Hacker News: ummonk

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:54:48 +0000

You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:50:02 +0000

Protp-Sinaitic was an abjad not an alphabet.

New comment by ummonk in "Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee"

ummonk — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:45:38 +0000

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

New comment by ummonk in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

ummonk — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 23:46:36 +0000

Yeah and we've already seen this with Facebook getting blamed for Cambridge Analytica.

New comment by ummonk in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

ummonk — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:56:47 +0000

It sounds more like this was a predefined account recovery flow, rather than some LLM agent making use of arbitrary write access.

New comment by ummonk in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

ummonk — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:51:00 +0000

If someone is talking about "spinning up a separate machine" for Postgres, they're not talking about a desktop or mobile app...

New comment by ummonk in "SQLite is all you need for durable workflows"

ummonk — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:43:27 +0000

Why go through the trouble of shoehorning SQLite into a cloud database by getting solutions for HA/failover and DR, when you can just use Postgres off the shelf?

New comment by ummonk in "Valve raises Steam Deck prices"

ummonk — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:18:05 +0000

My argument is that they would add an exception for TSMC in the event that Taiwan fell under Chinese control. The alternative would be an extreme supply shock to the industry that's responsible for most stock market and GDP growth in America.

New comment by ummonk in "Valve raises Steam Deck prices"

ummonk — Wed, 27 May 2026 20:03:27 +0000

Wouldn't the rest of the world encourage ASML to keep supporting the fab because they want the chips to keep coming?

New comment by ummonk in "The Fil-C Optimized Calling Convention"

ummonk — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:18:38 +0000

Interesting project in general. I wonder whether it could be adapted to behave reasonably without relying on threading. E.g. run the GC only when *alloc is called.

New comment by ummonk in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

ummonk — Tue, 12 May 2026 02:34:43 +0000

I mean they brought that incident on themselves...

New comment by ummonk in "Ada, its design, and the language that built the languages"

ummonk — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 03:20:31 +0000

That factor was downstream of its complexity though. It's far harder to implement a compiler for Ada 83 than even for modern C.

New comment by ummonk in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

ummonk — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 07:05:14 +0000

What's a situation where one needs to use `eval` in benign way in JS? If something is precomputable (e.g. `eval("1 + 1")` can just be replaced by 2), then it should be precomputed. If it's not precomputable then it's dependent on input and thus hardly benign -- you'll need to carefully verify that the inputs are properly sanitized.

New comment by ummonk in "Claude mixes up who said what"

ummonk — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:51:57 +0000

I don't see why the transformer architecture can't be designed and trained with separate inputs for control data and content data.

New comment by ummonk in "Finding all regex matches has always been O(n²)"

ummonk — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:47:37 +0000

Great stuff.

I would argue that hardened mode should be default though, similar to how siphash is the default hashing function in Rust hash maps. Faster mode should be opt in if the user is confident that the supplied data is nonmalicious and they need the speed up.

New comment by ummonk in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

ummonk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:25:12 +0000

That's Rule 5 no?

New comment by ummonk in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

ummonk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:23:27 +0000

The boilerplate and indirection isn't done for performance

New comment by ummonk in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

ummonk — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:16:33 +0000

I've worked on optimizing modern slow code. Once you optimize a few bottlenecks it turns out it's very hard to optimize because the rest of the time is spread out over the whole code without any small bottlenecks and it's all written in a slow language with no thought for performance.

New comment by ummonk in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

ummonk — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:47:56 +0000

I would argue that making the company experience the consequences of its choice of metrics / mandates is in fact a moral imperative.

New comment by ummonk in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

ummonk — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:04:04 +0000

In fairness though, it does give you good practice for the essential skill of maintaining / improving an old codebase.