Hacker News: lacker

New comment by lacker in "Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?"

lacker — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 18:31:51 +0000

I remember when I first became an engineering manager. It felt pretty strange at first to be standing up in front of an audience, describing what our team's code did, how it worked, and how we ensured it was high quality. Being the final approver who decided whether the new service was ready to go into production or not. Because I didn't really understand it, the way that I had when I was writing all the code myself.

With AI, now every software engineer gets to feel this way.

New comment by lacker in "Why are we even doing all this?"

lacker — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:29:05 +0000

The question is the right one. "Why are we even doing all this?"

Why, indeed, is society funding pure mathematics? Many mathematicians are complaining that they do not like AI and their jobs are less fun when AI is involved. But does that matter? Should that matter to the institutions who fund mathematics research?

To me it seems that we fund pure mathematics because we believe that some pure mathematics will end up being useful. Turing was doing "pure mathematics" when he invented the Turing machine, because we didn't have another word for it, yet.

So, which is going to be more useful - the sort of pure mathematics that AI does in 2026, or the sort of pure mathematics that humans do in 2026? That is the debate I would like to see.

New comment by lacker in "11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker"

lacker — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:20:45 +0000

In theory it would be possible to formally verify the soundness of the borrow checker. Maybe with AI advances we'll be able to do that in the near future. I mean, how much more complicated can it really be than proving Navier-Stokes?

New comment by lacker in "How did Rosalind Franklin miss the helix in her iconic DNA image? She didn't"

lacker — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:21:59 +0000

I think this is a better article on the topic:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5

It seems like there are several different parts to the discovery of the "structure of DNA" and different people contributed.

1. DNA is helical

2. DNA is a double helix

3. The ACGT copying mechanism

Part 1 was Franklin and Wilkins. Part 3 was Watson and Crick. Part 2 is the part under debate, to what degree was the double helix clear from just Franklin's imaging?

But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot. The Nobel prize only went to the other three, in large part because Franklin died before it was given out.

New comment by lacker in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

lacker — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 17:57:28 +0000

Different incident that AFAIK did not become public. But yeah, I bet things like this happened a lot. In 2005 people were still getting used to the idea of a robot crawling their website regularly.

New comment by lacker in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

lacker — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 04:19:39 +0000

To me, it's easy to imagine them going more all in. For example, they could let their employees use ChatGPT and Claude!

They love to say "AI" but they don't seem to want to accept the reality of what AI is right now.

New comment by lacker in "OpenAI breaches Medicare, Albanese reveals"

lacker — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:33:42 +0000

I remember once at Google someone complained that GoogleBot hacked them and deleted their data, and it turned out that GoogleBot was just crawling the pages, and they had unfortunately designed their website so that there was no authentication, page URLs were generally secret, and GET requests to certain URLs were treated as requests to delete data. So once one URL leaked the site got crawled and a lot of data was deleted....

New comment by lacker in "What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers"

lacker — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 22:08:41 +0000

Yes, I worked for a bit on site at a datacenter in Fort Worth and was surprised by how many ex-nuclear-submarine engineers there were. I guess it's similar, you have a lot of high tech equipment in an environment where the climate is closely controlled.

New comment by lacker in "GPT-6 Sol and Luna"

lacker — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:39:39 +0000

Offering Luna for cheap is like restaurants giving you free bread and water. They're pretty sure that you're going to end up eating the expensive stuff on the menu.

New comment by lacker in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

lacker — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:02:03 +0000

The increased revenue is in startups, like the recent couple YC batches.

New comment by lacker in "AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up"

lacker — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:01:38 +0000

Well you mention Android, iPhone, Nintendo, and Microsoft. Those are the biggest companies, and many of them don't even use the best coding tools. So they are not going to be the ones improving.

On the other hand, look at the YC companies. I think the last batch or two is growing revenue faster than any batches ever before. Those are the companies that are being sped up a huge amount by AI.

New comment by lacker in "How do we prevent mathemathics from devolving into the Medieval Era of secrecy?"

lacker — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 23:43:19 +0000

I have seen two worries recently:

1. People will publish so much frontier mathematics, humans won't be able to understand it all

2. Frontier mathematics will all be kept secret

Fortunately, these seem like they can't both happen at once.

New comment by lacker in "The Relation Between Mathematics and Physics by Paul Dirac (1939)"

lacker — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:41:52 +0000

Yes, quite well in fact. This lecture was in 1939. In the 50's, Lie groups (previously just a pure, beautiful mathematics) were used in particle physics. Gell-Mann used SU(3) to predict some new particles before anyone observed them.

And then similar stuff happened later in quantum mechanics, with gauge theory, but I understand that only at a handwavy level. I think overall the "standard model" is a perfect example of what Dirac predicted.

Whether this still holds up in the past 40 years is another question. I don't have a great example from my lifetime.

New comment by lacker in "“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”"

lacker — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:49:45 +0000

Recently I showed my 7-yr-old son and a friend of his how they could build their own little video games with the Claude app. Simple stuff, make me a maze game, make the walls move sometimes, make it bigger, make there be a score.

The delight they have at, video games aren't just a thing to play, it's a thing they can design and change, share with each other... I think that dream of a truly malleable experience is still there, I think this "explosion of new forms" you talk about is happening right now with AI, and I think this time it is going to be bigger than ever.

New comment by lacker in "OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco"

lacker — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:31:04 +0000

I think the tech companies would be supporters of new rules that would let builders create more housing all throughout San Francisco. We need a big tent, with all pro-housing groups coming together, to change the rules, and start allowing new housing again.

If you own a lot in San Francisco you should be able to build an apartment building on it.

New comment by lacker in "Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked"

lacker — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:13:08 +0000

This is like giving you three outputs from md5sum and asking you to guess for which one the input ended in a "q". There's no way to tell unless you break the RNG.

New comment by lacker in "Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics"

lacker — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:05:10 +0000

Maybe some sort of blockchain could make it so that you don't have to verify the whole proof yourself, to know that it's true. Because some of these proofs could take a long time to verify. Similar to a Merkle tree, but you'd have to make it respect the laws of mathematical proof in some way.

edit: Yes I think this should be possible, using a "recursive SNARK".

New comment by lacker in "Mathematics in the age of AI"

lacker — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:03:23 +0000

I don't think the mathematicians are going to be able to make that work, because journals are already struggling to keep up with their review load, and AI seems like it will make that harder. So a solution that involves "journals will do a lot more effort to review each paper" doesn't seem practical.

It would work better as a bar for hiring, rather than as a bar for publishing.

New comment by lacker in "Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2"

lacker — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:22:44 +0000

Yeah, totally. But... the problem is that I don't have time to test every single model that comes out. So I rely on reports like this to decide, should I even bother testing out Muse?

New comment by lacker in "Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2"

lacker — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:20:55 +0000

My conclusion is the opposite. If benchmarks were meaningless, surely Meta would be able to find some benchmark that shows they are better than Sol and Fable. The fact that they can't do that tells me that benchmarks still do mean something.