Hacker News: Bootvis

New comment by Bootvis in "Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1"

Bootvis — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:49:51 +0000

I don’t think the apps are ugly at all but the kerning of the first letter of the headers feels very off on the website. Maybe it’s intentional but I find it distracting and inappropriate for a note taking app. (latest iOS, Firefox, iPhone 17)

New comment by Bootvis in "Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market"

Bootvis — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 06:45:43 +0000

Discussed here as well: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-story-of-money/id1...

New comment by Bootvis in "Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games"

Bootvis — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 20:36:33 +0000

The early GPTs were supposedly reasonable at chess but it indeed is not a very useful skill to have for an LLM (Elo 1800 IIRC) which is stronger than most players and for them it could be a useful tool.

Even at higher levels, I think there could be use. The Dvoretsky example on my GitHub is real but it’s not a guarantee you get it and it could just be reiterating from training. What didn’t work for me was forcing it to look at lines in detail, but maybe with larger context and better engineering, you can get the LLM to extract themes from the search tree. With compare and contrast, it could maybe figure out why a move works in one variant and not in another and produce a coherent explanation of this nuance.

I’m not trying this yet because it would take a lot of tokens and I don’t have the time.

New comment by Bootvis in "Show HN: A Claude Code skill to analyze your chess games"

Bootvis — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 19:22:53 +0000

Already a year ago I vibe coded Babelfish: https://github.com/bobjansen/Babelfish

It integrates an LLM of your choice with StockFish to analyze games. Back then, the results weren't very good and I abandoned the project but a lot has changed (the LLM's got better and I did too) so maybe it is time to take another stab at it.

New comment by Bootvis in "AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible"

Bootvis — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 10:45:00 +0000

In the examples above, that’s really your own loss? There will only be one or two events in your local village, it seems self defeating to ignore what they offer because you don’t like the medium. At least these posters are well laid out and easy to read.

New comment by Bootvis in "Suspected sabotage causes major Netherlands rail disruption"

Bootvis — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 11:29:59 +0000

Nothing was derailed, they put pipes on the rails that tricked the system into believing there was a train on the track, shutting it down

New comment by Bootvis in "How An AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy"

Bootvis — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:41:33 +0000

GP is saying it’s not a very good one.

New comment by Bootvis in "Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI"

Bootvis — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 05:34:31 +0000

Everyone in AI used to know this.

New comment by Bootvis in "The Highest Point in the Netherlands"

Bootvis — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 05:58:31 +0000

It’s a joke. Mt. Scenery is in the Caribbean, part of the Netherlands but not in the flat mainland.

New comment by Bootvis in "Pre-Release of Polars 2.0"

Bootvis — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:46:13 +0000

That’s an API design question. What is the more common use case.

You seem to suggest they did it for benchmarking reasons only. They could use the option there themselves without changing the default so that is unlikely to be the motivation.

New comment by Bootvis in "Pre-Release of Polars 2.0"

Bootvis — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 12:56:16 +0000

Or you know, just better performance for people that know how to use their tool of choice.

New comment by Bootvis in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)"

Bootvis — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:50:53 +0000

I'm working on my typed, fast data frame language Ibex: https://github.com/bobjansen/Ibex

It is usable stand alone but also through an R package:

https://bobjansen.net/faster-than-data-table-introducing-ibe...

It performs better than data.table in my benchmarking on a wide array of tasks and is competitive with Polars on low core counts.

New comment by Bootvis in "The Claudyssey: A line-for-line translation of Homer's Odyssey by Claude Fable 5"

Bootvis — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:47:49 +0000

Then you need to read the original. A translator is a product of their time.

New comment by Bootvis in "Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index"

Bootvis — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:30:43 +0000

So the original link should be: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-max?intelligenc...

Even then, this seems a much more marginal win than the headline suggested to me.

New comment by Bootvis in "Qwen3.8 Max now ranked as the best overall model by agentic index"

Bootvis — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 19:20:58 +0000

Indeed, and this Qwen 3.8 max specific page:

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-max

Doesn't have the claim either. Clickbait?

New comment by Bootvis in "LLMs reward expertise"

Bootvis — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:30:40 +0000

I went to VB.NET first using a previous generation of LLM's (that was quite manual back then) and then from VB.NET to C# or just keeping the VB.NET around worked very well. The code was not highly complex but more than just CRUD. The porting from VB6 to VB.NET included building tests which helped.

New comment by Bootvis in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

Bootvis — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:39:55 +0000

Zero. I don’t think that implies the product is bad though. I haven’t marketed it much yet and I’m not great at it either. Even if it is marketed well, integrating the tool into existing workflows would take some effort. This has nothing to do with the suitability of LLMs though.

New comment by Bootvis in "AI doesn't generate working products, that's still your job"

Bootvis — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 11:25:47 +0000

I have solo built this:

https://github.com/bobjansen/Ibex

Ibex is a usable DSL for table manipulation that is quite fast

https://bobjansen.github.io/Ibex/benchmarks.html

I'm still managing to add more features, such as multithreading. The LLM's do make mistakes but they have gotten better and they tend to self correct these days. I'm also comparing results to mature products such as Polars and DuckDB and the results match.

Ibex: Tables at the Speed of Thought

Bootvis — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:32:11 +0000

Article URL: https://bobjansen.net/ibex-tables-at-the-speed-of-thought/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49121834

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by Bootvis in "Document-borne AI worms can self-propagate through Copilot for Word"

Bootvis — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:21:48 +0000

Rendering followed by OCR and making sure that the computer doesn’t see more or less than the user does. Tricky and computionally more expensive.