Hacker News: cwyers

New comment by cwyers in "John Bradley, author of xv, has died"

cwyers — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:43:31 +0000

I was wondering why HN was linking to Vox Day. The answer "because the alternative is worse" is probably the most justifiable one I can think of.

New comment by cwyers in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

cwyers — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 03:59:57 +0000

There's a lot of people in this thread that assume that Sam Altman is the one who is being dishonest here, and I kind of understand, but the other two parties who could just as easily be lying are Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump, and of the three of them if you think sama is the _most_ likely to lie I feel like you have not been paying attention.

New comment by cwyers in "GPT-5.3-Codex"

cwyers — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:44:12 +0000

Codex now lets you tell the LLM tgings in the middle of its thinking without interrupting it, so you can read the thinking traces and tell it to change course if it's going off track.

New comment by cwyers in "Only 5 Sears stores remain in the U.S."

cwyers — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 09:54:37 +0000

Ironically they had the foresight, they were just too early/didn't execute. They ran an online service (co-owner with IBM and CBS) called Prodigy that competed with AOL and CompuServ, and they tried to do online shopping there.

New comment by cwyers in "Ruby 4.0.0"

cwyers — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 18:34:00 +0000

Just use WSL2 and Docker Desktop. VS Code has DevContainer support so you can standardize on a Docker image for your project.

New comment by cwyers in "I have to give Fortnite my passport to use Bluesky"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:41:27 +0000

It's as much of a stretch as describing using an Azure service as "I have to use Halo" or AWS as "I have to use Rings of Power."

New comment by cwyers in "Hacker News front page now, but the titles are honest"

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:33:50 +0000

"Slop" is at _least_ as fair a description of "we had an LLM rewrite HN headlines" as "we rewrote it in Rust so you have to upvote it" is of "we removed our biggest source of crashes on Android by getting rid of Go FFI issues."

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

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:15:09 +0000

I mean, he's _allowed_. The Compiler Police aren't going to roll up to his house and take away his Jai compiler if there isn't a quorum of HN users blessing his efforts. But people can point out they don't feel the juice is worth the squeeze. Also, Blow is certainly an advocate for his position, which means this kind of public debate is germane to the question of if _other_ people should adopt Jai.

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

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:02:58 +0000

If you have bills to pay, it really is.

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

cwyers — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 17:00:55 +0000

The point is that Blow has two blockbuster hits under his belt and can afford to take a decade to ship a single game. Most people would go broke never having shipped a game if they tried to do things Blow's way.

New comment by cwyers in "I fed 24 years of my blog posts to a Markov model"

cwyers — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 22:37:33 +0000

Yeah, there's only two differences between using Markov chains to predict words and LLMs:

* LLMs don't use Markov chains, * LLMs don't predict words.

New comment by cwyers in "Perl's decline was cultural"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 19:05:43 +0000

Node.js is the most popular web framework/technology in the StackOverflow developer survey. Express is more popular than FastAPI, Django, Flask and Rails in the same survey. Just... what are you talking about?

New comment by cwyers in "Perl's decline was cultural"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:46:01 +0000

I was surprised by that, too, and assumed it was a decade-old article until I saw the date at the bottom. Both being mentioned before Python is wilder, as is the total exclusion of JavaScript.

New comment by cwyers in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:19:50 +0000

You can actually look at history and see what happens when IBM tries to wrest control of the PC platform back with the PS/2, which was a flop with consumers because it wasn't backwards compatible enough with IBM's own previous PCs or the wider PC market that developed. A bunch of PC clone manufacturers got together and came up with the EISA bus standard so they wouldn't have to pay IBM license fees for MCA, and made it backwards-compatible with ISA cards people already had. It was successful enough that IBM ended up adopting EISA for some of their PCs.

The other notable thing about the situation is that three companies ended up simultaneously responsible for a large part of the PC platform, originally -- IBM, Microsoft and Intel. They all worked in various ways to encourage competition to each other -- the reason we see OS competition on the PC platform is that IBM and Intel both found it in their interests to allow other OSes on the platform to reduce Microsoft's leverage over them. IBM in fact created one of the competing PC OSes out the gate, OS/2, which was originally an IBM/Microsoft joint project until they started feuding. Now, OS/2 is dead, but IBM's interest in being able to support their own OS instead of Microsoft's is a big reason the PC platform was built in an OS agnostic way. People criticize UEFI for locking down the PC platform more than the previous BIOS implementations, but UEFI is still _way_ more open than basically any other platform, most of which don't have a standard for bootloaders at all. It's really the absense of a standard for bootloaders that keeps most Android phones locked down. Two Android phones from the same OEM might have different bootloaders, much less two phones from different manufacturers. We've yet to see an alternate OS with the resources to support implementing their own bootloaders for a majority of Android phones.

New comment by cwyers in "GrapheneOS is the only Android OS providing full security patches"

cwyers — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 18:03:14 +0000

Because the original IBM PC was designed to be cheap and built in a hurry. IBM had a mandate for the original PC to use off the shelf components as much as possible. They also neglected to secure an exclusive license from Microsoft for DOS. 95% of building an IBM PC clone was buying the same parts and getting a DOS license from Microsoft (which they were very happy to sell you). Everyone saw what happened to IBM and just didn't do it that way again.

New comment by cwyers in "MinIO is now in maintenance-mode"

cwyers — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 06:39:36 +0000

MinIO is absolutely not a passion project, it's a business.

New comment by cwyers in "Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL"

cwyers — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 03:54:36 +0000

I'm not saying SWE-Bench is perfect, and there are reports that suggest there is some contamination of training sets for LLMs with common benchmarks like SWE-Bench. But they publish SWE-bench so anyone can run it and have an open leaderboard where they attribute the results to specific models, not just vague groupings:

https://www.swebench.com/

ARC-AGI-2 keeps a private set of questions to prevent LLM contamination, but they have a public set of training and eval questions so that people can both evaluate their modesl before submitting to ARC-AGI and so that people can evalute what the benchmark is measuring:

https://github.com/arcprize/ARC-AGI-2

Cursor is not alone in the field in having to deal with issues of benchmark contamination. Cursor is an outlier in sharing so little when proposing a new benchmark while also not showing performance in the industry standard benchmarks. Without a bigger effort to show what the benchmark is and how other models perform, I think the utility of this benchmark is limited at best.

New comment by cwyers in "Keep Android Open"

cwyers — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:26:55 +0000

The short version is: the PC is a historical accident. By "the PC" I mean "the Windows-Intel platform on which most consumer PCs were built." Linux and BSD were both able to exist in the form they did because there was a commodity hardware platform that was standardized (ad-hoc standardization, mind you) and _somewhat_ open. IBM, Microsoft and Intel were all best frenemies, able to exert enough power to standardize the PC platform but also able to exert enough power against each other to prevent them from locking the platform down too much. There is no standard "smartphone" platform like there is with the PC, really the only standard is Android AOSP. Because of this, it's a lot harder to do a third-party phone platform without adopting large parts of Android's code.

New comment by cwyers in "Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL"

cwyers — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 18:50:16 +0000

The lack of transparency here is wild. They aggregate the scores of the models they test against, which obscures the performance. They only release results on their own internal benchmark that they won't release. They talk about RL training but they don't discuss anything else about how the model was trained, including if they did their own pre-training or fine-tuned an existing model. I'm skeptical of basically everything claimed here until either they share more details or someone is able to interpedently benchmark this.

New comment by cwyers in "A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)"

cwyers — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 02:38:48 +0000

If you read the article, one of the buttons on the bar prompted people to upgrade to the latest version of IE.