Hacker News: geoffschmidt

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes"

geoffschmidt — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:50:51 +0000

But they have "learned to implement any of the algorithms we know that we have used to make strong chess engines". Ask Claude Code to write you a chess engine. Your objection is that they don't implement MCTS in the neurons themselves? Neither does a human, we use a C compiler when we want to play chess using MCTS.

That's a separate question from whether an LLM (unaided by a C complier) can learn to play chess as well as human (also unaided by a C compiler). Certainly humans can't become grandmasters only by reading chess transcripts on the web, and certainly humans require many "thinking tokens" during a game to play effectively. Do you know for sure that a transformer can't reach grandmaster level if it is allowed to learn by playing games (as humans do) and is given a sufficient number of thinking tokens during the game? It seems near certain that they could, if someone wanted to spend the money (and I don't see why anyone would.)

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Rust Is Not a Memory-Safe Language"

geoffschmidt — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 20:50:38 +0000

That wasn’t my takeaway from it at all. I think he’s quite precise in his definitions and the point he’s making about Rust, even if I found the prose a bit fatiguing due to the LLMisms.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "It's Only When You Look Back"

geoffschmidt — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 02:35:04 +0000

Personally I think that the world needs more of your optimism. But what does your crystal ball say about energy costs and political stability?

It’s one thing to say that AI will help everyone create immersive games, but skyscrapers won’t be free unless energy is free. Do you also assume that AI will solve fusion?

What happens to the individuals who are not “strong” and how do they hold onto their remote work jobs? Why will the biomedical research technology you’re positing not be used to create biological weapons, or do you assume that AI also creates universal peace and harmony? If so, how does it do that while also preserving our ability to have our own ideas and disagree with each other?

If we want the great future you’re imagining, I think history teaches that we need to give at least as much attention to these questions as we do to making the technology work.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Prompt Injection as Role Confusion"

geoffschmidt — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:34:21 +0000

I think their work earns "theory" because it makes specific predictions both about how to make more effective prompt injection attacks and what activations you'd observe in the LLM during those attacks, and can also be plausibly extrapolated to suggest useful future research directions.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks"

geoffschmidt — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:30:57 +0000

They were adopted by professionals long ago, and those highly tuned and validated proprietary models are going to kick the butt of the models that you have access to every day of the week.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Cal.diy: open-source community edition of cal.com"

geoffschmidt — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:50:33 +0000

https://cal.com/blog/cal-com-goes-closed-source-why

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Open Source Isn't Dead"

geoffschmidt — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:30:28 +0000

Claude is already shockingly good at reverse engineering. Try it – it's really a step change. It has infinite patience which was always the limited resource in decompiling/deobfuscating most software.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Book review: There Is No Antimemetics Division"

geoffschmidt — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:48:25 +0000

I'm not so sure about false positives being rare.. ZeroGPT flags the Gettysburg Address as 96% AI generated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1s0y...

(I tried it just now and got the same result as in that post)

New comment by geoffschmidt in "A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support"

geoffschmidt — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 04:34:12 +0000

And when you set them on fire, it lets the air and sunlight back out!

New comment by geoffschmidt in "I'll buy your electronics to feed our robot"

geoffschmidt — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:17:41 +0000

At 0:16 it looks like they're heating the board from below?

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

geoffschmidt — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:45:10 +0000

I think the origin is in the phrase, "Will the dogs eat the dog food?" which was common VC-speak in the 90's and 00's, referencing dog food commercials that once ran on TV, and meaning something like "this has been made to sound great in an internal powerpoint presentation, but will customers actually like it?"

Attributed to a Microsoft exec in the 80s: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/eat-your-own-dog-food-how-micr...

In 2015, Marc Andreessen memorably said of Mixpanel's success at product-led growth: "The dogs are fucking jumping through the screen door to eat the dog food. And he hasn’t done any marketing yet." https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-adva...

That then led to the idea of "eating your own dog food", because if even you won't eat it, what credibility do you have saying that the other dogs will?

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Launch HN: Omnara (YC S25) – Run Claude Code and Codex from anywhere"

geoffschmidt — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 19:10:06 +0000

I think Jessica Livingston deserves at least as much credit as Paul for YC's success in that early era, and IIRC he has the same view.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "The largest number representable in 64 bits"

geoffschmidt — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:33:10 +0000

It's not "the largest representable number" because you're not representing numbers in any rigorous sense. If I give you 64 bits, you can't tell me what number those bits represent (first, because the rules of the game are ambiguous - what if I give you 8 bytes that are a valid program in two different languages; and second, because even if you made the rules precise, you don't know which bitstrings correspond to programs that halt). And if I give you a number, you can't tell me which 64 bits represent that number or even if the number is representable, and that's true even for small numbers and even if I give you unbounded time.

It seems far more natural to say that you're representing programs rather than numbers. And you're asking, what is the largest finite output you can get from a program in today's programming languages that is 8 bytes or less. Which is also fun and interesting!

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Elo – A data expression language which compiles to JavaScript, Ruby, and SQL"

geoffschmidt — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 06:02:36 +0000

FWIW, at the bottom of the landing page they credit Claude for “every line of code, tests, and docs”

New comment by geoffschmidt in "enclose.horse"

geoffschmidt — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 07:37:08 +0000

Click the sandwich icon in the top right, then either Past Puzzles or Browse, and you can play more puzzles. (Or even create and submit your own.)

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Satellites reveal heat leaking from largest US cryptocurrency mining center"

geoffschmidt — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 01:22:22 +0000

Heat is not by itself waste. It's what electricity turns into after it's done doing computer things. Efficiency is a separate question - how many computer things you got done per unit electricity turned into heat.

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

geoffschmidt — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 01:30:40 +0000

But see also the next section ("empowering experienced users"):

> We are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Launch HN: Scaphold.io (YC W17) – GraphQL Backend as a Service"

geoffschmidt — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 02:04:55 +0000

The GraphQL ecosystem has grown amazingly quickly over the last year. It's definitely not a single-vendor technology at this point. Check out this list of GraphQL libraries, tools, and implementations: https://github.com/chentsulin/awesome-graphql

The majority of people who are using GraphQL are using an implementation from someone other than Facebook (on either the client or the server, or in many cases both).

(And for what it's worth, I did see a "Why not RDF" slide in one of Lee Byron's decks, and those of us at Meteor who are working on GraphQL are definitely aware of the RDF/SparQL roots. I think what's driving GraphQL's growth is, first, it addresses a very timely problem - fetching all of the data for a screen in a mobile app in a single round trip without coupling your backend to your UI - and second, the focus on tooling and developer experience which has been a weakness for SparQL.)

New comment by geoffschmidt in "Ask HN: Is Meteor(JS framework) is dying slowly?"

geoffschmidt — Tue, 03 Jan 2017 02:37:36 +0000

Hi, Meteor cofounder and CEO here :)

Our Meteor business is thriving and we beat our 2016 revenue goal by almost 40%, driven by strong Galaxy growth. We expect that to continue into 2017 based on what we heard from a survey of Meteor/Galaxy users that we did recently – they are using Meteor for mission critical apps and most of them plan to write more Meteor apps in 2017. In line with this, we are growing our Meteor open source team while also continuing to ramp up our work on Apollo.

The big difference between Meteor and Apollo is that Meteor is about new app development (specifically in JavaScript), and Apollo is about a data system that you can add to already-existing apps that are running in production at meaningful scale. There's a place for both of these things and a lot of overlap between them.

Meteor isn't going to take over all JavaScript development the way Rails took over Ruby development, at least not anytime soon. That's just not how the JavaScript ecosystem works. However, I think it will be the #1 full stack JavaScript framework for a long time to come and will continue to be a really great option for teams that want to build JavaScript apps quickly, especially apps that have a realtime or collaborative element.

Show HN: Optics – GraphQL Analytics and Insights

geoffschmidt — Thu, 27 Oct 2016 20:36:48 +0000

Article URL: http://www.apollodata.com/optics

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12809782

Points: 7

# Comments: 0