HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sayrer

955 karma · joined January 17, 2008

submissionscomments
sayrer··on I rewrote PostHog's SQL parser, 70x faster, while barely looking at the code
ha, try to keep going. Run it under samply and Gungraun (need AMD64 for this)
sayrer··on The future of version control
The joke is there in the name. It is wrong (on purpose): it should be "Mañana". That term means "tomorrow" in your Spanish class, but it can mean "later/future/morning" or even "later this afternoon".

In English, you might think of "procrastination" or "we'll get to it."

In Portuguese, you would say "proxima semana", literally "next week", but it means "we'll get to it" (won't get to it).

sayrer··on Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
I don't think this part is correct: "If you distribute modified code, or offer it as a networked service, you must make the source available under the same terms."

That's what something like AGPL does.

sayrer··on Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 post mortem
Yes, can't have .unwrap() in production code (it's ok in tests)
sayrer··on Zed is our office
Haha: Can't find a good Windows laptop.

It's true, most of them are bad. Galaxy Book5 Pro or Microsoft Surface are OK.

sayrer··on Show HN: Cuq – Formal Verification of Rust GPU Kernels
Yeah, "coq" is a grade school joke in French class. It just means "rooster" or something in French, but it sounds ridiculous in English. This one has the same problem.

A company with that in the name made the French national team jersey for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Coq_Sportif

It's Nike now, but it still has a rooster on it.

sayrer··on Tinnitus Neuromodulator
It is striking that it sounds like Brian Eno - An Ending (Ascent)
sayrer··on Greenland is a beautiful nightmare
They used to! Anyway, Iceland is really easy to travel to. Everyone speaks perfect English, and the coffee is good. I know a little bit of Icelandic because they think I am Icelandic for some reason (I can read the signs at least, so maybe I don't look lost). There's a street with hot dog stands and stuff right in the middle of the capitol, which they seem to like. There are good hamburger places too, but they are expensive.

Greenland is another level.

sayrer··on Claude Code: Now in Beta in Zed
No kidding. It is /so/ fast. It has remote development like VS Code, and most of the features I use, so it's my main thing now. Claude Code was the only thing that made me wince, since I wondered if I was living in the dark ages. VS Code of course has many more extensions, but I don't use that many.
sayrer··on I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs
A lot of them use G or F because that is the biggest bass note you can get in a club system.
sayrer··on 3D reconstruction of the capital of the Aztec empire
Yep. You can see it on the map in the Museo Nacional de Antropología. El periférico ("the ring highway") and other major roads follow the old causeways. I have been there many times in my life, maybe 30 or 40.
sayrer··on Oracle justified its JavaScript trademark with Node.js–now it wants that ignored
They are using the wrong tactics. They should use the "Kleenex" argument and say it's generic. But what do I know.
sayrer··on Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help
oh, it is "declaration", yes, but not South America. this guy is even on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/James-Lambert-1758-1847-Elaboration-R...

sayrer··on Can You Read This Cursive Handwriting? The National Archives Wants Your Help
Yes, that seems right. Not that difficult. This one suffers from some poor penmanship, though.
sayrer··on Firefox bug gets fixed after 25 years
It helps to avoid timezone details within a day or two. I agree "a month ago" is pretty bad, but I haven't seen that.

But it's good to say "1hr ago" if I send an email from New York to San Francisco.

sayrer··on Ask HN: Interesting TUIs (text user interfaces), maybe forgotten ones?
Oxide computer has a really interesting one. This probably hits all of the big points: https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/1272104
sayrer··on The hunt for the missing data type
I think it's because you have to think it through when they get too big for one machine. A lot of those so-called "NoSQL" databases are really meant to represent graph databases (think DynamoDB) in an adjacency list. I've had success with Gremlin and JanusGraph, but it's a really messy space. It's not a programming language problem in my opinion, but a distributed systems one.
sayrer··on Quairading shire erects signs telling travellers to ignore Google Maps
I sent a correction once, and they did indeed fix it after a couple of weeks. I only knew it was wrong because I had studied the area in non-interactive maps ahead of time.
sayrer··on Just about every Windows/Linux device vulnerable to new LogoFAIL firmware attack
I read this comment because I saw some other moderation duty comments and looked at your history. I don't think you should use the word "thither" for transactional comments. It is correct here, I think, but it's somewhat archaic English.

Maybe "over there" or "to that one"? Your way is not wrong, but many will miss the point.

sayrer··on Apple M1 Pro Beats M3 Pro with Ableton, Logic and Pro Tools
Oh, interesting. I'd probably never use something like Nolly. So, out of my range. I do use the synth stuff, and I can get the Intel mini to like 50% with some effort, but it's never been a real problem.

The SSD matters for picking the sounds, in my experience. So you're going through listening to a bunch of drum hits, for example. If the drive is slow, this stalls.

Plus, isn't he simultaneously playing 70+ tracks with a CPU-intensive filter on each one? That's not a realistic workload.

sayrer··on Apple M1 Pro Beats M3 Pro with Ableton, Logic and Pro Tools
Surprising, but you really don't even need an M1 for those programs. You want fast external SSDs, though. I use the last Intel Mac mini for audio things, and it's fine.
sayrer··on Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
It is the English term. It collapses the definite article into one word: "the Port" -> "o Porto".

Nothing modern uses this name anymore, though. I always see "Porto", even in American English.

But, it's a recent enough fix that you can still find signs of it. For example, you can book a flight to "Porto (OPO)". Just like you can book a flight to "Beijing (PEK)".

sayrer··on Portuguese Orange, Persian Portugal
If you look at the history there, you'll see "naranj" in the Arabic. This is still the word in Spanish: Naranja (البرتقالي).

The wikipedia article is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)

That article says sweet oranges originated from China or Myanmar, and made their way west. Introduced to the Iberian Peninsula by the people then called the "Moors".

sayrer··on How can I get my engineers to accept being on call?
This is a pretty fair comment, but also not scratching the surface in some ways. Firstly, any decent boss will give you days off if some gnarly on-call stuff happens. Anywhere from "you can come in at 2pm and leave at 5pm" to "take Monday and Tuesday off, no one will track it". This is because they know it is a retention issue.

Secondly, there is a cultural divide sometimes. Generally, iOS programmers aren't on call, because they can't ship anything in less than a day or two. So, you get this phenomenon where they say "I'm an expert in Apple user interfaces" (a fine thing to know about!), but everyone resents them, because they are not on call.

sayrer··on Google ad exec: “it is a worse user experience to not have ads on the page”
I think it can be true in some situations. If you think of magazines, it would be a disappointment for Rolling Stone to contain no ads. Same for camera magazines.

News content really doesn't benefit, though. Just clickbait stuff.

sayrer··on Ableton Push 3
Not right now, but they have an app called Note: https://www.ableton.com/en/note/
sayrer··on Ableton Push 3
If you really want one of these things, and you use Ableton, get this one. I've used a Native Instruments Maschine and and Akai APC, and they just don't integrate that well with Ableton. But I've found I end up using a keyboard (Native Instruments Komplete) most of the time, even for drums, and that does integrate well.
sayrer··on Purely Functional AVL Trees in Common Lisp (2018)
There's a whole book of these if you're interested:

Purely Functional Data Structures by Chris Okasaki

sayrer··on The secret life of fsync
Have you read "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann? I'm sure most of it will be old news to you, but it does add multiple computers to what you've described here. You will have to read like 80% of the book to get to that part though.
sayrer··on In-Flight Entertainment Challenge
The trend is just to have you use an iPad or iPhone with local video and games available from the plane's Wifi. This pretty normal on US shorthaul US flights now, since those things are way better than anything built into the headrest.
Page 1 of 8Next →