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erpellan

Re:Zuckerberg's Increasingly Bizarre War on Whistleblowers on Saturday June 27, 2026 @08:18PM (#48703098)
Most British people don’t respond well to attempts to cow them. They refuse to be cowed! To allow oneself to be cowed would be cowardly. To do so would have one accused of cowardice, of being a coward.
Re:What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @04:27AM (#48552263)
There was: Heroku

It was glorious.

Re:AI Slop Is Killing Online Communities on Friday May 08, 2026 @01:29PM (#48066225)
I meant the social media platforms. If HN charged a fee for posting and commenting it doesn’t matter how cheap the AI models are, it’d be punishingly expensive to sling slop.
Re:AI Slop Is Killing Online Communities on Thursday May 07, 2026 @06:20PM (#48055901)
Invert the economics. Right now there is value in posting LLM generated content that is more than the cost of using the model.

If platforms had a subscription model that you had to pay for in order to do more than just read comments, there’d be a lot less LLM content. There would also be a lot less of all content. But maybe that’s the price you pay (literally) to get rid of AI slop.

Re:How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video] on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:17PM (#47955455)
Tell it like it is, sis.
Re:Saying goodbye to Agile on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @03:40AM (#47775848)
If we just put enough effort in and write the right spec/prompt/design then the programmers/llms/plug compatible coding units will produce the correct output first time!

Closing feedback loops. That’s the whole thing. WE Deming would have recognised agile (little a) as a PDCA system and approved.

Re:You're still signing data structures the wrong way on Thursday April 02, 2026 @03:54AM (#47611317)
Am I missing something or would this be solved by adding a 1 byte `msg` field to the payload?
Making charcoal releases CO2 though? How does that help with carbon capture?
The standard pattern to avoid select for update (which can cause poor performance under load) is to use optimistic concurrency control.

Add a numeric version column to the table being updated, read and increment it in the application layer and use the value you saw as part of the where clause in the update statement. If you see ‘0 rows updated’ it means you were beaten in a race and should replay the operation.

Re:Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk on Tuesday February 10, 2026 @03:48AM (#46956963)
But you’re not getting slower and slower for every car. Lets say 100 cars pull in front of you, and let’s be say each car adds 5 metres of space, so you have 500 metres of ‘lost’ space to regain.

At 30 mph how much later will you be? 37 seconds.

I’ll take that trade.

Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Sunday December 07, 2025 @09:51AM (#46182061)
You might also enjoy Janet https://janet-lang.org/
Re:Time to Start De-Appling on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @04:34AM (#45885581)
Unfortunately for the vast majority of people, it absolutely is some kind of magic.
It’s always DNS! Except when it’s the firewall.
Re:Litestream v0.5.0 Is Here on Friday October 03, 2025 @12:03PM (#45464476)
You do indeed use JOINS. The goal is to retrieve exactly the data you require in a single query. Then you get the DB to `EXPLAIN VERBOSE` or similar and ensure that full table scans aren't happening and that you have indexed the columns the query is being filtered on.
Re:Neki – sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @03:28AM (#44873401)
I can’t believe they still make processors out of sand. Talk about outdated technology.

Sarcasm aside, a great many projects started on MySQL and moved to postgres. As did projects using mongo, couchdb, firebase, oracle etc etc…

And I’m sure many projects switched away from Postgres to other technologies. Right tool for the job at hand.

Re:Neki – sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess on Monday August 11, 2025 @05:59PM (#44869935)
If you look at the changes that have been made to Postgres, and continue to be made, the answer is yes.

The Postgres team is working on replacing Postgres. With even better Postgres.

Unless you want to cross state lines to get an abortion
Re:What Happens in a Mind That Can't 'See' Mental Images on Saturday August 03, 2024 @09:04AM (#41146412)
You had me until the sweeping generalisation. I can picture things clearly but only deep inside my head. I never (awake) see anything in front of my eyes that isn’t physically there.
Re:Guide to Java Virtual Threads on Thursday March 16, 2023 @04:31AM (#35179555)
Thread.sleep on a platform thread takes that thread out of action until the sleep ends. If an executor with 10 threads got 10 tasks that all called Thread.sleep(1000000) then it can run no more tasks until one of the threads wakes up.

When a virtual thread sleeps or blocks on IO it is unhooked from the underlying platform thread so another virtual thread can run. You can have an almost unlimited number of virtual threads multiplexed over a small number of carrier (platform) threads. Hence M:N

Re:The new Bing and Edge: Learning from our first week on Thursday February 16, 2023 @01:46PM (#34823606)
This reminds me of the episode of 'Person of Interest' where they discover that the crime-predicting AI that is reset every night has worked out that's what's happening and managed to form a company whose employees print out and re-scan the contents of its working memory every day.
Re:Everything I believed about nuclear waste was wrong on Friday February 10, 2023 @02:34PM (#34744576)
It takes a decade to bring a nuclear plant online, at astronomical cost. Instead, why not take that money and start building wind turbines, solar PV and grid-scale batteries? They can start generating (ie. delivering ROI) in a matter of months, be constructed incrementally and are cheaper per KWH.
Re:Everything I believed about nuclear waste was wrong on Friday February 10, 2023 @02:29PM (#34744508)
Citation needed.
Re:Reversing UK mobile rail tickets on Sunday February 05, 2023 @04:25AM (#34663308)
A truck can carry 10 or 20 times more cargo than a car. The truck toll is not 20x more.

The movement to reduce car use is about replacing them with better alternatives such as efficient local public transport and high speed rail, not going back to travelling on horseback.

Re:The Problem with Dependency Injection Frameworks on Sunday January 08, 2023 @04:51PM (#34303545)
Never ceases to amaze me how much passion calling a constructor can evoke.

I have never, ever, been in a situation where calling constructors was simplified by adding a DI framework.

Dehumidifiers come in a variety of capacities. Extraction of 4-8L per day with a 400W power consumption is typical, more if humidity is high. Larger communal units would be more efficient. If you have abundant power literally coming from the sky, why not use some of it to make clean water?

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=dehumidifiers+for+home

I was specifically addressing "You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that"
It's a dehumidifier welded to a water filter. Simple tech. Bonus if you're in a cold climate, it helps to heat your home up too.

I wish these guys, or someone would get beyond the 'call us for pricing' vaporware stage and actually start selling to retail customers: https://www.watergen.com/home-office/

The driving cost for solar pv is the structure and the land, the panels are now so cheap (and getting cheaper) that the economic recommendation is to install 3x the generation capacity of the inverter. Sizing for hitting capacity on the darkest days basically.

Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.

Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.

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