Hacker News: efromvt

New comment by efromvt in "Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs"

efromvt — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:47:18 +0000

I’ve historically read this as ‘open format compatible’ but ‘native preferred’ - where this opens up market space and dev velocity - but it’ll be interesting to see if native storage differentiation gets dumped entirely. It just seems like ‘fork and optimize for our engine’ would always be tempting enough that you’d want a native play for when you don’t need the decoupling.

New comment by efromvt in "Flock's CEO Faced Me After Its Cameras Led to My Wrongful Stop"

efromvt — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 18:00:06 +0000

The system needs to account for how it will be used and resulting externalities. Being an accelerant can be a problem in and of itself. I do agree that having stricter societal and legal guardrails here is probably better then relying on companies to do the right thing, though.

New comment by efromvt in "The Economic Benefit of Refactoring"

efromvt — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 01:20:32 +0000

This has been a soul crushing part of the AI craze - we can finally fund all the devx work we wanted to do, for all the wrong reasons.

(It is nice that I can make something try our CLI a hundred times in an hour to test that new flag ergonomics, though)

New comment by efromvt in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

efromvt — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 17:53:35 +0000

Praise be, stacking is such a better ux for separating out a feature diff into distinct component units and native support makes it easy.

New comment by efromvt in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

efromvt — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 17:06:32 +0000

Isn’t the intentionality the actually concerning bit? Exploit capabilities are all fun and games constrained by the humans directing them; a paperclip maximizer going rogue with them is less fun.

New comment by efromvt in "Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address difficulties of real-world data stores"

efromvt — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:58:38 +0000

I think/hope that most benchmarks have moved to an agentic loop - I'd still call that 'text to sql', since you're going from the business question to one or more SQL queries that provide the answer.

With a loop you can get extremely high results on a clean DB with a clear question. (I'm usually seeing high 9s accuracy.). A messy/ambiguous DB schema then degrades that again (which is what companies actually have, where you get closer to 20-30% rates pre-context engineering), which a clean semantic/presentation layer can bring back up. Then you're just left with the problem of underspecified/poorly formulated question - which you can partially solve with the agent pushing back, but also can be solved by improving the human side of things.

New comment by efromvt in "Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address difficulties of real-world data stores"

efromvt — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:29:17 +0000

Yeah with self-serve analytics all the rage (for good reason) for a bit, the bar from some places I've worked wouldn't be "does the agent beat a good analyst" it's "does the agent beat the a business person with SQL access who might have an overworked analyst glance over it", which is a much more tractable break-even point - and as you said, the business person might be even better at sanity checking numbers at that point.

New comment by efromvt in "Any text-to-SQL benchmark should address difficulties of real-world data stores"

efromvt — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:57:34 +0000

This was a very enjoyable read! Constraining the language surface is helpful, but the lost expressiveness can bite unless you’re in a constrained domain - which this seems like it was!

New comment by efromvt in "OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k"

efromvt — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:44:41 +0000

I’ve noticed it having weird message dropping and replay in general, but the compaction boundary has been pretty solid.

New comment by efromvt in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

efromvt — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:32:12 +0000

This was more interesting/creative than I expected on both sides (the prompt and the existing safeguards). I love that obscure Cloudflare validation turnstiles seem unsuspicious based on training data.

New comment by efromvt in "DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs"

efromvt — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:28:48 +0000

DSLs are a great middle ground for 'use LLM to turn ambiguous spec into something well defined', with the caveat that without discipline they'll inevitably expand until you should just have the agent write whatever the final language is.

There's a context tax up front (which will hopefully be less relevant over time) and then you really need a compiler/linter with helpful errors to keep it on the rails, because there is no corrective context in pretraining for something novel.

A purely descriptive DSL is just a convention, which is useful, but doesn't inject reliability the same way an enforced syntactic contract does.

New comment by efromvt in "I tricked Claude into leaking your deepest, darkest secrets"

efromvt — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:25:11 +0000

I think like social engineering, it will always be an issue to some degree, and we'll build safeguards until it's at a 'societally comfortable' baseline level. Which is maybe not particularly comforting, but I don't see us closing Pandora's Box here.

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

efromvt — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:38:07 +0000

Same as last month for once - optimizing how well agents can work with a new language [1]. I've been able to 2-3x success rate and drop total tokens for complex tasks significantly (though the initial syntax dump is rough - need to do some ablation there to get it down).

The best part has been that I think it's significantly improved things for humans too; it's weirdly satisfying to be able to measure improved ergonomics. Also, since a big pitch/theory was that the language should be ideal for agents as a result of the original nice things for humans it was designed for, it's a relief to be able actually measure a concrete lift.

[1] https://trilogydata.dev/ - SQL with types, composable functions of arbitrary complexity, and a native semantic layer.

New comment by efromvt in "EF Core 11 makes your split queries faster"

efromvt — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 16:21:34 +0000

I guess technically it is in the SQL standard, but optional, as S098? I agree that SQL is sorely lacking here and I'm hoping that the OLAP side innovation (presto, bigquery, snowflake, duckdb all seem to do better) help push it forward.

New comment by efromvt in "After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly moved away from Haskell"

efromvt — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:41:24 +0000

never use system python, always use virtual envs. (a bad answer, but agents do remove the setup boilerplate). UV does relatively completely solve this but it's a big dependency to take so understand why people don't rely on it

New comment by efromvt in "Muse Spark 1.1"

efromvt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 15:23:40 +0000

Out of curiosity, how often are the resource limits the bottlenecks? What do harnesses do to help here - limit parallelism? More efficient tools?

New comment by efromvt in "Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents"

efromvt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:48:21 +0000

Second comment, having read in more depth (really love the auto-layout detail!) - the spec doesn't seem to naturally support layering (which is useful in some multi-axis automatic cases) - any plans for composability?

New comment by efromvt in "Patching MechCommander's "left arm bug" for fun and profit"

efromvt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:21:58 +0000

Op1M5 was scarring the first (dozen) time around! Thank you minelayers

New comment by efromvt in "Patching MechCommander's "left arm bug" for fun and profit"

efromvt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 11:17:35 +0000

I wonder if all those different heavy shenanigans are just to get the hollander's gauss/hunchback autoconnon in the right torso by default.

(original Mechcommander is still the best of the series, even if mission 5 broke my soul for awhile).

New comment by efromvt in "Show HN: Microsoft releases Flint, a visualization language for AI agents"

efromvt — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 10:40:27 +0000

Semantic types as the extra formatting factor is super useful because they are concise encodings of a lot of formatting boilerplate.[1] Do you envision the flint type registry being shared/extensible? Why not have that be a data property itself?

[1] landed on pretty much the same spec for higher level tether charting on vegalite