<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Calavar</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Calavar</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 16 Jul 2026 01:55:31 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Calavar" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Similar situation. I have no doubt that a large fraction of my childhood memories are fabricated, but there were a few that I kept to myself until I was over the age of 30 and were later confirmed by a parent or aunt or uncle.<p>There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:37:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This gets said a lot and it kind of irks me. (I am a physician.)<p>US software devs also make 2x what their European colleagues do, but that never gets called out as bloat. Plus US software devs make that 2x pay without taking our additional loans for medical school at the rate of $75k per year or doing years of low pay residency where their salary doesn’t give them the means to pay off those loans.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:25:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "The Coming Loop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would be more willing to believe you only used Claude for minor editing tasks if you disclosed your usage of Claude upfront.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:18:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The value of a PhD thesis is the personal intellectual growth you get from putting it together. The end product isn't really the point.<p>There's a lot to be said about publishing in academia being broken and how nearly all the value comes from 10% of publications, while the rest are garbage spewed out for reasons orthogonal to the advancement knowledge. However, IMHO, none of that really applies to PhD theses.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:20:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572649</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48572649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To call out The Tribe as hypocritical, you first need The Tribe to have a consensus opinion. Agentic coding in particular has been very polarizing both on HN and in the developer community at large - there is no consensus opinion.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:44:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555222</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555222</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48555222</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Octopuses are smart, but I've yet to see anything that suggests they are smarter than dolphins or whales.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:13:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506754</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506754</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506754</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Brains are resource hungry, especially oxygen hungry. Earth's air is orders of magnitude richer in oxygen molecules than its water. This likely made it easier for intelligence to develop on land. It's worth noting that the smartest aquatic animals are air breathing mammals that spent much of their evolutionary history on land before returning to water.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 12 Jun 2026 16:57:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506536</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506536</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48506536</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Gates famously came from a rich family, but Bezos did too - he used hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments from his immediate family members to get Amazon off the ground. Maybe 1 to 2% of Americans would be able draw that much from their family members if they were to launch a startup. If we define "bootstrapped" wealth as starting from an economic background within one standard deviation of the national average, then he doesn't count.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:03:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451037</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451037</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451037</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Bricks and Minifigs Parts Ways with Franchise Owners"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> While fact investigation continues, BAM’s current state of its investigation has uncovered significant evidence of gross negligence in how the store was previously operated by the prior owner<p>Verbal diarrhea. Excessive passive tense and vagueries to dilute blame (who is the "prior" owner here - Johnson or the woman before they've been trying to scapegoat?) and to top it off multiple grammatical errors in a single sentence.<p>I can't believe they would let this draft hit the website in its current form this in the midst of what could be an existential crisis for there company.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 05 Jun 2026 03:33:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407615</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407615</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48407615</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Gaussian Point Splatting"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I believe they mean GPU threads. Plenty of cuda files in their repository.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:14:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397000</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397000</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397000</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your sarcasm is misplaced because yes, this has unironically been true for large chunks of Latin American history.<p>- Argentinians in particular are over 60% of Italian descent.<p>- The richest man in Mexico was born to Lebanese immigrants.<p>- The chief military leader of the Chilean war of independence was born to an Irish immigrant.<p>- Peru had a president who was born to Japanese immigrants.<p>These countries have all, at various times, had an influx of overseas immigrants whose birthright citizen children rose to high stations in society.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 20:57:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260936</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260936</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260936</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you're looking for international precedent, this is an old vs. new world issue. Birthright citizenship is rare in the old world, but it is the default for the Americas. Canada, most of Latin America, and a decent part of the Caribbean have birthright citizenship.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 May 2026 13:31:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257156</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257156</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48257156</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I did look up numbers before I made that claim:<p>From Yahoo Finance<p>GME Jan 1, 2016: $7.09, $5.49 adjusted (accounting for dividend disbursements)<p>GME Jan 1, 2026: $20.09<p>266% or 365% return depending on how you count dividends. 365% for GME vs. 306% for S&P 500 over the same period (also using adjusted for dividend numbers).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 19:19:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184201</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184201</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48184201</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>GME also beat the S&P 500 over the past 10 years. Is this evidence that Ryan Cohen is a business genius?<p>Tesla has been a meme stock for about five years now, maybe more. Its  valuation correlates with Musk's abilities as a showman and media figure, not a businessman.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 18:31:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183584</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183584</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48183584</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Fake building: Claude wrote 3k lines instead of import pywikibot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I consider myself AI skeptical-ish and I detest when people defend LLMs with "it's user error, prompt better," but in this case it actually <i>is</i> user error.<p>If you want a particular implementation approach, you need to specify not only the features you want, but the implementation strategy at least at a high level. This could be as simple as adding "use pywikibit" or "use relevant packages from pypi" to the end of your prompt. Or you could seed your project with some manually writtem scaffolding, including a pyproject.toml<p>While LLMs do tend have NIH syndrome by default, I think this is a good default. I'd much rather have tight control over when and how to include external dependencies as opposed to letting a prompt fire for 40 minutes, and coming back to find 2 GB of newly installed node packages with a dependency tree 300 levels deep.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 03:42:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103951</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103951</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48103951</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> But it’s getting harder and harder to define a task that humans beat LLMs on. On pretty much any easily quantifiable test of knowledge or reasoning, the machines win.<p>Quite to the contrary, I think it's extremely trivial to find a task where humans beat LLMs.<p>For all the money that's been thrown at agentic coding, LLMs still produce substantially worse code than a senior dev. See my own prior comments on this for a concrete example [1].<p>These trivial failure cases show that there are dimensions to task proficiency - significant ones - that benchmarks fail to capture.<p>> Is medical diagnosis one of these high judgement tasks?<p>Situational. I would break diagnosis into three types:<p>1. The diagnosis comes from  objective criteria - laboratory values, vital signs, visual findings, family history. I think LLMs are likely already superior to humans in this case.<p>2. The diagnosis comes from "chart lore" - reading notes from prior physicians and realizing that there is new context now points to a different diagnosis. (That new context can be the benefit of hindsight into what they already tried and failed and/or new objective data). LLMs do pretty good at this when you point them at datasets where all the prior notes were written by humans, which means that those humans did a nontrivial part of the diagnostic work. What if the prior notes were written by LLMs as well? Will they propagate their own mistakes forward? Yet to be studied in depth.<p>3. The diagnosis comes from human interaction - knowing the difference between a patient who's high as a bat on crack and one who's delirious from infection; noticing that a patient hesitates slightly before they assure you that they've been taking all their meds as prescribed; etc. I doubt that LLMs will ever beat humans at this, but if LLMs can be proven to be good at point 2, then point 3 alone will not save human physicians.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Calavar#47891432">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=Calavar#47891432</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 May 2026 23:12:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002610</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002610</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002610</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I disagree, I use metaprogramming in application code quite regularly, although I tend to limit myself to a single construct (instance_eval) because I find that makes things more manageable.<p>In my opinion the main draw of Ruby is that it's kind of Lisp-y in the way you can quickly build a metalanguage tailored to your specific problem domain. For problems where I don't need metaprogramming, I'd rather use a language that is statically typed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:27:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47896017</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47896017</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47896017</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Over-editing refers to a model modifying code beyond what is necessary"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm writing a compiler. When I have Claude write a new feature, I have validate that suite against a test suite of ~200 tiny programs.<p>I have a shell script that automates this. If all tests pass, the shell script prints "200/200 passing" with very little token spend. If only 190/200 pass, the shell script reports the names of every test that failed, and now Claude does a process of<p>1) run the compiler binary -> 2) get assembly output and inspect for obvious errors -> 3) assemble -> 4) verify that the assembler did not report errors -> 5) run test binary, connect with gdb, and find the issue -> 6) edit the compiler source -> 7) recompile the compiler -> 8) back to 1<p>multiplied by 10 for the 10 failing tests. This eats up tokens very quickly. I realize that not every use case is going to look like this. But if I didn't have Claude verify against the test suite, then I'd be getting regressions left and right, and then what's the point?<p>The whole codebase (tests included) is less than 15k lines, so I don't think that's the issue. No MCPs. CLAUDE.md about 1.5k lines.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:38:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892561</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892561</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892561</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Spinel: Ruby AOT Native Compiler"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm skeptical of that reasoning because the original C wasn't too clean or performant either. For example emit.c from an earlier commit [1]<p>It writes a separate call to emit_raw for each line, even though there many successive calls to emit_raw before it runs into any branching or other dynamic logic. What if you change this<p><pre><code>    emit_raw(ctx, "#include <stdio.h>\n");
    emit_raw(ctx, "#include <stdlib.h>\n");
    emit_raw(ctx, "#include <string.h>\n");
    emit_raw(ctx, "#include <math.h>\n");
    // And on for dozens more lines
</code></pre>
to this<p><pre><code>    emit_raw(ctx,
        "#include <stdio.h>\n"
        "#include <stdlib.h>\n"
        "#include <string.h>\n"
        "#include <math.h>\n"
        // And on for dozens more lines
    );
</code></pre>
That would leave you with code that is just as readable, but only calls the emit function once, leading to a smaller and faster binary. Again, this is a trivial change to the code, but Claude struggles to get there.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/matz/spinel/blob/aba17d8266d72fae3555ec916688fe1edcfa9858/src/emit.c#L892" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/matz/spinel/blob/aba17d8266d72fae3555ec91...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:02:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892049</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892049</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47892049</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I know this is tangential to your overall point, but did really they murder everyone in the room? I was under the impression that a few Venezuelan generals kidnapped Maduro themselves, left him at a predetermined point for US forces to pick up, and had their soldiers fire some small arms into the air to make a token show of resistance. There's no way the US would have flown a slow-moving convoy of helicopters into a hostile city unless they knew a priori that Venezuelan air defense missile batteries would be ordered to stand down.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:51:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891914</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891914</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891914</guid></item></channel></rss>