Hacker News: Staross

New comment by Staross in "Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice"

Staross — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:46:19 +0000

I think something that could help is moving together rather than one-by-one. We could have a website where you can register as "ready to move from X to Y when N other people are", when the goal is reached everybody gets a notice it's time to move.

New comment by Staross in "How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language"

Staross — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:43:48 +0000

And if you don't want to code your own HMM it also has the best (AFAIK) HMM library out there (HiddenMarkovModels.jl).

New comment by Staross in "I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch"

Staross — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 08:34:52 +0000

Implement a linear regression or Bayes' theorem.

New comment by Staross in "What's the best programming language for coding agents?"

Staross — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:58:07 +0000

I wonder if there's correlations between tasks and languages, e.g. maybe R is better for bioinformatics tasks, python for webdev, C for CLIs, etc. I'd expect to see it because some languages are used more often in some tasks than others, but on the other hand LLMs can learn across languages and it's not clear if task-language use patterns are just historical or if the language is genuinely better at the task.

New comment by Staross in "The fall of the theorem economy"

Staross — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 11:04:28 +0000

I thought it was very interesting, but maybe also incredibly naive politically ? it's like he's re-discovering alienation under capitalism.

A wood-worker could do the same argument, there's the "official" wood-working word of perfect joinery and beautifully finished tables one can buy, but behind it there's the "secret" messy human element, the art, the craft, the mistakes and hard-ships, the elevation of human skills and imagination, the creation of whole new types of wood-working inventions and techniques, the perpetuation of millenia-old traditions, the teaching, the joy of selling to a happy customer, etc.

But now comes techo-capitalism, division of labor, you cut that piece a that piece over and over, you operate that machine, you won't even see the finished table, fuck your human element, we want that profit !

New comment by Staross in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

Staross — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:17:49 +0000

It's already on my bank app since a couple of week, but I haven't tried it yet.

New comment by Staross in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Staross — Sat, 16 May 2026 09:26:26 +0000

You should really do a Bayesian fit for such predictions and give confidence intervals, it would probably show that the uncertainty is very high in these cases.

New comment by Staross in "CERN uses tiny AI models burned into silicon for real-time LHC data filtering"

Staross — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 12:30:55 +0000

That works well to get around patents btw :)

New comment by Staross in "How will OpenAI compete?"

Staross — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:55:42 +0000

If it taste as good and is cheaper, sure.

New comment by Staross in "Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia"

Staross — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:23:53 +0000

I think there's quite a bit of "quiet work" going on that isn't very visible. Personally I've been happily using Julia for work everyday for years. When the language was younger there was "big" updates that were news worthy, now that slowed down, but it seems there's a decent number of people using the language for serious work that is just a bit too specialised for general interest. E.g. in recent registered packages there's a simulation of earth, a method to analyse EEG recording, or a method to measure loudness.

https://github.com/NumericalEarth/NumericalEarth.jl

https://github.com/Marco-Congedo/Xloreta.jl

https://github.com/slink/ZwickerLoudness.jl

New comment by Staross in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

Staross — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:00:04 +0000

I gave it a try, I asked to do a reddit like forum and it did pretty good but damn I quickly hit the daily limit of the $20 pro account, and it took 10% of the monthly just to do the setup and some basics. I knew LLM were expensive to run but I've never felt it directly. Even if the code is good it's kinda expensive for what you get.

Ho it was also quite funny it used the exact same color as hackernews and a similar layout.

New comment by Staross in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"

Staross — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:15:19 +0000

Also tried it on a small project, it did ok finding issues but completely failed doing rather basic edits, like it lost closing brackets or used wrong syntax and couldn't recover. The CLI was easy to setup and use though.

New comment by Staross in "Python can run Mojo now"

Staross — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 18:04:30 +0000

Yeah that was a missed opportunity fore sure, joining forces 8 years ago would probably had yield better results that the current situation.

New comment by Staross in "Python can run Mojo now"

Staross — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:35:32 +0000

Funny how the already weak case for not working on Julia instead of creating a new language is becoming even more flimsy :

FAQ:

> Why not make Julia better? > We think Julia is a great language and it has a wonderful community, but Mojo is completely different. While Julia and Mojo might share some goals and look similar as an easy-to-use and high-performance alternative to Python, we’re taking a completely different approach to building Mojo. Notably, Mojo is Python-first and doesn't require existing Python developers to learn a new syntax.

https://docs.modular.com/mojo/faq/#why-not-make-julia-better

Now :

>We oversold Mojo as a Python superset too early and realized that we should focus on what Mojo can do for people TODAY, not what it will grow into. As such, we currently explain Mojo as a language that's great for making stuff go fast on CPUs and GPUs.

New comment by Staross in "Traveling with Apple Vision Pro"

Staross — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:28:11 +0000

>And it's basically not possible to escape that environment until the plane lands

Ever heard of closing your eyes ?

New comment by Staross in "Composable multi-threaded parallelism in Julia"

Staross — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 16:35:09 +0000

I would add:

- Good integrated test system (and test culture in the community)

- Super good package/environment manager

- Great integrated documentation system

- Good version control practices in the community

- Awesome community