Readit News logoReadit News
TillE commented on Why I stopped using JSON for my APIs   aloisdeniel.com/blog/bett... · Posted by u/barremian
ElectricalUnion · 18 days ago
Serialization issue. From the Introduction to Cap’n Proto:

"Cap’n Proto is INFINITY TIMES faster than Protocol Buffers. (...) there is no encoding/decoding step. The Cap’n Proto encoding is appropriate both as a data interchange format and an in-memory representation, so once your structure is built, you can simply write the bytes straight out".

I take it as a rationalization of what OLE Compound File Binary - internal Microsoft Office memory structures serialized "raw" as file format - would look like if they paid more attention to being backward and forward compatible and extensible.

TillE · 18 days ago
Google has a library/format for that too, with FlatBuffers. Different use cases and advantages really, not clearly better/worse.
TillE commented on Game design is simple   raphkoster.com/2025/11/03... · Posted by u/vrnvu
henning · a month ago
Nothing asserted here is simple. And after reading all that it's still hard to design and build a game that will cut through the noise of all the other games coming out on Steam.

It's not a matter of "simple vs. easy". If you have to write many words to list your ideas and you state each idea is deep and connected to all the other ideas, the thing you are talking about is not simple.

TillE · a month ago
This is an extremely interesting article about game design and it's a bit silly to fixate on the title.
TillE commented on Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?   vgel.me/posts/seahorse/... · Posted by u/nyxt
classified · 2 months ago
> the most practical solution

Maybe there is none, and this is just one example of a fundamental LLM limitation.

TillE · 2 months ago
People really really want LLMs to output a highly reliable finished product, and I suspect we're probably never gonna get there. Lots of progress over the past couple years, but not on that.

I think it's much more interesting to focus on use cases which don't require that, where gen AI is an intermediate step, a creator of input (whether for humans or for other programs).

TillE commented on U.S. investors, Trump close in on TikTok deal with China   wsj.com/tech/details-emer... · Posted by u/Mgtyalx
slg · 3 months ago
Sometimes I'm truly baffled over the stories that the HN readership ends up mostly ignoring. When I heard about this news elsewhere, I came here fully expecting this to be high on the front page with hundreds of comments discussing it. For comparison's sake, the story about Tiktok shutting down[1] and then restoring service[2] in the US each had over 2500 comments. Meanwhile, 3 hours after this story was posted, this is the 14th comment.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753396

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42759336

TillE · 3 months ago
Frustratingly I can't recall specific examples, but in the past year there have been several major discussion-worthy tech stories I've seen on The Verge or wherever, and I come to HN a couple hours later and there's either literally nothing or the post got zero interaction. Strange!
TillE commented on A new experimental Google app for Windows   blog.google/products/sear... · Posted by u/meetpateltech
maltelandwehr · 3 months ago
Google must really be feeling the pressure from ChatGPT. They picked up pace in a very noticeable way.
TillE · 3 months ago
A ton of the early discourse about ChatGPT was as an outright Google killer. It mostly hasn't really panned out that way; there's some overlap but the web ain't dead yet. If nothing else, search is a necessary input to the machine.

Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.

TillE commented on iPhone Air   apple.com/newsroom/2025/0... · Posted by u/excerionsforte
ncr100 · 3 months ago
$0.25 fentanyl sells good. Doesn't mean it's what people need.
TillE · 3 months ago
Fentanyl is a fascinating market case study because nobody actually wants fentanyl, they want oxycodone or heroin.

It's the "market data reveals that consumers actually want the cheapest shittiest airplane tickets" of drugs. And you can read that in a couple different ways.

TillE commented on Shared_ptr<T>: the (not always) atomic reference counted smart pointer (2019)   snf.github.io/2019/02/13/... · Posted by u/klaussilveira
TillE · 4 months ago
> VisualC++ doesn’t have its source code available

Got all the way here and had to look back up to see this post was from 2019. The MSVC standard library has been open source for several years now. https://github.com/microsoft/STL

Though to be perfectly honest, setting a breakpoint and looking at the disassembly is probably easier than reading standard library code.

TillE commented on Transport for London launches campaign targeting 'headphone dodgers'   theguardian.com/uk-news/2... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11
TillE · 4 months ago
It's certainly a socially weirder thing to do, but honestly I think someone playing music on their phone is probably less annoying/distracting than people having a loud conversation, which is far more common.
TillE commented on The “Wow!” signal was likely from extraterrestrial source, and more powerful   iflscience.com/the-wow-si... · Posted by u/toss1
treetalker · 4 months ago
Extraterrestrial as in "not of Earthly origin" — not as in space aliens.
TillE · 4 months ago
Space aliens are still kinda the best explanation. It's extremely inconclusive, and it's entirely possible that we'll discover some new natural phenomenon to explain it instead, but for now there's not really any known alternative.
TillE commented on Cupertino must stop calling Apple Watches 'carbon neutral,' German court rules   theregister.com/2025/08/2... · Posted by u/rntn
TillE · 4 months ago
Apple is big and rich enough that surely it could operate its own carbon offset program, rather than simply throwing money at unreliable third parties. Buy the land, why not?

u/TillE

KarmaCake day15471January 4, 2011View Original