Hacker News: surajrmal

New comment by surajrmal in "Surelock: Deadlock-Free Mutexes for Rust"

surajrmal — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:32:42 +0000

If you can get a stack trace of the process it is usually pretty easy to figure you will see two or more threads waiting on different futexes. I would say async deadlocks are far trickier to debug - task a sends a message to task b and task b sends a message to task a. Both tasks wait on processing further messages until the other side replies to their message. At the end of the day you need strict ordering of who is allowed to call into the other and block.

New comment by surajrmal in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

surajrmal — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:57:25 +0000

Are Irish red and Italians olive? Most folks of color consider Jewish folk of a certain complexion white. Heck, some Mexicans are seen as white.

New comment by surajrmal in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

surajrmal — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:40:18 +0000

The idea that it's not okay to arm the military is a position of privilege. The ethical issues are around how the military chooses to use its abilities, not around giving them the tools to do their jobs. We're talking about folks who are willing to give their lives up for others. If you're not going to serve yourself you should at least be willing to help them live. This has nothing to do with whether or not you support the political uses of the military. If world war 3 breaks out and you are forced to serve, you may find yourself feeling differently.

New comment by surajrmal in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

surajrmal — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:20:39 +0000

Depending on what part of Google you work for, you can absolutely feel good about what you do. The vast majority of employees don't work on ads or adjacent areas. I've never seen another company actually care for non profit related externalities so much. People talk about it like it's the same as Haliburton or Oracle and that's not true.

New comment by surajrmal in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

surajrmal — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:01:16 +0000

This lines up with my experience. Antigravity doesn't have this shortcoming though. I think the agent harness matters equally to the model. Gemini CLI and opencode aren't very great harnesses in my opinion.

I too dislike having my choice of ide forced on me. Hopefully that situation improves, but antigravity demonstrates that Gemini isn't necessarily behind by that much.

New comment by surajrmal in "In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants"

surajrmal — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:30:41 +0000

Does that include stay at home parents?

New comment by surajrmal in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

surajrmal — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:04:53 +0000

Are you using gemini CLI or antigravity? The former is not really comparable to the latter in terms of quality. I wouldn't say antigravity is as good as the competition but it's pretty close. Miles behind is overstating it.

New comment by surajrmal in "How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?"

surajrmal — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 02:38:38 +0000

Well it depends on what you're talking about. The model names were originally called lambda, followed by palm and then finally gemini. The chatbot product was internally known as meena, launched as Bard, and then transitioned to Gemini once the Gemini model came out.

New comment by surajrmal in "LinkedIn is searching your browser extensions"

surajrmal — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:51:30 +0000

Don't worry, soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month because AI is destroying click through rates. The internet will likely be far worse without ads than with ads. Solving the tracking problem doesn't need to be mixed up with blocking ads outright. What's funny is that tracking isn't nearly as meaningful for click through rates on ads as relevance to what's on the page, and yet so much effort is placed onto tracking for the slim improvement it provides.

New comment by surajrmal in "I quit. The clankers won"

surajrmal — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:28:50 +0000

Code quality will impact the effectiveness of ai. Less code to read and change in subsequent changes is still useful. There was a while where I became more of a paper architect and stopped coding for a while and I realized I wasn't able to do sufficient code reviews anymore because I lacked context. I went back into the code at some point and realized the mess my team was making and spent a long while cleaning it up. This improved the productivity of everyone involved. I expect AI to fall into a similar predicament. Without first hand knowledge of the implementation details we won't know about the problems we need to tell the AI to address. There are also many systems which are constrained in terms of memory and compute and more code likely puts you up against those limits.

New comment by surajrmal in "Claude Code Unpacked : A visual guide"

surajrmal — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:32:59 +0000

Bad by whose definition? They work really well in my experience. They aren't perfect but the amount of hand holding has gone down dramatically and you can fix any glaring problems with a code review at the end. I work on a multimillion line code base which does not use any popular frameworks and it does a great job. I may be benefiting from the fact that the codebase is open source and all models have obviously been trained on it.

New comment by surajrmal in "How the AI Bubble Bursts"

surajrmal — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 13:59:16 +0000

That's not a necessarily profitability thing as much as a demand thing. The only way to improve the supply for those willing to pay more is to take it away from those paying less. Once supply catches up to demand things will change

New comment by surajrmal in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

surajrmal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:51:58 +0000

This is not a chrome problem but an OS problem. Android does a much better job here by comparison. Desktop Linux is simply not well optimized for low RAM users.

New comment by surajrmal in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

surajrmal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:08:26 +0000

This isn't true for OS like Windows where the kernel is informed that the memory is discardable and it can prioritize discarding that memory as necessary. It's a shame that Linux doesn't have something similar.

New comment by surajrmal in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

surajrmal — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 14:02:42 +0000

That's not how it works. Process killing is one of the last ways memory is recovered. Chrome starts donating memory back well before that happens. Try compiling something and see how ram usage in chrome changes when you do that. Most of your tabs will be discarded.

New comment by surajrmal in "OpenAI to double workforce as business push intensifies"

surajrmal — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:58:58 +0000

If your work is parallizable, you can get more done. Eg more enterprise features you weren't currently going to do, more sales calls, more marketing campaigns, etc. mythical man month only applies to highly coupled work with large ramp time. Engineers often don't spend enough time planning to keep work decoupled (and with less people it's unnecessary overhead to do so).

New comment by surajrmal in "Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains"

surajrmal — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:25:55 +0000

I work on OS/embedded and my wife in server backend. I definitely feel like a simpleton when trying to understand all of the high level stuff she works on. It doesn't invalidate my own expertise. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging someone has skills that you don't have and likely would take a long time to pick up.

New comment by surajrmal in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

surajrmal — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 23:48:33 +0000

Have you heard of fastmod?

New comment by surajrmal in "Microsoft's "Fix" for Windows 11: Flowers After the Beating"

surajrmal — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:31:31 +0000

A single product meant for all the users will inevitably be a poor fit for most of them. We need more variety of products for the different segments of the market. Alternatively we need more knobs to tune things to user needs. One promise of AI is enabling folks to personalize product experiences, but so far it's all been surface level.

I think the desktop Linux ecosystem is an example of something healthier, but it goes too far in the other direction. There are too many options to choose from that it's hard to find the one for your needs.

New comment by surajrmal in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

surajrmal — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:38:50 +0000

Anti trust laws do not generally apply to these situations. The government has had an appetite for antitrust, but the cases are far from a slam dunk. We need modern laws for modern problems.