Hacker News: ummonk

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.

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

ummonk — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 22:45:16 +0000

Amazon has had a really bad string of various outages recently. Assuming they're internally treating this as business as usual in post-mortems then perhaps the newsworthy thing is actually that they aren't taking their outages seriously enough.

New comment by ummonk in "Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)"

ummonk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:18:25 +0000

This is reminding me of the story of a Japanese airport doing a full security sweep because one of the airport restaurants had misplaced a kitchen knife.

New comment by ummonk in "Osaka: Kansai Airport proud to have never lost single piece of luggage (2024)"

ummonk — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 22:12:21 +0000

My understanding is it's taken as a given that the authorities at US airports aren't bothering to catch baggage / item thieves amongst airport staff. The only exception is when a firearm (or luggage containing a firearm) goes missing.

New comment by ummonk in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

ummonk — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:01:48 +0000

The statement you quoted was about Big Tech oligarchs, not media bias. You need to work on your reading comprehension.

New comment by ummonk in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

ummonk — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 03:00:41 +0000

Not at all. The whole point is that I want discretion over which articles get rewarded for providing me value, not simply monetizing my attention.

New comment by ummonk in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

ummonk — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:39:23 +0000

In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.

New comment by ummonk in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

ummonk — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:03:58 +0000

Which tech billionaires are trying to bury us in extreme left wing bullshit?

New comment by ummonk in "A shortage of tenors"

ummonk — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 19:18:26 +0000

One of my annoyances is that most male pop singing is at too high a range for normal baritone men without vocal training to sing along. I actually find it easier to sing along to female pop songs (by singing an octave lower) than to male pop songs.

New comment by ummonk in "Not all Chess960 positions are equally complex"

ummonk — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:01:57 +0000

They’ve defined memorization complexity as having to memorize the best out of almost equally good moves (as opposed to being able to play the best move without memorization because it is so obvious.

In reality it’s almost the other way around. Because white usually has several good moves at every point, they can just memorize one of them, while black needs to memorize how they’ll respond to every good move white could make.

New comment by ummonk in "Europe wants to end its dangerous reliance on US internet technology"

ummonk — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:51:01 +0000

It’s amazing how complacent and weak-willed the European populace and political leaders are. Quite the contrast to Canada.

New comment by ummonk in "Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books"

ummonk — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 18:02:35 +0000

Performing rights are part of copyright law and thus directly relevant to copyright. Stop dissembling.

New comment by ummonk in "Ask HN: Do you have any evidence that agentic coding works?"

ummonk — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 08:15:36 +0000

What is the actual value of using agentic LLMs (rather than just LLM-powered autocomplete in your IDE) if it requires this much supervision and handholding? When is it actually faster / more effective?

New comment by ummonk in "A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)"

ummonk — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:32:07 +0000

Out of curiosity were the positions (especially of the Galilean moons) actual simultaneous positions, or positions as seen from Earth, given the ~40 light-minutes distance between the Earth and Jupiter?

New comment by ummonk in "A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)"

ummonk — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:13:37 +0000

Many Hindus celebrated Malay Sankranti a week ago. It was originally meant to coincide with winter solstice but because the Hindu dates are based on the position of the Sun against the background stars (as viewed from the Earth), precession over the last ~1700 years has driven it out of sync with the tropical calendar.