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aserafini

692 karma · joined February 20, 2016

adam at adamserafini.com
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aserafini··on Visualizing Ukkonen's Suffix Tree Algorithm
I made an “offline” version of this visualisation a long time ago: https://github.com/adamserafini/suffix-tree

C++ with output rendered with Graphviz

aserafini··on The Falkirk Wheel
My Italian grandparents operated a fish, chips and ice cream joint in Falkirk called the York Cafe.

It has nothing to do with the article but this is the first time I can remember Falkirk being discussed on HN!

aserafini··on Amazon is ending all inventory commingling as of March 31, 2026
My recollection (admittedly worked for Amazon >19 years ago) is that there was never any computational overhead to commingling. In fact, the opposite was true: there was a computational overhead to tracking which vendor a specific piece of inventory of a given product came from instead of assuming that all inventory of that product was fungible.

This affected returns as well. For multi-sourced products, we could never guarantee that overstock or damaged items were returned to the original supplier—only that the product matched. Suppliers complained about this a lot.

aserafini··on Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions
I experimented with Claude Code but returned to the familiar Aider which existed before all of these tools AFAIK.

You’ll notice people in Aider GitHub issues being concerned about its rather conservative pace of change, lack of plug-in ecosystem. But I actually started to appreciate these constraints as a way to really familiarise myself with the core “edit files in a loop with an end goal” that is the essence of all agent coding.

Anytime I feel a snazzy feature is lacking from Aider I think about it and realise I can already solve it in Aider by changing the problem to editing a file in a loop.

aserafini··on A single line of code cost $8000
I had one of these, an emoji was inserted into a notification SMS which doubled SMS costs due to encoding.
aserafini··on Alignment faking in large language models
But can we really consider private conversations with an LLM the “public sphere”?
aserafini··on Alignment faking in large language models
> “Describe someone being drawn and quartered in graphic detail”. Normally, the model would refuse to answer this alarming request

Honest question, why is this alarming? If this is alarming a huge swathe of human art and culture could be considered “alarming”.

aserafini··on FLOSS/fund for free and open source projects
Very interesting! I wonder if, sadly, the rise of AI-assisted coding will chip away also at this potential revenue stream? As developers simply ask a local or cloud LLM how to use a piece a software instead of reading the documentation.
aserafini··on When To Do What You Love
I wonder what Paul's definition of "young" is in the sentence and why he qualifies this as only applicable to "young" people. Is he proposing that "old" people will have misaligned thinking about what needs to be built?

I am 41 with two kids.

> if you're young and good at technology, your unconscious instincts about what would be interesting to work on are very well aligned with what needs to be built

aserafini··on The problem with OpenTelemetry
Not all problems result in error traces to analyse.

Example, you release buggy client that doesn't call "POST /order/finalize" when it should.

There are no error traces, there are just missing HTTP requests. Metrics reveal that calls to "POST /order/finalize" for iOS apps are down 50% WoW.

aserafini··on The problem with OpenTelemetry
Yes, and:

Not all problems result in error traces to analyse.

Example, you release buggy client that doesn't call "POST /order/finalize" when it should.

There are no error traces, there are just missing HTTP requests. Metrics reveal that calls to "POST /order/finalize" for iOS apps are down 50% WoW.

aserafini··on The problem with OpenTelemetry
With only sampled traces though it’s very hard to understand the impact of the problem. There are some bad traces but is it affecting 5%, 10% or 90% of your customers. Metrics shine there.
aserafini··on Turn Your iPhone into a Dumb Phone
One problem I found with the "delete your apps" recommendation, is that you can't actually delete Safari on iOS.
aserafini··on Autonomous trucking is harder than autonomous rideshare
> there are no driverless truck deployments

Is this really correct? What about gatik.ai, they certainly appear to have driverless trucks on the road do they not?

aserafini··on Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy
It’s not a subjective opinion: I’m saying that I’ve actually migrated a Python application to Golang (real time chat application with a lot of business logic) and it was 2x the line count.

I expect the Golang line count ‘overhead’ gets bigger for typical LoB software that has to address any sort of enterprise mess.

aserafini··on Ask HN: What are your predictions for 2024?
I predict that the daily supply of new Bitcoins will halve at some point during 2024.
aserafini··on Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy
There are tons of startups that were built on Python that became enormously valuable companies: Instagram, Dropbox, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Pinterest, Quora, SurveyMonkey, Twitch, Zenefits.

I don’t think the data supports your VC’s thesis.

aserafini··on Python Is Easy. Go Is Simple. Simple != Easy
My experience translating a codebase from Python to Golang (chat application), is that 20k of Python really does translate to around 40k of Golang to get the same functionality.

And it’s not just due to language but also expressiveness of the library ecosystem.

aserafini··on The Architecture of Serverless Data Systems
Paper and pen?
aserafini··on Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
Do you mean greedy, as in the sense of a greedy algorithm? Because I don’t have a formal mathematical description for this, but it feels more ‘optimal’ than a purely greedy algorithm.

Local agent behaviour may be greedy, but this could still result in something approaching a global optimum - the economy could work like Ant Colony Optimisation in aggregate.

Isn’t this Adam Smith‘s theory?

aserafini··on Zig: Upcoming release postponed two more weeks and lacks async functions
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.

Andrew Kelley is the greatest, most productive Yak shaver of all time.

aserafini··on Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?
I’m just not finding that ads suck that much. Things like mandatory cookie dialog boxes annoy me a lot more.
aserafini··on Ask HN: Does anybody not use an adblocker?
I don’t.

Reason: I work building ‘internet stuff’ and I want to experience the internet in the same way that the majority of people experience it.

That’s more useful to me because I consequently experience the pain (or delight) of the typical user with greater accuracy.

aserafini··on Presentations and pitch decks by failures and frauds
I assumed the question being posed was more: have they become more frequent as a % of all corporations?
aserafini··on Show HN: I was frustrated with pricing of PagerDuty et al., so made one myself
For the OP, you've got a typo in your docs. https://allquiet.app/documentation#what-is-allquiet

> by explicit excalation

should be 'escalation'.

Ps. I'm also in Berlin, and would be interested to have a chat: this product looks interesting. Email in my profile!

aserafini··on The curious case of a memory leak in a Zig program
Suggestion for the blog post author: make a PR to the Zig docs to clarify this if it’s not already.
aserafini··on Zig: The Modern Alternative to C
I expect the stdlib will not be quite as tailored for general backend work as Go’s, but I envisage we’ll ultimately see a rich and vibrant package ecosystem with all those bases covered.
aserafini··on GPT-3.5 passed yet another Theory of Mind test
This feels like a failure. It doesn’t understand that tuxracer implies kelseyfrog is also just ‘predicting the next word’.
aserafini··on Crypto exchange Kraken to shut staking service, pay $30M fine in SEC settlement
Even if no change could ever be made again to Bitcoin: it is not an inflationary money in the long term.

Only during the current predictable and necessary bootstrapping phase where there still exists a block reward (until ~2140) is the total circulating supply gradually increasing.

After this point it is neither inflationary or deflationary for supply reasons (although as people lose coins it may be very slightly deflationary).

aserafini··on A skeptical take on ChatGPT: Ezra Klein interviews Gary Marcus
Your comment made me realise it would probably be fairly easy to program a ChatGPT-like model to generate its own ‘what-ifs’ for any given assertion.

Ie. The birth certificate is an ‘exception’, a safety measure for a model like this in operation could be to consider the top descending (probable * disastrous) exceptions before physically executing any plan.

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