Hacker News: Semkas

New comment by Semkas in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

Semkas — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:33:42 +0000

Won't deny that this is an interesting idea, but I feel like waiting on the output of an LLM for 40 hours feels like it is completely antithetical to what makes classic Hackathons appealing / educative.

More generally, I don't think the shape of a hackathon (intensely working for a short timespan) maps at all onto the way LLM Math progress has seemingly been made so far; AFAIK it mostly involves picking out something for the Model, then having it run for a week with sporadic correction / encouragement.

New comment by Semkas in "Fastpotify"

Semkas — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 09:09:04 +0000

I'm not sure what decision you're talking about. My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.

I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.

New comment by Semkas in "Fastpotify"

Semkas — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:52:45 +0000

Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.

Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.

New comment by Semkas in "Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)"

Semkas — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:07:51 +0000

K-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.

New comment by Semkas in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

Semkas — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:17:53 +0000

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+books+are+published... https://www.google.com/search?q=how+many+megabytes+average+b... https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+3+megabytes+times+2....

New comment by Semkas in "Defending my own brain against enshittification"

Semkas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:47:58 +0000

It's interesting that this article is mostly focused on the merits of living a simple / predictable life, whereas I get the impression that the main improvement here might be just not working from home anymore (I guess the author agrees since they link to this older post: https://mrmarket.bearblog.dev/remote-work-is-bad-for-you/).

New comment by Semkas in "Defending my own brain against enshittification"

Semkas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:43:18 +0000

Couldn't it just be a moral thing? Ie "This thing was trained on the work of people it's now replacing and I think that sucks". (NB I'm not looking to get into an argument about the actual impact of these kinds of small moral stances)

New comment by Semkas in "Defending my own brain against enshittification"

Semkas — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:39:36 +0000

I think the quality of a commute is very different depending on whether it's by car or by train, since you can actually read / write / program / draw on a train. Obviously I'm still pretty glad when I get to work from home and sleep in a little and make some good coffee though.

New comment by Semkas in "Pebble Mega Update – July 2026"

Semkas — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:39:13 +0000

You are not restraining yourself from mocking, you are somehow doing something even less conducive and more annoying

New comment by Semkas in "Show HN: Juggler – an open-source GUI coding agent, by the creator of JUCE"

Semkas — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:58:32 +0000

This looks cool! I'll check it out. Out of curiosity: I assume you've also used agents to help build this, and on the site you mention working on this for ~6 months. Most one-man projects I see that use ai seem to focus on creating and presenting a concept as soon as possible (to a lot of people I think the main benefit of stuff like vibing is that you really quickly get something that you can have others test out).

On the site you also mention being pretty opinionated about the tools you use / build, which I imagine is part of the reason why you spend more time on this before releasing it. What was your experience using ai to build a larger project with a very specific idea / taste in mind?

New comment by Semkas in "My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite"

Semkas — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:45:43 +0000

Anthropic's niche is that they're the preferred model for software development currently. So, the reason for them to care about the rewrite is obviously not because they care about Bun's stability, but because it is the largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities.

Every part of this saga has gotten an exceptional amount of attention on HN. HN is ostensibly filled with many people starting software-related companies, ie potential Anthropic customers.

Behind the scenes with the Midjourney scanner [video]

Semkas — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:21:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nzzpUKhj1M

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774720

Points: 78

# Comments: 50

New comment by Semkas in "Godot will no longer accept AI-authored code contributions"

Semkas — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 09:35:01 +0000

I'm getting the feeling that many people here are mostly reacting to the title instead of reading the actual policy: they state that an important part of the reason is that they use PR review to train new contributors and find possible future maintainers.

Irrespective of the quality of ai-contributions, that seems hard to argue with.

(unless you believe ai will make the whole concept of OS contributions / maintenance redundant. If that's your belief I don't think it makes much sense to submit PR's to Godot though, instead of just forking the engine and having your agents work on it)

New comment by Semkas in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

Semkas — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:35:11 +0000

4. then you write empty cliches

New comment by Semkas in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

Semkas — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:34:32 +0000

Arguably the most beautiful town in the Netherlands

New comment by Semkas in "Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability"

Semkas — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:27:30 +0000

I'm disinclined to be overly generous to Antrophic, but I have to say that regardless of whether the talk of Mythos being uniquely dangerous was mostly cynical: It would be great if this starts a trend of giving security-critical software a few months head start with any new significantly improved model.

New comment by Semkas in "Wikipedia isn’t officially a social network, but the harassment can get ugly"

Semkas — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 12:14:53 +0000

The barrier to entry is the effort required to create a good and truthfull page.

New comment by Semkas in "Wikipedia isn’t officially a social network, but the harassment can get ugly"

Semkas — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 09:43:12 +0000

If a non-programmer critisised some part of Blender or some other large scale open source software project it would be weird to call them hypocritical for not just enacting the change themselves wouldnt it? Seems strange to pretend that there is no barrier to entry to contributing a page to an encyclopedia.

New comment by Semkas in "Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly (2006) [pdf]"

Semkas — Sat, 05 May 2018 15:09:32 +0000

Assume that the range of integers is limited by the largest positive or negative number that can be written on the limited space of the paper. Whenever the largest positive or negative number comes up your answer will be certain. Turn a profit over a few billion years.

New comment by Semkas in "Ask HN: What problem in your industry is a potential startup?"

Semkas — Fri, 04 May 2018 17:11:55 +0000

I do some illustration and have noticed on twitter how much every illustrator who gets some experience with 3d-tools likes to use 3d modelling to create block-outs for scenes they want to draw. By creating a simple scene out of blocks and shapes you can make your perspective work while drawing a lot easier. A tool that could be really populair would be something that makes making 3d mock-ups easier for 2d artstists without 3d experience.