<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: lacker</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lacker</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:47:11 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lacker" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "“We want it to really confuse people, but also really make people happy”"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:49:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557599</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557599</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557599</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "OpenAI and Anthropic are ruining San Francisco"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.<p>If you own a lot in San Francisco you should be able to build an apartment building on it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 06:31:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487482</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487482</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49487482</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 22 Aug 2026 19:13:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402831</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402831</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49402831</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.<p>edit: Yes I think this should be possible, using a "recursive SNARK".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:05:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49369916</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49369916</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49369916</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Mathematics in the age of AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.<p>It would work better as a bar for hiring, rather than as a bar for publishing.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2026 21:03:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367190</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:22:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199634</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199634</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49199634</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>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.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2026 21:20:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189174</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "AI companies destroy rare and non recoverable physical books"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Personally, I end up throwing away a decent amount of books that the book donation people won't take. Especially old technical books. Textbooks from 2001. These headlines just don't tell me anything useful. "Rare" doesn't mean anything.<p>Please, give me one example of an interesting and unique book that the AI companies have destroyed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 31 Jul 2026 19:25:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127508</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127508</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127508</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Feds freaked over Fable 5 after 'fix this code', not jailbreak, say researchers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think people working at Amazon "know that it is a part of a larger bad", it's one of the most trusted American institutions.<p><a href="https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/why-everyone-loves-amazon" rel="nofollow">https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/why-everyone-loves-amazon</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:30:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563142</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563142</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48563142</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "The Abundance Illusion"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes there are studies, for example last year Pangram's false positives were measured to be under 0.5%.<p><a href="https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals" rel="nofollow">https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals</a><p>Personally, at first I thought these sorts of tools were dumb and wouldn't really work, but I think it works because it just isn't designed to be "adversarial". If you want your AI to trick Pangram, you can make an AI to trick Pangram. It just catches people who are cutting and pasting from the AIs without putting any more effort into hiding it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:20:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482878</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482878</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48482878</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is a smell. But it's the EU that smells bad, when it comes to tech regulation. It's the smell of cookie popup warnings.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:46:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451751</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451751</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48451751</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Sum-product, unit distances, and number fields"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Think of it this way, how would you turn a set into a vector in the first place? We solve this in programming a lot, for example, the "one-hot" encoding for neural networks. Here, a set turns into a vector that has a zero for every item that isn't in the set, a one for every item that is.<p>Now, there are a lot of things that |v| for a vector can mean. In the L1 distance you just add up the absolute value of each dimension. You could argue that that's a simpler sort of |v| than L2.<p>And there you go! |S| on a set actually means exactly the same thing as |x| on a vector, if you interpret sets as vectors in the right way.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:59:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405827</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405827</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405827</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "America's Data Center Build-Out Is Falling Way Behind Schedule"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Falling behind schedule" doesn't really seem like the right term, for a sector of the economy that has been accelerating for the past few years.<p>You could easily describe this trend positively rather than negatively, like:<p>"Google has built an incredible amount of datacenters in the past few years, which makes sense since Google Cloud revenue has tripled since 2021. But they are trying to grow even faster and add more revenue."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Jun 2026 05:02:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380099</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380099</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48380099</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Toy Story 5 shows 'terror' of children's screen addiction, says Tom Hanks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The next step in my fight against screen addiction is to have my children not watch Toy Story 5.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:51:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376096</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376096</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48376096</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Go: Support for Generic Methods"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think it's nonsensical, it's just another name for the same thing. E.g. in the Haskell wiki it says, "the Error monad, also called the Exception monad".<p><a href="https://wiki.haskell.org/index.php?title=All_About_Monads" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.haskell.org/index.php?title=All_About_Monads</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 05:17:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304859</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304859</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48304859</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah, and rate-limiting is only one of the things a PaaS needs to handle, to avoid looking like a bad actor to the underlying platform. The trickiest thing to handle is people using your PaaS to host malware, because:<p>1. There may be no simple rule of thumb like "suddenly using tons of bandwidth"<p>2. Bad actors can open up so many accounts, you have to close them automatically<p>3. Malware can infect a good actor, who is unaware or struggling to deal with it</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 16:21:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225262</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225262</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48225262</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perfectly demonstrating the truth of the "Microsoft org chart" cartoon.<p><a href="https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts" rel="nofollow">https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 22:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215087</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215087</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48215087</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "I’ve joined Anthropic"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The specific code I was working on, I had a general idea of the sort of performance improvement that would be possible. I just thought that it would be too hard for the models to figure out without a lot of hand-holding.<p>But it ended up being not "too hard ever", but more like, in 1 out of every 5 tries, the model did in fact manage to get a large refactoring to the point where it improved performance. So once I set it up to try something, use the perf test, see if it worked, if not, throw it away, repeat. Then it started, slowly, finding some useful things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 18:51:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212288</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212288</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212288</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "Ask HN: Shouldn't Google need to give a public statement about Railway incident?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's an especially awkward situation because Railway is a competitor of Google Cloud, with many third parties involved. So, I just think it will take them a little more time to figure out how to message things.<p>To me, what it sounds like is that a Google Cloud system identified Railway as a misbehaving customer. Spam, hackers, that sort of thing. Often this happens for "platform as a service" companies, because Railway themselves probably do host some spammers and hackers, and they have their own systems for dealing with it.<p>So, it's quite possible that according to the Google team, Railway violated the terms of something or other, and according to the Railway team, they did not, and now everyone has to argue about it.<p>But who knows, this is just me guessing based on some experience running a PaaS that itself was running on top of AWS.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 18:48:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212235</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212235</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48212235</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lacker in "I’ve joined Anthropic"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I didn't dig into what the actual repository was doing, but personally, I took some inspiration from the idea after reading about it and realizing that I might have been underestimating the ability of LLMs. I put a bit more work into a performance harness I was using locally and just set some agents to brainstorming and they did seem to find some great stuff. So I don't really have a stance one way or another on this specific repo, but the general idea seems like a really good one.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 23:25:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201031</link><dc:creator>lacker</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48201031</guid></item></channel></rss>