peterldowns

Joined 16 years ago

Karma
4,619
Submissions
1,230
Member since
Oct 20
https://peterdowns.com

https://github.com/peterldowns

https://twitter.com/peterldowns

Always happy to meet a stranger, please reach out any time: hn @ peterdowns.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/peterldowns; my proof: https://keybase.io/peterldowns/sigs/9N-85LOZH1eJMXHLR70WroivxJB1is_s3ye5IT5xzxs ]

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Recent submissions

Comment · 23 days ago
Thank you for these!
Comment · 24 days ago
Industrial history and the history of precision manufacturing is extremely exciting to me. This is an excellent overview and the animations — while not quite as smooth as https://ciechanow.ski/ — add to the experience.

If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy the book “English and American Tool Builders" by Joseph Wickham Roe.

Comment · 1 month ago
Great concept and nice demo site! It's kind of interesting to me what the Jev model is ambiently aware of and what it isn't. For instance, this query comes back as safe:

    -- fails if any rows exist in the table since the new column
    -- is not null and also has no default value.
    ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN status text NOT NULL;
That's like, one of the most common mistakes ever when it comes to database migrations. Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude all flag this immediately and can offer improvements.

I bring this up not because it's a gotcha but because I wonder how you think about the utility of rules-based classifiers like this. At a certain point, if you need to extend your rules engines with tons of edge cases like this, why not just ask a true LLM? Or, have you considered extending your default ruleset with generated rules — maybe point an LLM at use-the-index, other db docs, or just ask it to expand the ruleset based on its own knowledge?

Comment · 1 month ago
We hadn't seen that post before --- very similar, but completely independent.

Reasonable suggestions, but we've mostly published our action as reference for others. I'd suggest forking or creating your own setup-go action and implementing whatever behavior you'd like. Nothing wrong with either idea!

Comment · 1 month ago
What made you just start posting on HN? Welcome and thanks for the links!
Comment · 1 month ago
Thanks for reading :) Broken down by key idea:

- Allowing actions/setup-go users to specify a cache key prefix so that they can have more than one golang CI job, each with its own cache: this is 100% worth upstreaming. I believe there are existing requests and PRs about this. Up to you guys to implement however you see fit.

- Allowing "always update the cache": also a good idea to enable as an option, very important for non-open-source teams that are trying to maximize cache hit rate.

- Allowing "trim the cache": if you're going to allow always updating the cache, probably a good idea.

But the "always update" and "trim" cache changes combine to have a lot of risks regarding cache poisoning that might be bad for open source projects. Lukas may have a different opinion or more to say on this front.

Comment · 1 month ago
How did this new account `vertigoruntime` get three posts on the front page, all in the last day?

- This post

- The DeepMind Institute https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49727659

- Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49723408

based on their account submission history they have a 25% hit rate (!) Seems very, very weird.

Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
Comment · 1 month ago
But why not Zanzibar?
Comment · 1 month ago
This is awesome. Does the demo run fully client-side? This is at least as good as my current solution (Preview.app -> Tools -> Remove Background), I generally pre-crop so it's not too hard to get just the object I care about.
Comment · 1 month ago
As a Pennsylvanian I think this is idiotic and I completely blame the press, who have breathlesslly amplified baseless negative claims. Such as that datacenters are somehow bad for the environment, have negative impacts on water supply, will raise energy and water rates for residential customers, etc.

I HATE that this is somehow becoming a culture war issue.

Comment · 2 months ago
The idea is that it's like Github but it stays up even as your commit/CI frequency increases. As a customer I'm stoked and looking forward to fully switching over as that's exactly what I want.

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