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solumos

621 karma · joined January 28, 2015

mail [at] tomhadley dot link

solumos.at.hn

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solumos··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Adverse side effects of creatine are generally less severe than GLP-1s
solumos··on All major LLMs are lib-left. Even Grok, half the time
Is there a reason you think 4chan would be auth right rather than lib right?
solumos··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
I’m in the tiny minority.
solumos··on The startup's Postgres survival guide
> devs just writing their own random queries.

I've spent a lot of time writing my own random queries. I don't know that I've ever written a stored function.

solumos··on It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
Small-language models also use GPT. And I agree it's not "LLM vs RL" and that they're orthogonal, however, RL has features that more clearly resemble intelligence.
solumos··on It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
Google's definition is sufficient[0]. I'd also go so far as to say that LLMs aren't even AI, but that can be a bit pedantic. I align with Richard Sutton's reasoning, in that LLMs (and GPT models more generally) aren't "intelligent" in the same way that RL models are[1].

[0] - https://cloud.google.com/discover/what-is-artificial-general...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EYKqUsPfg

solumos··on Best Simple System for Now (2025)
I think it's a bit nuanced, and maybe poorly explained by the original author, but to me, "left-pathers" are always "move fast and break things" to the point that whatever they build really only works as a throw-away prototype, and the effort to architect sensibly is minimal.

"We don't really need to use REST, we can just create some endpoints that have undocumented side-effects. We don't need to abstract vendor calls into a separate class, we can just implement that functionality directly in our endpoint code."

These sorts of decisions aren't actually materially faster, they're just lazier. And maybe that's "a sprinkle of QC"? But it's a lot of unforced errors that don't really save time to implement, and also create a lot of problems later on.

On the other end, with the "right-pathers", you can have people that really try to over-engineer at any opportunity. This is sort of typical of people who have worked in much larger teams. This can mean building out a k8s cluster when you're still a team of 2-3 people, splitting into 10+ microservices, deciding to use Kafka when a simple queue system would work, building out in-house load balancing for dubious reasons, etc.

The middle path is really something that resembles the "Best Simple System for Now" — when I've done this, I think about how I can solve a problem and not have to rebuild it entirely within 12-18 months.

solumos··on It Still Can't Do My Job: Four Years of Moving Goalposts (2022–2026)
I’ll go on record and say that AGI will never happen (in the next 50 years). I think that’s also the timeline for white-collar job automation that requires critical thinking.
solumos··on Spanish government 'quietly bans use of Palantir' in critical state systems
If this is true, who is the EU-equivalent of Palantir?
solumos··on Fintech Engineering Handbook
With integers/floats, he's saying it's not opinionated enough. Anything other than integers with minor-unit precision, unless you have a very good reason, is a bad idea. So "floating point is almost a bad idea" doesn't go far enough, and the other alternatives are presented somewhat equally.

The FX critique is saying that it's glossing over a lot of the complexity. I'd say the same is true for the treatment of DE ledgers, and it borders on bad advice (e.g. "Balance is never stored. It’s derived from the movements of money.")

solumos··on Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign
solumos··on Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?
Without regulation, yes. Brokers (i.e. scalpers) will buy up tickets to events and take all of the risk off of TM’s plate, and reprice however they’d like. ~80% of tickets in the U.S. are sold this way. Stubhub has done a great job of lobbying for this since their existence depends on ticket brokers.
solumos··on Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
If you want to see what that looks like, I one-shot a browser with Claude that does it[0]. Docs pages are early adopters to this[1][2], so that AI agents can better handle tasks.

[0] - https://github.com/solumos/md-browse

[1] - https://docs.stripe.com

[2] - https://vercel.com/docs

solumos··on Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)
Something different that other folks might not have thought of: Robust multi-environment infra deploy scripts that leverage terraform + AWS SSO

I've found that converting stuff that's previously been very ops-cli heavy into very detailed skills has worked really really well.

I use Claude Opus 4.8 + Conductor as my daily driver

solumos··on Ask HN: Is the web for machines (/llm.txt) the one we wished we had as humans?
No, requesting "Accept: text/markdown" in the headers and returning markdown is the more agreed upon standard at this point.[0]

[0] - https://acceptmarkdown.com/

solumos··on 560-610 minutes of exercise a week needed for substantial heart benefits
> Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity

> Observational study

Can we stop doing this please?

solumos··on Crypto industry lobbies to evade AML/CTF rules
I see nothing advocating against requiring KYC for user wallets and continuing to do wallet screening (which is the norm)
solumos··on Crypto industry lobbies to evade AML/CTF rules
I agree — I don’t see the connection between the items mentioned on the page and flat out AML/CTF evasion as the title suggests. If I’m wrong, someone please connect the dots.
solumos··on Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder
This is such an important step forward as we start to understand the 2nd order implications of AI and how it will change UIs in the future.

We used to have to allow + review 3rd party plugins for software so that people could customize it, but when the cost of development is near-0, we can simply hand over the development reigns to customers.

solumos··on How Monero’s proof of work works
No meaningful benefit? Tell that to the people in emerging economies who now have access to digital US dollars.

Bitso processes 10% of US-MX remittances. 12% of people in Argentina use stablecoins. The shift is happening in real time.

solumos··on Let's Buy Spirit Air
“Horrible” and “low cost” are contradictory for many consumers
solumos··on Someone allegedly used a hairdryer to rig Polymarket weather bets
Polymarket is simply an exchange for these sorts of “contracts” and the results are verified by a separate entity (it’s a DAO, which of course can be manipulated, and was the subject of controversy due to some Venezuela invasion-related “market” resolutions)
solumos··on Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?
There are three-sided marketplaces, like DoorDash, etc:

Restaurant, courier, customer

solumos··on Ask HN: How to solve the cold start problem for a two-sided marketplace?
"Focus on one side first" means get in your car and start fulfilling orders.
solumos··on Instant 1.0, a backend for AI-coded apps
Plenty of people, but how many companies?

Plenty of people bake bread from scratch without a mixer, but few (if any) bakeries do.

solumos··on System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]
No no, MemPal is a memory system, not an LLM
solumos··on “Collaboration” is bullshit
I think it's just explaining the difference between comms/collab being a supporting thing vs the only thing? It doesn't seem intended to be deep to me, but it's a little verbose.
solumos··on Migrating the American express payment network, twice
My ISP (Spectrum) is also blocking it as suspicious...it's kind of funny that they haven't migrated the blog to SSL
solumos··on Migrating the American express payment network, twice
It's definitely not 140ms round-trip. Issuer processors typically have a ~2.5s window for approval.

In practice, the POS sends a message to the acquirer processor -> hits the network -> is sent to the issuer processor, and back again.

https://medium.com/wharton-fintech/the-anatomy-of-the-swipe-...

solumos··on I’m joining OpenAI
Yes, just like Jony Ive has been doing
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