Top all-time · #1308
Juho Snellman
Personal blog · snellman.net · on HN as jsnellgamesprogramming
Juho Snellman's personal blog at snellman.net covers games and programming. Since 2014, 56 different Hacker News readers have linked it 114 times, most often “LLMs are cheap”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- LLMs are cheap8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2025-06-02
- Numbers and tagged pointers in early Lisp implementations7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-09-04
- Writing a Procedural Puzzle Generator5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-05-14
- Hanging S3 downloads4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-07-20
- I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-12-13
- The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-09-01
- Web Environment Integrity vs. Private Access Tokens: They're the Same Thing3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-25
- TCP is harder than it looks3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-11-17
- The origins of XXX as FIXME3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-17
- Use Cases for Change-Class in Common Lisp3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-07-30
What Hacker News says?
https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch... , also note the "objections" section Anecdotally thanks to hardware advancements the locally-run AI software I develop has gotten more than 100x faster in the past year thanks to Moore's law
Comment linking /blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
on “LLM Inevitabilism”Submitted Why PS4 downloads are so slow as a story · 713 points
HN discussionSure. Here's something I'd written on the subject that I'd left lying in my drafts folder for a month, but I've now published just for you :) https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch... It has links to public sources on the pricing of both LLMs and search, and explains why the low inference prices can't be due the inference being subsidized. (And while there are other possible explanations, it in…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
on “Cloudlflare builds OAuth with Claude and publishes all the prompts”Submitted The most obsolete infrastructure money could buy – my worst job ever as a story · 464 points
HN discussionChatGPT’s revenue means nothing if reports are to be believed that it loses money on each paying customer on just inference. It’s definitely not enough to support its training costs. Sam Altman: We're very profitable on inference. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/17/sam-altman/#:~:text=Su... Independent analysis: Inference is very profitable. https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... https://…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
on “Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out”Submitted I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years as a story · 361 points
HN discussionUnless a resource is very small, it won't be transmitted in a single atomic unit. The sender will only send a part of it, wait the client to acknowledge having received them, and only then send more. That requires a network roundtrip. The larger the resource, the more network roundtrips will be required. If you want to learn more, pretty much any resource on TCP should explain this stuff. Here's something I wrote ye…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2017-08-19-slow-ps4-downloads/
on “WebP: The WebPage Compression Format”Submitted LLMs are cheap as a story · 344 points
HN discussionI wrote a tool for basically that exact use case. It causes deterministic network faults (on a per-flow rather than per-interface basis), and takes trace files from both sides of the fault. [0] https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2015-10-01-flow-disrup...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2015-10-01-flow-disruptor/
on “TCP Puzzlers”Submitted Hanging S3 downloads as a story · 235 points
HN discussionThose are effectively made up numbers, since they're given to him by an anonymous source we have no way of corroborating, and we can't even see the documents themselves, and it contradicts not just OpenAI's official numbers, but first principles analyses of what the economics of inference should be[1] and the inference profit reports of other companies, as well as just an analysis of the inference market would sugge…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
on “Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research”Submitted The origins of XXX as FIXME as a story · 195 points
HN discussionIt has some ancient history as a morse code distress signal: https://regulatorylibrary.caa.co.uk/923-2012/Content/Regs/03... And it shows up in some old BSD code: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-04-17-xxx-fixme/ But... I think repeated letters are just easier to type than any other string, and since X looks like the classic "marks the spot" logo, it's what people jump to.
Comment linking /blog/archive/2017-04-17-xxx-fixme/
on “TODOs aren't for doing”Submitted I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years (2016) as a story · 164 points
HN discussionHere are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway. * Blogs with a math focus: http://blog.sigfpe.com http://bit-player.org http://mathr.co.uk/blog/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/ * Blogs with a programming languages focus: https://existentialtype.wordpress.com https://bluishcoder.co.nz http://blog.ezyang.…
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted Unit testing a TCP stack (2015) as a story · 135 points
HN discussionI can't read your hyperbolically titled paywalled medium post, so idk if it has data I'm not aware of or is just rehashing the same stats about OpenAI & co currently losing money (mostly due to training and free users) but here's a non paywalled blog post that I personally found convincing: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-ch...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2025-06-02-llms-are-cheap/
on “How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise”Submitted Optimizing a breadth-first search as a story · 114 points
HN discussionVery interesting and yes, interoperability is hard. https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-11-11-tcp-is-hard...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2014-11-11-tcp-is-harder-than-it-looks.html
on “Let's Code a TCP/IP Stack: TCP Retransmission”Submitted A monorepo misconception – atomic cross-project commits as a story · 102 points
HN discussionIt doesn't look like Google's paper or the results on this site consider CloudFlare's zlib fork: https://github.com/cloudflare/zlib Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9857784 And a recent performance comparison with Intel's patches: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison-...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2014-08-04-comparison-of-intel-and-cloudflare-zlib-patches.html
on “Introducing Brotli: a new compression algorithm for the internet”Submitted The hidden cost of QUIC and TOU (2016) as a story · 102 points
HN discussionOnly because the computer it was on already had a tag field in every word. Other implementations of Lisp did similar things though: https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2017-09-04-lisp-number...
Comment linking /blog/archive/2017-09-04-lisp-numbers/
on “Go Slices Are Fat Pointers”Submitted The many ways of handling TCP RST packets as a story · 99 points
HN discussionIf you're specifically looking to probe the behavior of different TCP implementations, I think you want something slightly different than this. First, you want the faults to be deterministic (e.g. not random 1% packet loss but packet loss at a certain point in the connection); and you want the limits to be per TCP connection, not per link. If you don't have that determinism or connection isolation there are just goi…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2015-10-01-flow-disruptor/
on “Speedbump – a TCP proxy to simulate variable network latency”Submitted On open-sourcing existing code as a story · 98 points
HN discussionBecause no one wrote one. There were some attempts but nothing which would work now. Delivering small applications does not seem to be a focus of SBCL users. https://www.snellman.net/blog/archive/2005-07-06.html There is also the possibility to compress the image. See :compression option when saving an image: http://www.sbcl.org/manual/#index-g_t_0040sbext_007bsave_002... Commercial Lisp implementations like LispWor…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2005-07-06.html
on “Pixie – A small, fast, native Lisp”Submitted Numbers and tagged pointers in early Lisp implementations as a story · 89 points
HN discussionI run a server on Hetzner that sends maybe 100k messages a week, and appears to have no problems with delivery. It doesn't even have SPF or DKIM set up. And I'm pretty sure that if messages were not getting delivered, users would complain. At least that's exactly what happened the one time there was a configuration screwup [1] that made some email providers reject mail from that server. So I don't know if that theor…
Comment linking /blog/archive/2014-12-05-how-buying-a-ssl-certificate-broke-my-email-setup/
on “Why does Gmail hate my domain?”Submitted Unit testing a TCP stack as a story · 89 points
HN discussion
