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squirrellous

126 karma · joined December 13, 2024

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squirrellous··on Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?
One way I use skills, which I don’t see mentioned very often, is as “shortcuts”. Imagine some frequently issued prompt like “fetch origin and rebase this branch onto origin/master and resolve conflicts”. I make that into a little skills file called “rebase” with a one sentence description, and next time just type something like “/reb-tab-enter”.
squirrellous··on We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora
Riegeli is great! Packed full of features. It could be the standard storage format for serialized pb binary if there were more official support.
squirrellous··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
Ah yes, something like prefix tree would work well storing reverse domain names like com.abc.www (although this is such a well known thing I feel like I must be missing things).
squirrellous··on Saving 100 terabytes of memory by optimizing 1.1.1.1's DNS cache
I wonder at their scale, why wouldn’t it make sense to store the entries lightly compressed in memory?
squirrellous··on HN: The Good Parts (2016)
There is https://hnrss.github.io/ if you don’t mind a 3rd party service.
squirrellous··on There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
This doesn’t seem to mention that having AI aggressively optimize software will result in code that is too clever / complex to be maintained by the original human author. For something with a very stable API and can be tested to death like a regex engine it’s likely workable. Other things, not so much. We have enough trouble maintaining AI generated code _without_ aggressive optimizations as is!
squirrellous··on DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813
I _think_ that has always been based on discretion of the mods. It’s only allowed after some period of time and if popular enough.
squirrellous··on That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
Well, did they hire you? Don’t leave us hanging!
squirrellous··on Ask HN: What are your favorite blogs not about AI?
Here are some that come to mind right now:

https://research.swtch.com/

https://danluu.com/

https://apenwarr.ca/log/

squirrellous··on IceCream – Never use print() to debug again
My first thought as well. Debugging is actually a decent use case of AI.
squirrellous··on Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises
These days I am of the opinion that we don’t need a real IDL. Instead one should choose a “primary language” and define the schema in that language. All other language bindings are generated from that canonical language. Then for wire format you’d just pick something workable from pb json msgpack etc. This replaces all the Google codegen intermediate layer, and for the primary language it naturally becomes very ergonomic.
squirrellous··on Protobuf-py: Protobuf for Python, without compromises
Honest question - why isn’t the following document [1] a standard? Is it too loosely specified?

[1] https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/

squirrellous··on Does code cleanliness affect coding agents? A controlled minimal-pair study
Research done by SonarSource, a company that sells static analysis products. This explains the focus on static analysis, among other things.
squirrellous··on Pystd, similar-ish functionality with a fraction of the compile time
Love to see someone implementing pathlib in c++. It is what stdfs could have been.
squirrellous··on DuckDB Internals: Why Is DuckDB Fast? (Part 1)
Those three things you mentioned kind of live in the same niche - offline data storage and querying. In that world yes everything has become columnar since it’s just better. Row-oriented is still the solution for online streaming use cases.
squirrellous··on Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability
The last time I tried JJ it plainly refused to work with git LFS, which is kind of what OOP here is about (large files). Has that improved?
squirrellous··on Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails
If you don’t like what Anthropic is doing, stop paying them money. There’s plenty of competition to go around. They can’t keep this up for long if users flock elsewhere.
squirrellous··on The beauty and simplicity of the good old C-style void* in C++
One could argue the reinterpret_cast makes the intent more explicit which is a good thing.

That said I don’t have much against the use of void* or even char* here. If it works in C, it works in C++ just fine. std::span is not the right tool for this.

squirrellous··on More than 6 out of 10 people turn to AI for psychological support
I think there are situations where AI is good for quick advice, provided you _also_ have a professional to talk to if needed. I sometimes seek advice about dealing with difficult colleagues, or ask for opinions about things I said at work while a little emotional. These don’t affect my personal life that much so the stakes are lower.
squirrellous··on Restartable Sequences
I am not very well versed here but I think due to the requirement for assembly and single-instruction commit, practical uses of rseq is generally very simple. It is nowhere near the usefulness of locks.
squirrellous··on Restartable Sequences
IIUC rseq is similar to thread-local data with the additional benefit that it scales with number of CPU cores, not threads. However if you are an application developer and is able to control all the threads in an application, then rseq isn’t that superior.

I fully agree that rseq should be more easily available to Linux developers, though.

squirrellous··on What color is your function? (2015)
This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. Thanks for teaching me something.
squirrellous··on Every Frontier AI Is INTJ
I’d guess that is what you get for training them on source code.

Also the I vs E axis feels meaningless in this case.

squirrellous··on What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?
The point about feedback is spot on. However the generalization to system software seems a little sloppy. Something being system software doesn’t inherently make it more testable. You can have feedback-abundant and feedback-scarce pieces in both system and user-facing software.
squirrellous··on Python 3.15: features that didn't make the headlines
Uhm what? All of those things are totally ordinary.
squirrellous··on Testing distributed systems with AI agents
It’s shocking to me that you of all people should have financial issues. You are a legend in the community! By all means, take things closed source if it even just helps a little bit. As a profession we’ve all been hurt by over-sharing.
squirrellous··on Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]
Both Facebook and Google internally use a custom version of mercurial, so I wouldn’t count it out just yet.
squirrellous··on Git Is Not Fine
I feel like parent was referring to a culture of shipping small changes frequently, which tends to result in stacked PRs.
squirrellous··on Git Is Not Fine
Stacked PRs is mostly a way to avoid thousand- or tens-of-thousands- LOC branches, which makes each PR meaningfully reviewable. You need a good code review process for it to become useful. It’s very pleasant once you are accustomed to it.

I’ve seen successful teams that regularly do reviews of massive PRs and feel this serves them well enough. I suspect it just places a lot more trust on the developers to get the details right so reviewers only look at larger design issues.

The language of choice is not relevant. Even before AI, one can accumulate thousands of lines of c++ easily.

squirrellous··on Elevated error rates on Opus 4.7
Corporate reasons. AWS hasn't opened codex models to everyone yet.
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