Hacker News: smadge

New comment by smadge in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

smadge — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:06:06 +0000

I found it interesting that the bettors who threatened the journalist accused him of being motivated to manipulate the market. The journalist was motivated to report honestly, the bettors were the one trying to manipulate the market by changing the reporting.

New comment by smadge in "The Isolation Trap: Erlang"

smadge — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:40:56 +0000

The prequel “Message Passing Is Shared Mutable State” makes the claim that highly scrutinized go codebases had just as many message passing bugs (using go channels) as shared memory bugs. But then this article claims the Erlang community has a record of higher quality and reliability largely through discipline and convention.

New comment by smadge in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

smadge — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:05:23 +0000

At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).

New comment by smadge in "Godot veteran says 'AI slop' pull requests have become overwhelming"

smadge — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:35:05 +0000

It raises an interesting point. Code review is as much about educating the author of the code as much as ensuring the quality of the code. Why invest time providing feedback to a brick wall? LLMs aren’t going to “learn” from your feedback.

New comment by smadge in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

smadge — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 21:18:11 +0000

It is a classic cooperation problem. Perhaps not prisoners dilemma. Perhaps not at individual scale. Probably tragedy of the commons.

Cooperation is not consuming fossil fuels. Defection is consuming fossil fuels.

If you cooperate and other defects you suffer climate impact and expensive energy (expensive everything, worse economic growth than others).

If you defect and other cooperates you suffer climate impact but at least you get cheap energy (cheap everything, more economic growth than others).

People, nations, corporations, etc don’t stop using fossil fuels because they incur a penalty against their competitors if they volunteer to and their competitors don’t.

New comment by smadge in "The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers"

smadge — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:18:51 +0000

The Russia reference doesn’t seem forced since the explanation for increased abandonments is attempts to skirt sanctions against Russian.

New comment by smadge in "How when AWS was down, we were not"

smadge — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 22:30:39 +0000

I think a lot of web services talk about reliability in terms of uptime (e.g. down for less than 5 minutes a year) but in reality operate on failure ratios (less than 0.001% of request to our service fail).

New comment by smadge in "URLs are state containers"

smadge — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 18:40:07 +0000

One might even say that hyperlinks are the engine of application state.

New comment by smadge in "Mamdani says he would phase out NYC gifted program for early grades"

smadge — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:52:35 +0000

Can you share more about education in the USSR? My impression is that for all its faults, education is one area where the USSR excelled, with very high standards and outcomes.

New comment by smadge in "Indices, not Pointers"

smadge — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 03:52:38 +0000

The distinction in the article really is between calling malloc for every added node in your data structure (“pointer”) or using the pre-allocated memory in the next element of an array (“index”).

New comment by smadge in "Citybound: City building game, microscopic models to vividly simulate organism"

smadge — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 16:13:51 +0000

Treatment plant is optional.

New comment by smadge in "Researchers map where solar energy delivers the biggest climate payoff"

smadge — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:20:08 +0000

California has the opportunity to be a beacon in North America for environmental and climate action e.g. by expanding solar production, finishing the CAHSR, and other projects like expanding and electrifying mass transit and commuter rail networks, but they are their own worst enemy.

New comment by smadge in "The "personal computer" model scales better than the "terminal" model"

smadge — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:40:07 +0000

A telnet terminal isn’t a terminal by this logic because the text isn’t rendered on the server. A telnet server sends data to your device and your device renders it.

New comment by smadge in "National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted federal facility"

smadge — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 00:13:43 +0000

I believe you are interpreting “business need” as “commercial need” when I think it’s more like “what is your business here?” Purely anecdotal, but when I visited Moffett Federal Airfield to visit the aviation history museum there I asked the security guard at the gate checking my ID if I could ride my bike around the base afterwards. He said I needed a business purpose to being on the base and that visiting the museum was a business purpose but biking around aimlessly wasn’t.

New comment by smadge in "First methane-powered sea spiders found crawling on the ocean floor"

smadge — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 03:23:14 +0000

It’s like the symbiotic relationship between humans and livestock.

New comment by smadge in "U.S. Chemical Safety Board could be eliminated"

smadge — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 01:45:01 +0000

What knowledge are you trying to impart with this fact?

Do CSB recommendations inform policy? Do CSB recommendations get implemented? Do CSB recommendations when implemented increase safety?

New comment by smadge in "GOP omnibus bill would sell off USPS's EVs"

smadge — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 21:31:51 +0000

3 republicans are quoted in the article defending the proposal. Is there a better argument that the article didn’t quote?

New comment by smadge in "Benzene at 200"

smadge — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 15:21:21 +0000

Maybe the target audience doesn’t need to be reminded, but benzene is really toxic and dangerous and it’s odd the article doesn’t mention that.

New comment by smadge in "An Interactive Guide to Rate Limiting"

smadge — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 19:29:36 +0000

I have experience with token bucket and leaky bucket (or at least a variation where a request leaves the bucket when the server is done processing it) to prevent overload of backend servers. I switched from token bucket to leaky bucket. Token bucket is “the server can serve X requests per second,” while leaky bucket is the “the server can process N requests concurrently.” I found the direct limit on concurrency much more responsive to overload and better controlled delay from contention of shared resources. This kind of makes sense because imagine if your server goes from processing 10 QPS to 5 QPS. If the server has a 10 QPS token bucket limit it keeps accepting requests and the request queue and response time goes to infinity.

New comment by smadge in "IRS Direct File"

smadge — Fri, 30 May 2025 05:50:06 +0000

What percentage of tax filers have a single W-2, maybe a 1099, and take the standard deduction? If I had to guess, 80%.