Hacker News: RobinL

New comment by RobinL in "Shipping a laptop to a refugee camp in Uganda"

RobinL — Sat, 23 May 2026 06:27:43 +0000

Yes, but it's important to note that just because a lot of aid is ineffective doesn't mean it all is. If you want to give to very poor people and be confident most (85%+) actually gets to them I encourage you to take a look at https://www.givedirectly.org/. Full disclosure, I'm an unpaid trustee of the UK sister charity

New comment by RobinL in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

RobinL — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:02:15 +0000

$20 chatgpt pro plan gives pretty generous usage both of codex, general chat

New comment by RobinL in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

RobinL — Tue, 19 May 2026 05:56:19 +0000

Interesting. I don't have to use PowerPoint much, but I hate it when I do. I don't want the llm to write the words but I do want it to make things look nice. So does this work well now?

Optimising DuckDB performance on large EC2 instances

RobinL — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:55:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.robinlinacre.com/optimising_duckdb_performance_large_ec2_instances/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180774

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector (UK)

RobinL — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:35:23 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ai-open-code-and-vulnerability-risk-in-the-public-sector

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48138543

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by RobinL in "ChatGPT Images 2.0"

RobinL — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:47:42 +0000

I'm been impressed when testing this model today, but it still can't consistently adhere to the following prompt: make me an image of a pizza split into 10 equal slices with space in between the them, to help teach fractions to a child.

It doesn't reliably give you 10 slices, even if you ask it to number them. None of the frontier models seem to be able to get this right

Letterpaths – free software for teaching cursive writing

RobinL — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:21:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths_blog/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47850955

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by RobinL in "ggsql: A Grammar of Graphics for SQL"

RobinL — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 08:21:02 +0000

Please retain vega lite speech as an option! It's incredible useful because you can tweak the chart or change it completely at a later date using e.g. the vega lite editor.

New comment by RobinL in "Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card"

RobinL — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:43:27 +0000

Thanks, interesting. Does this make it more surprising that the other benchmarks have improved? I'm not sure I understand the benchmarks well enough - but I'm wondering whether with agentic workflows it's possible to get away with a smaller more focussed context (and hence lower cost) whilst achieving the same or better performance, because of agentic model's ability to decide what the put in context as they work

New comment by RobinL in "Claude Opus 4.7 Model Card"

RobinL — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 16:16:24 +0000

Could this be because they've found the 1m context uneconomical (ie costs too much to serve, or burns through users quota too quickly causing complaints), and so they're no longer targeting it as a goal

New comment by RobinL in "Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie (2011)"

RobinL — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 11:03:20 +0000

There's a section in the docs of our FOSS record linkage software that covers this: https://moj-analytical-services.github.io/splink/topic_guide...

New comment by RobinL in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

RobinL — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 11:59:10 +0000

The letters are based on how they're formed in the UK primary school curriculum.

Each letter is a json that defines the bezier curves according to a schema.

They were created by starting by drawing the letters freehand, yielding essentially a dot to dot, and then (2) using an approximation/smoothing algorithm to convert that into beziers. Finally,I went through touching up/fixing each letter by hand, using a purpose built editor.

So I would say overall it's more time consuming than challenging.

That stills leaves the problem of joining letters together. For that I heavily lent on AI to propose an algorithm, although it required a lot of back and forth to get something even semi decent. At the moment it's probably 'good enough' but there's still lots of room for improvement.

On the countries quiz, you should be able to move and zoom on the bloge using click and drag (or pinch and drag on mobile). Letter constellations uses shaders. Both of those are only tested on Chrome, so that might be the issue.

Example letter: https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths/blob/main/packages/let...

JSONSchema

https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths/blob/main/packages/let...

Editor

https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/editor

New comment by RobinL in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

RobinL — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 09:55:24 +0000

Thank you! Noticed you're interested in similar areas. I've also previously done some work on maths problem generation. Similar to letterpaths, the core lib can then be used to power games/other educational apps. As I'm sure you've found as well, It's surprisingly difficult to generate random maths problems aligned to a curriculum! Core lib is UK-focussed: https://github.com/RobinL/maths-game-problem-generator

And examples of games is can power:

https://rupertlinacre.com/maths_vs_monsters/

https://rupertlinacre.com/breakout_maths/

https://rupertlinacre.com/maths_blaster/

New comment by RobinL in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

RobinL — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 08:52:07 +0000

letterpaths (https://github.com/RobinL/letterpaths), a FOSS typescript library that can power cursive handwriting/educational apps for kids.

The idea is that it provides all the geometry to enables games like these to be built: (These are just rough demos)

https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/writing_app/snake/

https://www.robinlinacre.com/letter_constellations/

And here is like the admin/demo: https://www.robinlinacre.com/letterpaths/

And, separately, I made an educational country quiz, again FOSS:

https://rupertlinacre.com/country_quiz

https://github.com/RupertLinacre/country_quiz

New comment by RobinL in "Ask HN: Software engineers who enjoy working with LLMs?"

RobinL — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:32:40 +0000

I work on an open source record linkage library called Splink. The list of features I want to add has always been far larger than the time I have. I enjoy working with LLMs because they have enabled me to work through my backlog much faster.

I think the primary reason I enjoy working with them is that coding, for me, has always been a means to and end. I like the product of it more than the process. This quote sums it up quite well for me:

> People are really worried about their jobs. And I just want to remind them that the purpose of your job and the tasks and tools that you use to do your job are related, not the same. I've been doing my job for 33 years. I'm the longest running tech CEO in the world, 34 years. And the tools that I've used to do my job has changed continuously in the last 34 years, and sometimes quite dramatically, you know, over the course of a couple, two, three years.

Source: https://lexfridman.com/jensen-huang-transcript

New comment by RobinL in "Codex pricing to align with API token usage, instead of per-message"

RobinL — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:40:25 +0000

5.4 is great. I use it for python professionally and for typescript/front-end games and educational apps recreationally. In my experience it's roughly as good as opus, just a lot cheaper. It's amazing how much usage you get for $20/mo

New comment by RobinL in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

RobinL — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:33:52 +0000

I love this! Thanks for the detailed response, super interesting

New comment by RobinL in "Solar and batteries can power the world"

RobinL — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:53:22 +0000

Wow, that's big! I'm curious, how much does the 600kWh battery cost nowadays? Amazing that the tech has got to a point this is even possible

New comment by RobinL in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

RobinL — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:19:38 +0000

It's also widely misunderstood. Just because the spot price of electricity is set by the price of gas doesn’t mean the consumer pays that price for all of their electricity.

A lot of wind and solar are on Contracts for Difference. That means when market prices go above the agreed level, the generator pays the difference back through the scheme, which reduces supplier costs rather than the generator simply keeping the whole windfall.

This is particularly relevant when e.g. the price of gas goes way up due to the Iran war, it doesn't mean that the consumer ends up paying more for the energy from wind

New comment by RobinL in "Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables"

RobinL — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 13:05:02 +0000

Why would additional storage make a significant difference to the price of gas?