programd (u/programd)

programd commented on Perl's decline was cultural beatworm.co.uk/blog/compu... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

Check out "Perl Best Practices" by Damien Conway, and the more recent "Modern Perl" by Chromatic. Both can be had as paperbacks, and I think both are also available free on online.

programd · 16 days ago

I'll go further. Ignore the Perl specific bits and Conway's "Perl Best Practices" is one of the best general programming books ever written.

It has so many great pieces of advice that apply to any programming task, everything from naming variables, to testing, error handling, code organization, documentation, etc, etc. Ultimately, for timeless advice on programming as a profession the language is immaterial.

programd commented on Cloudflare outage on December 5, 2025 blog.cloudflare.com/5-dec... · Posted by u/meetpateltech

liampulles · 17 days ago

Rollback is a reliable strategy when the rollback process is well understood. If a rollback process is not well known and well experienced, then it is a risk in itself.

I'm not sure of the nature of the rollback process in this case, but leaning on ill-founded assumptions is a bad practice. I do agree that a global rollout is a problem.

programd · 17 days ago

Global rollout of security code on a timeframe of seconds is part of Cloudflare's value proposition.

In this case they got unlucky with an incident before they finished work on planned changes from the last incident.

programd commented on Gemini 3 blog.google/products/gemi... · Posted by u/preek

recitedropper · a month ago

This is the million dollar question. I'm not qualified to answer it, and I don't really think anyone out there has the answer yet.

My armchair take would be that watt usage probably isn't a good proxy for computational complexity in biological systems. A good piece of evidence for this is from the C. elegans research that has found that the configuration of ions within a neuron--not just the electrical charge on the membrane--record computationally-relevant information about a stimulus. There are probably many more hacks like this that allow the brain to handle enormous complexity without it showing up in our measurements of its power consumption.

programd · a month ago

My armchair is equally comfy, and I have an actual paper to point to:

Jaxley: Differentiable simulation enables large-scale training of detailed biophysical models of neural dynamics [1]

They basically created sofware to simulate real neurons and ran some realistic models to replicate typical AI learning tasks:

"The model had nine different channels in the apical and basal dendrite, the soma, and the axon [39], with a total of 19 free parameters, including maximal channel conductances and dynamics of the calcium pumps."

So yeah, real neurons are a bit more complex then ReLU or Sigmoid.

[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.08.21.608979v2....

programd commented on Ask HN: Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? · Posted by u/Grosvenor

programd · 2 months ago

SEEKING WORK | Remote | Onsite San Francisco Bay Area |

Versatile back end code and infrastructure development services. Typical deliverables are Dockerized microservices specified by OpenAPI, written in Go or Python, with a REST/JSON API and backed by PostgresDB or MySQL. CI/CD pipelines included and deplyment on any of the major cloud vendors. And of course your custom business logic.

If you have more complex needs, e.g. project or team management please reach out as I have extensive career experience in all aspects of of technology development and management in startups and large enterprises. Need a contract manager or CTO perhaps?

At minimum I can help you develop your back end infrastructure from the ground up. Basically I offer development of back-end componenets you can slot into your Kubernetes or Docker environment from day one.

On the business side, you get a fractional developer for a no-haggling fixed monthly rate, corp-to-corp billing, long term support for your code, careful vetting of dependencies for licensing and security, and a professional approach to your technical needs.

Contact: contact@nulladmin.com

Website: https://nulladmin.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abnulladmin/

programd commented on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2025) · Posted by u/whoishiring

programd · 2 months ago

  Location: SF Bay Area
  Remote: Yes - or hybrid/in-office, I'm flexible
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Go, C/C++, Python, Docker, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL/MySQL, ML/LLM, and many others
  Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/abnulladmin
  Email: contact@nulladmin.com

I'm an engineer with many years of experience in Silicon Valley, working in management roles, engineering, and consulting. My expertise is mostly in back end systems, working in the modern Go/Docker/Kubernetes ecosystem. In addition to working directly on large and complex code projects I also managed and grew engineering teams at various companies.

If you need help with specific technical projects, or are looking for management roles please feel free to reach out. I'm very familiar with both the unique challenges of scaling up startups as well as working to innovate in large enterprise companies.

Specifically if you need help productizing and scaling out various AI/Machine Learning/LLM systems this would be a good fit. I know there is quite a bit of demand in this area and a limited supply of qualified candidates.

programd commented on I built ChatGPT with Minecraft redstone [video] youtube.com/watch?v=VaeI9... · Posted by u/ghuntley

sbuttgereit · 3 months ago

If you like thinking about the possibilities of the worlds of Minecraft and LLMs colliding I recommend the YouTube channel @EmergentGarden (https://www.youtube.com/@EmergentGarden) it's not exclusively agents and Minecraft, but there's a fair amount of stuff tested over time.

Most recently: Can AI (actually) beat Minecraft? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wh4abvcUj8Q

programd · 3 months ago

I'll second that recommendation. One of the more interesting videos is AI creating utopian and dystopian worlds in Minecraft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnQvdypW_I

Invokes shades of Iain M. Banks' "Surface Detail" Culture novel, where virtual Hells are a major plot point.

programd commented on Ubuntu installs failing for more than 24 hours due to security.ubuntu.com down askubuntu.com/questions/1... · Posted by u/programd

programd · 4 months ago

More discussion on Ubuntu forums

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/problem-with-updates-error-fa...

programd commented on Ubuntu installs failing for more than 24 hours due to security.ubuntu.com down askubuntu.com/questions/1... · Posted by u/programd

programd · 4 months ago

The worst part is that they marked the incident as resolved after 32 minutes, but didn't mention that mirrors for the packages on security.ubuntu.com have huge queues. OK fine, we can wait until the mirrors sync and you can choose another mirror to do your update - eventually. You can also work around this while updating Ubuntu 24.04 by manually installing the deb file it wants.

But wait, there's more! You can't install new instances of Ubuntu 24.04.2 because the installer connects to security.ubuntu.com by default (probably for good reasons) and will bail out while formatting and writing the disk when it gets 500 Internal Server Error from security.ubuntu.com for a specific deb file. There's no option around it that I'm aware of if you're doing an install connected to the network. I'm told that things should work if you try to install without networking connected. But that's not working for me, possibly due to some drivers it needs to pull for my hardware that are not in the default installer.

Ran into this while trying to install a fresh instance on an old mac hardware.

All in all, not a good look for Canonical, especially given how long this is taking to resolve and the lack of any status indication that this is still a problem. Lots of people are being bitten by this in the last 24 hours.