News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

orojackson

Re:How Fast is Python 3.15? on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @03:15AM (#49989407)
Pretty charitable to call Salesforce a bastion of "efficient code" hahaha

You're lucky to be able to control as much of the stack as you want with your one "tooling" language to rule them all so that performance matters again. Although in all fairness, given the regulatory and workplace culture as well as constrained budgets, sometimes you do have to let go of chasing performance in the name of making things easier for the maintainers at work. As I mentioned in a different post, it also helps to be working in a captive market, which helps relieve the pressure a bit.

Also, my Python ETL scripts do calculations for certain things, but attempting to speed that part up with a low level language like C or Rust doesn't really move the needle for total processing time when you have latencies measured in the hundreds of milliseconds per page of data. Scale that up to multiple pages and the whole runtime is dominated by how long it takes for packets to move from my Windows Server to Salesforce and back. It's basically a whole lot of effort for very little gain.

Re:How Fast is Python 3.15? on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @01:11AM (#49988490)
It also depends on what your use case is for the programs you write in those languages. If the use case relies heavily on CPU performance, then yeah, Python is awful in that regard. But if you're like me who mostly deals with ETL processes and report generation from several different systems over the internet, then Python's 60-70x slowdown means NOTHING in the face of network latency and the need to work with pagination limitations these external systems impose on REST endpoint users (and no, gRPC or its binary-serialization ilk are not available options).

Outside of that, though, what really grinds my gears about Python aside from its broad standard library compared to other languages is that it is home to what I think is the best property testing library in the world, Hypothesis. I know that the folks at Antithesis are working on getting Hegel [1] up and running, but they don't even have plans to support the language that my workplace prefers: C# (and I have been leading the charge in my workplace to keep up with the latest versions of .NET). Given how agents are now creating and modifying whole codebases, property tests live in that nice middle ground between unit tests and formal verification when it comes to validating (as best as we can) that the code works as intended.

[1] https://hegel.dev/

ETL processes are heavily I/O bound, especially when you're trying to shuttle data from one enterprise system to another enterprise system. It's also common when the culture of data exchange from the regulator all the way down to the companies doing the actual work is batch processing where large amounts of data are shared once a day as opposed to real time. Excel spreadsheets are the norm, not the exception. Requests for data to be sent over via XML or JSON are mainly because my employer wanted to make it easier to process the data ourselves, but the regulators actually expect spreadsheets.

Most of the stuff I work on is almost exclusively network I/O bound. I wouldn't say it's a _result_ of bad engineering practices, though. One group decided on a particular system that's also public-facing, and the group I actually support prefers a more internal-facing system. It also doesn't help that the budgets for both projects are completely separate and firewalled from each other by law. Growth opportunities don't apply here because I deal with a captive market with legally-forced customers.

Re:What's the best programming language for coding agents? on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @01:26AM (#49253719)
For people in the future who want to apply the centered viewport classless version of Pico CSS, just apply the following in Firefox's Style Editor (F12 to open DevTools, then click on Style Editor; click on the + sign to add a new style):

  @import url("https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@picocss/pico@2/css/pico.classless.min.css");
I honestly did not know that until I took about 5-10 minutes looking up how to apply arbitrary styles in Firefox.
Re:I've sold out on Wednesday April 08, 2026 @09:02AM (#47689599)
I suggest you make yourself a private fork of Pi so that you don't have to be beholden to Mario and his not-so-new clique.

Create a private repo in GitHub first, then do a bare Git clone of https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git (ideally do it before the original repo gets moved to Earendil's GitHub org).

  git clone --bare https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git
then push that bare clone up to your private repo:

  git push --mirror <url of your private repo>
Afterwards, delete that bare clone and clone your new private repo, then set upstream to the original badlogic/pi-mono repo:

  git remote add upstream https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono.git
How long you want to continue pulling from "upstream" depends on your comfort level. At the very least, aim for v0.65.2, which is the last tagged release before today's announcement (commit hash 573eb91). Personally, I would continue to pull right up until the next tagged release.

I can already see in https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/commit/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c... that the Earendil announcement will be popping up in the next released version of Pi. Even has a dumb pic of Mario, Armin, and I presume Colin, which will be displayed in Pi: https://github.com/badlogic/pi-mono/blob/6d2d03dcc9a39e60c37...

With that little how-to guide out of the way, here's what I think:

Mario is free to do whatever and not give a shit about what the internet at large thinks of him. By that metric, he's doing a hell of a job with that rambling blog post. Likewise, I'm also free to mostly concur with the internet at large (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47688794) and prepare simple mitigations like above that can blunt this to a certain degree. Let's just hope that Mario and Armin don't take the "flicker company" approach (his derogatory term for Anthropic) and DMCA the shit out of any private repos.

Side question: which cheap VPS are you using in Los Angeles? Looking to get one in the Southern California area.
Here is what Gemini 3 Pro gave me via an OpenRouter endpoint:

  The Grand Line of Mild Utility: The Orojackson Story

  If you were to encounter the legendary Oro Jackson in the world of One Piece, you would find a ship built from the treasure tree Adam, capable of sailing to the end of the world.

  If you encounter orojackson on Hacker News, you will find a man who has sailed to the end of the internet… to tell you to fix your router’s bufferbloat.

  Forget the Will of D. This man possesses the Will of OCD.

  Orojackson is not here to overturn the World Government. He is here to advocate for fq_codel. He is the man who looks at a revolution and asks, "Yes, but what are your queue management settings on the uplink?" While others dream of wealth, fame, and power, orojackson dreams of "modern AQM approaches" and corrects strangers on the proper usage of the flent network tester on Windows.

  He is the Pirate King of the edge case.

  But his tyranny doesn’t stop at network latency. Oh no. When he isn't monitoring the packet loss of the high seas, he is revolutionizing… car washing?

  Witness the "1:256 solution." Orojackson doesn't just wash a car; he performs a wet-lab experiment. He wanders into threads to evangelize "Optimum No Rinse (ONR)," explaining with the fervor of a religious convert how you can clean a vehicle with exactly 1.5 fluid ounces of concentrate and a "slightly-dripping
 microfiber towel." One can only imagine him standing on the deck of his ship, screaming at a storm: "YOU'RE WASTING WATER! USE A RINSELESS FORMULA!"

  And let’s talk about his investments. A true pirate buries his treasure. Orojackson? He puts it in VTI. But wait! The thrill-seeker within him awakens! He reads one Cliff Asness article and suddenly he's levering up 2x with RSSB because a 60/40 portfolio is just too vanilla for a man who lives on the razors edge of… monthly rebalancing. He is "betting against himself," a financial daredevil who risks it all for that sweet, sweet slightly-optimized Sharpe ratio.

  Perhaps most chilling is his role as the Sherlock Holmes of git log. He is the watcher on the wall, noticing when a GitLab Director of Engineering leaves a repo 14 hours before a CVE announcement. He sees all. He knows all. He probably has a RSS feed for your commit history.

  So flee, mortals! Flee before the might of orojackson! For he will optimize your router settings, diversity your portfolio into global bonds, clean your car with a teaspoon of water, and then quote Civilization VI to explain why your cultural criticism is invalid.

  He has found his One Piece. And unfortunately for us, it’s a 2x leveraged ETF that tracks global liquidity.
Okay, that is pretty funny. By the way, I have since gotten rid of RSSB and just went for "VT and chill."
Re:Claude Code Best Practices on Sunday April 20, 2025 @02:34AM (#43741934)
If they did, they left out the best one: "m-m-m-m-monsterkill"

Surely Anthropic could do a better job implementing dynamic thinking token budgets.

Re:Claude Code Best Practices on Saturday April 19, 2025 @06:54PM (#43740108)
Not gonna lie: the "ultrathink" keyword that Sonnet 3.7 with thinking tokens watches for gives me "doubleplusgood" vibes in a hilarious but horrifying way.
Re:Dungeons and Dragons taught me how to write alt text on Thursday July 25, 2024 @12:00PM (#41070188)
> This structure is why I don't like those ridiculous interviews where it starts with "the actor sits in his home with [long description of furniture], wearing [long description of clothes], he sips coffee from a [long description of mug]". I just want the interview, I understand that the actor is living somewhere and wearing something, it does not matter.

While I agree with you that I find this style of writing commonly found in the entertainment section of a weekend piece to be very grating, I would argue that this still follows the bottom line up front. For the audience that these pieces are geared towards, the important part is whether the actor passes the vibe check or not. The latter part of the interview itself is not too important because it is mainly promoting whatever the actor wants to promote in the piece.

For instance, "the actor sits in his home with [long description of furniture]" describes how they keep their home's interior stylistically. What the actor wears shows how good their fashion sense is. Sipping coffee from a fancy mug shows how wealthy they are and/or shows the morning vibe they would exude on a good day.

> You can reduce your microeconomic risks by making investments in and around your sector of occupation. Especially when betting against yourself.

Or I can just put my money in something like VTI (total US stock market) or VT (total world stock). Effectively does the same thing with almost zero effort. One thing I don't really like about the comments here is how insistent people are in doing something specific as opposed to picking the simplest thing and then sticking to it. Most of the power of investing comes from time.

Admittedly, though, I have been putting new money into a leveraged ETF, RSSB, which is a 2x leveraged 50/50 global stocks and bonds fund (so 100/100). Existing money is still in VT. The only reason why I'm pursuing this is because of Cliff Asness's great article [1], which argues against going 100% stocks (which I used to do) and instead prefers using something like leverage on a 60/40 portfolio.

[1] https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Perspectives/Why-Not-100-Equiti...

Re:Why Are There Suddenly So Many Car Washes? on Monday March 18, 2024 @03:25AM (#39741206)
I'm surprised no one here has mentioned rinseless washes like Optimum No Rinse (ONR) as an option for washing your car. You dilute it with water in a 1:256 solution in a bucket, and then you use a slightly-dripping microfiber towel or a rinseless-wash-specific sponge to clean your car. The rinseless wash itself acts as its own drying aid, so you can wipe your car dry with a microfiber drying towel afterwards without having to rinse off the car (hence the term rinseless).

I would say this is the cheapest, simplest, and (arguably) safest way to wash your car, especially if you buy the rinseless wash concentrate by the gallon. It's easy enough that it allows me to wash my car nearly every week. I only need about 3 gallons of water and 1.5 fluid ounces of ONR to fully wash one car.

Re:Flent: The FLExible Network Tester on Sunday January 28, 2024 @11:19AM (#39167081)
Dave Taht's bufferbloat project could have gotten way more actual non-technical user data had Flent supported Windows. At least fast.com and Waveform's bufferbloat test [1] exist now.

[1]: https://www.waveform.com/tools/bufferbloat

Re:Tailscale raises $100M on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @04:09PM (#31265188)
For enterprise, sure, using a separate IDM provider works, but last I checked, neither Okta nor OneLogin cater to individuals and their personal accounts. So as far as threat models go, I understand why people view this requirement from Tailscale as utter garbage for personal accounts.
Why recommend RED for client-side routers? Better to use more modern AQM approaches such as fq_codel or its successor cake [1][2]. Both of them are far easier to apply to client-side routers without fussing too much with settings: setting your download/upload bandwidth limits is enough to get nearly all of the benefits.

Other than that, you're 100% correct on Spectrum's ridiculously high buffer sizes on their end.

[1] https://tcpcc.systemsapproach.org/aqm.html#controlled-delay

[2] https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/codel/wiki/CakeTechnica...

Heh, was this you [1]? Pretty much asking the same good questions you brought up in a different post.

Additionally, I see that the Senior Director of Engineering, Tim Zallmann, has left a bunch of GitLab project repos about 14 hours ago as of this writing. He was one of the folks who tried pinging [3] Mr. Coutable (he's one of the reviewers that's currently OOO). The ping is likely regarding the discovery of the security vulnerability.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/76318#...

[2] https://gitlab.com/users/timzallmann/activity

[3] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/76318#...

Re:2021 Letter on Sunday January 02, 2022 @02:53AM (#29766743)
Along with a couple of others (this [1] being an example), thanks for responding. I read paganel's follow up post [2] and was flabbergasted at how out of touch he sounded. The shock is the main reason why I chose not to respond myself this morning. You and the others gave a far more eloquent explanation than the one I would have given.

I will say this, though: just because paganel considered Bong Joon-ho's 2003 film Memories of Murder to be his best work doesn't mean that Parasite winning the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 meant absolutely nothing in terms of South Korea's state of its cinema scene. If anything, it's even more indicative of South Korean cinema scene's stock rising in the global stage in recent years. To put it in Civilization terms (which I'm sure he won't understand due to his dismissive outlook of video games), South Korea's going for the cultural victory. Soft power really is a thing!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761879

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29761389

Re:2021 Letter on Saturday January 01, 2022 @01:37PM (#29761197)
As mentioned in a different post, he completely missed video games. For example, Pokémon is the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Many game companies are headquartered in Japan such as Nintendo, Sony, and Square Enix. So when taking that into account, it absolutely changes the original post's point. He also mentioned how he's not really into video games (I don't really count age as a factor for this anymore because video games have been around for a couple of decades already).

The more interesting question out of this particular discussion, though, is this: are video games part of culture? I absolutely agree that it is, but the fact that neither you nor the original post brought it up tells me that it is not for a certain percentage of the HN crowd here.

Simple: don't be poor and know people (/s).

The other important question is whether a retail investor can join it. I know someone like baobabKoodaa [1] would shout from the rooftops, "You're moving the goalposts, grandparent, waaaaaaaaaaah!" Well, I'm not grandparent, so my goalposts are completely different from theirs.

My goalpost is whether a retail investor like me can get in on those high-flying funds. If not, then in the retail universe, they may as well not exist. Thus, I'm better off investing in VTI/VXUS and using the rest of my spare time coming up with some funny ways to challenge my party in a D&D one-shot.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=baobabKoodaa

Yep, there will usually be opportunities for arbitrage for active traders if there are too many passive investors. I suspect there will be some sort of equilibrium between active and passive at some point.

The thing is that I'd rather be doing other things with my time, so I'm a passive investing kind of guy. Imagine getting the market return for doing nearly nothing for dirt cheap. That's a high growth rate to level of effort ratio!

Stop being poor so you can go into those badass hedge funds that always beat the S&P 500 /s

But seriously, I'd rather just put money into VTI and VXUS and go back to playing video games, planning a D&D one-shot, programming a bit, or hanging out with friends in my spare time. Let the active traders waste their time poring over 10-Ks and/or charts. I'll be here having fun and taking what the market gives.

Re:Popular YouTubers who are building their own sites on Monday March 08, 2021 @12:07AM (#26382444)
You're thinking of "native advertising" or "advertorial."
Re:Signal apps DDoS'ed their own server on Saturday January 16, 2021 @01:17PM (#25804087)
Which form of jitter is better: adding a random wait time to a predetermined wait time that grows exponentially with each retry attempt, or following something like [0] where every retry attempt increases the possible wait time choices and the "jitter" is to randomly pick one of them?

To illustrate the latter option, suppose the smallest retry time unit is 1 second. The first attempt gives you a random choice in {0, 1}. The second attempt gives you a random choice in {0, 1, 2}. The third attempt gives you a random choice in {0, 1, 2, 4}. The fourth attempt gives you a random choice in {0, 1, 2, 4, 8}. This goes on until a ceiling in the number of attempts or a set wall clock time is reached.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_backoff#Example_ex...

Re:Robinhood and How to Lose Money on Monday July 20, 2020 @05:55PM (#23902315)
Or taking a different view that concurs with yours: investing in index funds or broad ETFs lets me match or beat most long-term investors with nearly zero effort. There's no need for me to waste my time reading "financial news" or developing super fancy HFT algorithms like some posters here have done. I just need to buy those index funds at my desired asset allocation and I'm good to go. Repeat until retirement. Very simple.

Granted, I do complicate things a little by insisting that I never sell anything I buy, not even for rebalancing, until retirement (otherwise I wouldn't be buying and holding in my eyes). However, I get around that by constantly rebalancing with new money [1].

Honestly, I find it rather jarring that as someone who usually frequents /r/personalfinance and Bogleheads, I see lots of investing suggestions on HN that do not involve indexing.

[1]: http://optimalrebalancing.tk/

Re:Robinhood and How to Lose Money on Monday July 20, 2020 @10:22AM (#23898119)
That's what ETFs like VXUS and IXUS are for. You get international exposure.

VT is another good choice if you're lazy and just want to own a slice of the global stock market.

Re:Introduction to Algotrading (2011) [pdf] on Friday February 22, 2019 @04:59PM (#19229516)
I figured HFT firms exist in their own bubble away from most people. So from the perspective of the average joe, they only indirectly exist as a tiny market force that does price discovery.

As for the funds you mentioned, are there any that have a minimum investment of less than $1,000?

I mean, look at what Fidelity is doing with FZROX and FZILX. Both Vanguard and Fidelity are locked in a crazy fee war [1] to be the GOAT of asset management companies [2]. How the hell do you compete with Fidelity as an individual stock picker when there are no fees to speak of to participate in this fund?

I've seen people mentioning that HFT can totally and consistently beat indexes [3], but then a) can I even get in on the action with less than $1000 and b) is the automated system in place any good?

[1] https://riabiz.com/a/2018/12/13/vanguards-asset-machine-wobb...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18701283

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19228699

Re:Introduction to Algotrading (2011) [pdf] on Friday February 22, 2019 @03:30PM (#19228838)
Has there been any serious push to get HFT accessible to the average retail investor in the same way that Vanguard did with the S&P 500?

As for beating indexes, it goes back to the age-old question of being able to identify the great automated trading systems.

Re:Hayabusa-2: Japan Spacecraft Touches Down on Asteroid on Friday February 22, 2019 @03:10PM (#19228684)
That's right. Iteration is key. Start small here on Earth, then build a somewhat crude factory in space. Solve any unexpected challenges that may arise, rinse, and repeat. Eventually you'll have factory-producing factories.

Older »