Hacker News: Revisional_Sin

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Don't trust large context windows"

Revisional_Sin — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:25:46 +0000

It's a black box, but you can run tests to quantify the behaviour and establish, for example, that a certain model is X% more likely to give a certain behaviour.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Claude, Teach Me Something"

Revisional_Sin — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:46:29 +0000

> Initially I didn’t instruct Claude to use the Socratic method, but that works much better. It’s significantly less “information-dumpy”. When I know a topic well, Claude successfully shortcuts the basics.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS"

Revisional_Sin — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:52:58 +0000

The password can only be compelled via a judge. A policeman can't demand it on whim.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

Revisional_Sin — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:46:17 +0000

Why would it add pressure?

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "UK government replaces Palantir software with internally-built refugee system"

Revisional_Sin — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:52:44 +0000

Sure, but you can receive the service and also keep the money spent within the country.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Claude Managed Agents"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:28:22 +0000

I just have a black page.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Python 3.15's JIT is now back on track"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:58:37 +0000

It's best practice to avoid mutable defaults even if you're not planning to mutate the argument.

It's just slightly annoying having to work around this by defaulting to None.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "AI-generated password isn't random, it just looks that way"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:21:27 +0000

Not surprising at all if you've used LLMs to generate fiction; they always choose the same few names.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "James Moylan, engineer behind arrow signaling which side to refuel a car, dies"

Revisional_Sin — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 09:07:37 +0000

Yeah, it's a bit counter-intuitive.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "How uv got so fast"

Revisional_Sin — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 08:03:54 +0000

> Ignoring requires-python upper bounds. When a package says it requires python<4.0, uv ignores the upper bound and only checks the lower. This reduces resolver backtracking dramatically since upper bounds are almost always wrong. Packages declare python<4.0 because they haven’t tested on Python 4, not because they’ll actually break. The constraint is defensive, not predictive.

Erm, isn't this a bit bad?

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

Revisional_Sin — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:17:23 +0000

Okay, but are the puzzles fun?

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Deprecations via warnings don't work for Python libraries"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:02:03 +0000

> Maybe the answer is to do away with advance notice and adopt SemVer with many major versions

Yes.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "The fuck off contact page"

Revisional_Sin — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:09:29 +0000

My toddler was playing with my Kindle the other day, and he bought a £600 (yes, six hundred) volume of books. I was unable to refund them automatically, and when looking for help I was confronted with a "fuck off" contact page. After finding the option to talk to a human, I was put through within 5 seconds, and the woman had the item refunded in about 1 minute.

Was pleasantly surprised.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "You want microservices, but do you need them?"

Revisional_Sin — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 08:40:05 +0000

I was once working on a project where we had a gRPC server that inserted data into the DB for another service.

This split was probably a mistake, as the interface we exposed resulted in us making twice as many DB calls as we actually needed to.

One of the stored procs needed a magic number as a parameter, which we looked up via another DB query.

One of the other Devs on the team tried to convince me to write a separate gRPC server to run this (trivial) query.

"We're doing microservices, so we need to make everything as small as possible. Looking up this value is a separate responsibility from inserting data."

Luckily our tech lead was sane and agreed with me.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 09:51:28 +0000

They're not saying it is.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "Things that aren't doing the thing"

Revisional_Sin — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 07:25:17 +0000

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "GPT-5-Codex is a better AI researcher than me"

Revisional_Sin — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 08:13:04 +0000

That's weird. I thought LLMs loved over-explaining their code?

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "ChatGPT Pulse"

Revisional_Sin — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 08:19:19 +0000

Thanks, I hate it.

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "RustGPT: A pure-Rust transformer LLM built from scratch"

Revisional_Sin — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 11:11:52 +0000

How do you know? The over-commenting?

New comment by Revisional_Sin in "3D modeling with paper"

Revisional_Sin — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 19:26:34 +0000

"These are self-imposed limitations that fit my preferred-style for model design... I find that these constraints encourage a better designed model that can be assembled easily and predictably, including by others."

Seems reasonable.