Mahn
Mahn on Hacker News
Posted by
Mahn on Tuesday June 17, 2025 @03:42PM
from the self-post dept.
Seeing unicorns and 500 errors right now
Posted by
Mahn on Sunday May 11, 2025 @12:54PM
from the waitbutwhy.com dept.
At its core what it really reflects is that the technology is a blackbox that wasn't "programmed" but rather "emerged". In this context, this is the best we can do to fine tune behavior without retraining it.
At this point you have to start entertaining the question of what is the difference between general intelligence and a "sufficiently complicated" next token prediction algorithm.
European here, I do not think that electing Trump makes the US a laughing stock; there were legitimate reasons to disagree with the Biden administration, and, given that Kamala was essentially a continuation of Biden's policies, there was no other real alternative.
Key quote from the article:
> Many have argued that the lack of large-scale applications for the past ten years proves that crypto is useless. I have always argued against this: pretty much every crypto application that is not financial speculation depends on low fees - and so while we have high fees, we should not be surprised that we mainly see financial speculation!
> Now that we have blobs, this key constraint that has been holding us back all this time is starting to melt away. Fees are finally much lower; my statement from seven years ago that the internet of money should not cost more than five cents per transaction is finally coming true.
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All of this depends on so called "Layer 2s", which adds a great deal of UX complexity to the end user. I'm skeptical that this is best way to solve the scalability issues that plague cryptocurrency, but I will say that this looks to me like it has a much better shot of succeeding that anything Bitcoin has ever attempted to do on this front.
I would think that Cloudflare is reputable enough that they would not state that claim without at least having some knowledge about it.
Posted by
Mahn on Thursday August 25, 2022 @07:24PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I'm worried that we are starting to see the effect of the Akamai takeover. Linode has always been very dependable for us in the past, but this is the third time in the past 6 months that our startup experiences a +30 minute downtime all across the board on all our nodes. This used to be a very rare occurrence in the nearly ten years that we've been with them, but not so anymore apparently.
Posted by
Mahn on Wednesday February 23, 2022 @04:29PM
from the ask-hn dept.
I realize that asking this probably makes me sound like an asshole, but bear with me for a second. When I joined Reddit, circa 2012, it had its shared of misinformed, poorly researched comments/posts like every other internet community, but as long as you stuck to niche subreddits it was mostly downvoted and contained.As the years pass and I pick up new niche interests, my instinct is to turn...
That's funny, I've been doing this (appending searches with "reddit") for a while, but I thought it was just a random thing I did, not the universal experience of so many people.
It's probably not so much search that is dying but non-profit content on the internet. Not a whole lot that search engines can do about that, unless they become search "walled gardens" ala Apple.
And therein lies the problem, algorithms can't tell if you click and spend time with something because you enjoy it, or because it enraged you.
More importantly, if you want China, India and Africa to pollute less, the only way to do so is leading by example and figuring out a way to achieve cost-effective, environmental-friendly path for economic growth for yourself. If it works, and it's better, they'll copy it.
"We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".
Posted by
Mahn on Saturday May 23, 2020 @09:47PM
from the google.com dept.
Tangential, but it's strange to me the sort of culture that Quora has cultivated over the years. It seems to tolerate and even encourage low quality content and contributors to the point that ignorance, misinformation and poorly researched opinionated answers thrive on a regular basis. That's not to say there aren't good contributors and content, but browse any one random topic today and you'll be forgiven for thinking you are on Yahoo Answers. Just no filter at all, extremely poor questions, offtopic comments posted as answers, people with no understanding of the subject shamelessly pretending to know what they are talking about, etc etc.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
Posted by
Mahn on Sunday December 01, 2019 @01:57PM
from the kobo.com dept.
According to Dr. Sapolsky (Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Behave), there's ample evidence of enlarged, hyperactive amygdalas in chronically stressed individuals, both on artificially stressed lab rats and when looking at differences in individual human beings.
This thread makes it sound like it's impossible to make a medium scale application work without FKs constrains. I work on a commercial application that depends on relational relationships without FKs and the number of data corruption cases that we run into on regular basis is zero. Data integrity is handled at the application side, unexpected crashes are accounted for by heavy use of transactions, and everything works just fine.
To be clear, I'm not advocating against the use of foreign keys. But not using them is perfectly doable and not at all what this thread would have you believe.
There are ways to prevent invalid states in a database without foreign keys, for example enforcing "all or nothing" operations via transactions.
And it will be their undoing, since now that people are not upgrading their iPhones continued growth will depend on how well they can transition to become a services company, which, for the most part, you can only do phoning home the way Google and Facebook do. The only reason Apple touts privacy today is because they suck at services, and they figured they might as well sell it as a feature. But that won't last if Apple is to grow.
What laws did Facebook break that warranted seizing and publishing internal documents?
There's nothing that Facebook did here than any other company, in tech or otherwise, wouldn't have done.
And for the record, Facebook did not "share data with Cambridge Analytica for shady research purposes". A rogue third party developer created one of those shitty quiz apps for Facebook, and then proceed to get users to signup for it; several million did, which allowed said developer to harvest data thanks to the very permissive APIs that Facebook provided at the time. He then proceeded to sell this data to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a responsibility in what happened there, but "Facebook sold data to Cambridge Analytica" is a widly misconstrued story.
I think this sets an awful precedent and it's astonishing that an action like this would be applauded. But you do you.
> Google is well known for suppressing search results and banning people on YouTube etc. based on political ideology.
Can you give some examples of this?
We should simply stop referring to MVC as a "pattern", and call it what it is instead, a high level, abstract, general idea on how to structure an application. There isn't a right or wrong interpretation or implementation, just different applications of the same idea.
Imagine if those 3B were used to seed 3000 startups with 1M each. Even if only one third of these worked out, what an incredible golden age of productivity would that mean for the country.
Sure, I understand the argument. Critical thinking, questioning everything that is around us, is important. I'm just saying that it's also important that this argument doesn't provide ground for holding ideas that are objectively false, as proven by science.
I hate this line of reasoning that not accepting "contrarian" ideas is narrow minded, because while it's not wrong, 90% of the time it's used to justify believing the earth is flat, vaccines cause autism, and climate change is untrue. What's that, you don't like my ignorance? Ah well, then you're part of the narrow minded blind elite for not accepting contrarian thought!
Tangential, but it's worth noting that if what you are looking for is a portable development machine with tablet-like capatibilities, the Microsoft Surface series is arguably a better choice.
A lot of what goes on in t_d is artificial, so the actual size of the community is probably a lot less than what it appears here.