Hacker News: cortesi

New comment by cortesi in "Sakana Fugu"

cortesi — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 07:34:56 +0000

I only had time to use it for a couple of deep reviews of large Rust projects, and a few agentic coding tasks (implement plan X, refactor Y in fashion Z) before my quota ran out. My impression is that the reviews were quite strong - maybe Opus 4.8+ or around GPT 5.5 (for my particular use case) - but very slow. For implementation I found it weaker, it made a few mistakes that I haven't seen frontier models make in a long time.

New comment by cortesi in "Sakana Fugu"

cortesi — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 04:37:31 +0000

As a developer outside the US I think it's vital to have alternatives to OpenAI and Anthropic, but sadly this is not it. For $200/month you get < 3 hours of use per week, the API is extremely slow, and the output quality in my tests is nowhere near Fable. It's nowhere remotely near usable as a day-to-day workhorse. Very disappointing.

https://x.com/cortesi/status/2068898694238486658

New comment by cortesi in "Marcus AI Claims Dataset"

cortesi — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:25:56 +0000

I'm sorry, but we can tell absolutely nothing about Gary Marcus from this. People should have a look at the final data:

https://github.com/davegoldblatt/marcus-claims-dataset/blob/...

Many of the "supported" claims here are vague, banal, obvious, or just opinion. E.g.

"the general public hasn't quite realized what's not possible yet"

"loads of things scale, but not at all"

"To be sentient is to be aware of yourself in the world; LaMDA simply isn't."

"To date, nobody, ever, has given a convincing and thorough account of how human children (and human children alone) learn language."

"A cat holding a remote control shouldn't have a human hand."

"What I didn't see last night was vision" (about Tesla Optimus)

New comment by cortesi in "Spacecurve: A space-filling curve playground"

cortesi — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:07:29 +0000

Written in Rust, with cross-platform + web visualiser in egui.

Spacecurve: A space-filling curve playground

cortesi — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:07:29 +0000

Article URL: https://corte.si/posts/spacecurve/announce/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787693

Points: 43

# Comments: 5

New comment by cortesi in "AGENTS.md – Open format for guiding coding agents"

cortesi — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 01:51:03 +0000

I have a tiny, relevant weekend project:

https://github.com/cortesi/agentsmd

This is a command-line tool that lets you generate your AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files from common sources. So, for instance, if you have Rust-specific guidance for models, you can define it once, and then automatically include it in any project that contains Rust based on the `lang()` language matcher.

This is one of those small tools I now use many times a day to maintain and update ubiquitous agents files. Maybe other folks will find it useful too.

New comment by cortesi in "SQLx – Rust SQL Toolkit"

cortesi — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 03:34:39 +0000

SQLx is great, but I had a long laundry list of issues with its SQLite support so I forked it into a focused SQLite-specific library. It has now diverged very far from SQLx, and the number of small inaccuracies and issues we fixed in the low-level SQLite bindings is well into the dozens. The library is unannounced, but is already being used in some high-throughput scenarios.

https://github.com/cortesi/musq

New comment by cortesi in "Why Rust nextest is process-per-test"

cortesi — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 21:22:34 +0000

Nextest is one of the very small handful of tools I use dozens or hundreds of times a day. Parallelism can reduce test suite execution time significantly, depending on your project, and has saved me cumulative days of my life. The output is nicer, test filtering is nicer, leak detection is great, and the developer is friendly and responsive. Thanks sunshowers!

The one thing we've had to be aware of is that the execution model means there can sometimes be differences in behaviour between nextest and cargo test. Very occasionally there are tests that fail in cargo test but succeed in nextest due to better isolation. In practice this just means that we run cargo test in CI.

New comment by cortesi in "Nostr is public key microblogging that works"

cortesi — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 02:47:19 +0000

I'd love to say that it's taking off, but it looks like daily active users (as measured by sampling popular relays) has been stagnant at just under 20k for 6 months:

https://stats.nostr.band/

New comment by cortesi in "Claude 3.5 Sonnet"

cortesi — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 04:36:55 +0000

We haven't found this to be an impediment. Keep things modular, and share the type definitions of anything you import with the model. As the benefits here become more and more clear tooling will improve and people will adapt their development practices to get the most out of the models.

New comment by cortesi in "Claude 3.5 Sonnet"

cortesi — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 04:10:47 +0000

Claude 3.5 Sonnet's coding abilities are incredibly impressive. I think it lets an expert programmer move more than twice as fast. There are limits - to produce high quality code, not copy-and-paste pablum, you have to be able to give detailed step-by-step directions and critically evaluate the results. This means you can't produce code better than you would have written by yourself, you can only do it much faster.

As an experiment, I produced a set of bindings to Anthropic's API pair-programming with Claude. The project is of pretty good quality, and includes advanced features like streaming and type-safe definitions of tools. More than 95% of the code and docs was written by Claude, under close direction from me. The project is here:

https://github.com/cortesi/misanthropy

And I've shared part of the conversation that produced it in a video here:

https://twitter.com/cortesi/status/1806135130446307340

New comment by cortesi in "Visual Analysis of Binary Files"

cortesi — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 07:26:18 +0000

Oh, right! That's just a bit of fun - a random pattern (picked to be vaguely visually pleasing), which is laid out on the Hilbert curve, and then offset by a calculated amount depending on the mouseover. So I'm just shifting the same pattern forwards and backwards in a ring buffer, basically.

New comment by cortesi in "Visual Analysis of Binary Files"

cortesi — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 04:51:10 +0000

The mousover always shows a contiguous section of the underlying file. So you're seeing a constant-length section of the space-filling curve centered on the cursor as you move the mouse about. The hex to the right is that same contiguous piece of the file. Sort of neat, actually.

New comment by cortesi in "Visual Analysis of Binary Files"

cortesi — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 00:07:55 +0000

There is, but I see it's not visible on smaller resolutions - I should fix that. The default color scheme just classifies bytes into black (0x00), white (0xff), blue (ascii), and low (green) and high (red).

New comment by cortesi in "Visual Analysis of Binary Files"

cortesi — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:28:17 +0000

Ah, this is an old side-project of mine. Something I should probably make clearer is that files are not uploaded anywhere - the app is completely local, and all analysis is done in the browser.

This version is written in React but when time permits I plan to release an updated version written in Rust, along with a library of fast implementations of space-filling curves and related utilities.

New comment by cortesi in "The nightmare of targeted individuals in the age of paranoia (2017)"

cortesi — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 12:23:41 +0000

This was a fascinating rabbit hole. Here's Myron May - who shot and injured 3 people and then was killed by the cops - describing his "stalking". At first blush, he seems intelligent and rational - but as you listen, it soon becomes clear that he's in profound psychological distress.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-8PklxYM3w

He's using all the terminology employed by the targeted individual community - he clearly found "his people" online, and with it validation and an explanation of what he was experiencing. I wonder what role this played in the fact that he never got the help he needed.

New comment by cortesi in "Hardy, Ramanujan and Taxi No. 1729"

cortesi — Mon, 31 Jan 2022 01:13:06 +0000

I once correctly guessed a that friend's PIN was "1729", based only on the fact that he was a maths major, a huge fan of Ramanujan, and was sure to have read this story. I still cherish the look of complete confusion on his face, more than 20 years later.

New comment by cortesi in "E.O. Wilson saw the world in a new way"

cortesi — Thu, 06 Jan 2022 22:52:42 +0000

It depends on what kind of geek you are. "The Ants" is perhaps my favourite non-fiction book of all time - at the time it was written it was a fair account of the total sum of human knowledge of ants. It's beautifully written and incredibly complete, and although it's now a bit dated, it's still the best reference to ants if you're interested in them. For a broader summary of Wilson's intellectual project I recommend "Consilience" - a wonderful synthesis of almost all his ethical and scientific interests.

New comment by cortesi in "Richard C. Lewontin, eminent geneticist with a sharp pen, has died"

cortesi — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 05:26:30 +0000

This review of "Naturalist" in the NYTimes gives some flavor of events:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/s...

The book itself is well worth reading - it's a wonderful scientific autobiography written by, for my money, the best science writer of the last century.

New comment by cortesi in "Richard C. Lewontin, eminent geneticist with a sharp pen, has died"

cortesi — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 05:03:46 +0000

The feud is alluded to in the article. The broad summary is that Wilson had the temerity to devote the final chapter of Sociobiology, a book that pretty much launched the field of evolutionary study of animal behaviour, to humans. Lewontin and Gould - among others - had ideological objections to this, resulting in a vicious personal persecution of Wilson that stretched over decades. This is all very well documented, but to appreciate the sheer unfairness of the way Lewontin prosecuted his vendetta you have to hunt down Wilson's accounts of the affair in books like "Naturalist". It's very hard to come away from it without having your opinion of both Lewontin and Gould soured.