Hacker News: lanstin

New comment by lanstin in "Make tmux pretty and usable (2024)"

lanstin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:31:10 +0000

Volunteer to be the official image maintainer - I had emacs-nox and (screen) installed fleet wide for my own utility :)

I had a friend that even had his public keys added to the /root/.ssh/ but I didin't go that far -I didn't even put my own .emacs out - but I at least could use good tools to look at the tcpdump output or giant log files if needed. "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" is not that big of a deal anymore.

And if people want to just use some default open source image, just point out that in modern cloud environments, you don't want each node to customize itself, you want to pre-run that process one time per node type in your "directed graph of image delta pipelines" which takes the input image and publishes the cloud ready app-specific images (with your DNS configs, LDAP integration, whatever, plus emacs/neovim and screen/tmux :)

New comment by lanstin in "Running out of disk space in production"

lanstin — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:51:51 +0000

Old war story: I had an old Sun 4/260 with 2 1G drives - I had SunOS on 1 and Gentoo on the other - my initial Gentoo install worked for a while but then the portage directory used all the configured iNodes - really weird errors and I could not figure it out at the time; error msgs maybe should mention inodes? I had to do #gentoo-sun IRC and someone suggested df -i which was indeed the issues (solve: you can configure extN filesystems to have more iNodes)

New comment by lanstin in "Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model"

lanstin — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:52:24 +0000

The places where solutions are discussed in a way that is best long term solution may well exist in a language subspace with politeness, calmness and thoughtfulness. Getting the model to those areas of linguistic space is useful; as is preserving my own habits of kind and thoughtful speech.

New comment by lanstin in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

lanstin — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:03:22 +0000

It's a language/compiler/function call stack feature, not existing as far as I know, but it would be awesome - the caller of a function would specify what resources/syscalls could be made, and anything down the chain would be thusly restricted. The library could try to do its phone home stats and it would fail. Couldn't be C or a C type language runtime, or anything that can call to assembly of course. @compute_only decorator. Maybe could be implemented as a sys-call for a thread - thread_capability_remove(F_NETWORK + F_DISK)? Wouldn't be able to schedule any work on any thread in that case, but Go could have pools of threads for coroutines with varying capabilities. Something to put the developer back in charge of the mountain of dependencies we are all forced to manage now.

New comment by lanstin in "Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromised"

lanstin — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:49:35 +0000

There are so many advantages to deployable artifacts, including audibility and fast roll-back. Also you can block so many risky endpoints from your compute outbound networks, which means even if you are compromised, it doesn't do the attacker any good if their C&C is not allow listed.

New comment by lanstin in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

lanstin — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:42:51 +0000

Also there's no reason why a horizontally scalable service can't be stress tested with 2x or 10x of prod load in non-prod environments.

New comment by lanstin in "If you thought code writing speed was your problem you have bigger problems"

lanstin — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:52:14 +0000

For years I worked at a large company with so many blockers for everything that I always worked like this all the time - have 5 projects so when one becomes blocked for external deps, you have one to pull out and work on. There is a context switch (which lead me to context preservation habits like checking everything I write into git; using tmux so that the context is sitting around in the bash history of the shell where I was working, that sort of thing; lots of org files and Mac stickies with TODOs etc).

New comment by lanstin in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

lanstin — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:27:16 +0000

I have lived in the DC metro area inside the beltway or in Sillicon Valley my entire adult life and have only had above ground power wiring. Despite tree ordnances and wind storms and a grid so aged if we see lightning we lose power.

New comment by lanstin in "BitNet: Inference framework for 1-bit LLMs"

lanstin — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:15:36 +0000

I did not realize all the dendritic synapses were excitatory, I always thought it depended on the specific neurotransmitters released. Thanks, this is cool. I am curious what will happen when we build LLMs that have the equivalent of chemical diffusions between synaptic release areas as well as the temporality of spiking neural nets.

New comment by lanstin in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans"

lanstin — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:01:16 +0000

Also your eyes are good at seeing patterns. If the formatting is all consistent the patterns they see will be higher level, long functions unintuitive names, missing check for return success; make bad good look bad is the idea. Carefully reading every line is good but getting hints of things to check more deeply because it looks wrong to the eyes is extremely useful.

New comment by lanstin in "Microgpt"

lanstin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 17:10:06 +0000

Human life includes a lot of adversarial training (lying relatives) and training in temporal logics, which would seem to be a somewhat different domain than purely linguistic computations (e.g. staying up late, feeling bad; working hard at a task for months, getting better at it; feeling physical skills, even editing Go with emacs, move from the conscious layer into the cerebrellar layer). I think attention is a poor mans "OODA" loop; cognitive science is learning that a primary function of the brain is predicting what will be going on with the body in the immediate future, and prepping for it; that's not a thing that LLMs are architecturally positioned to do. Maybe swarms of agents (although in my mind that's more of a way to deal with LLM poor performance with large context of instructions (as opposed to large context of data) than a way to have contending systems fighting to make a decision for the overall entity), but they still lack both the real-time computational aspect and the continuously tricky problem of other people telling partially correct information.

There's plenty of training data, for a human. The LLM architecture is not as efficient as the brain; perhaps we can overcome that with enough twitter posts from PhDs, and enough YouTubes of people answering "why" to their four year olds and college lectures, but that's kind of an experimental question.

Starting a network out in a contrained body and have it learn how to control that, with a social context of parents and siblings would be an interesting experiment, especially if you could give it an inherent temporality and a good similar-content-addressable persistent memory. Perhaps a bit terrifying experiment, but I guess the protocols for this would be air-gapped, not internet connected with a credit card.

New comment by lanstin in "Microgpt"

lanstin — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 16:54:56 +0000

Why would you think a system that can reason well in one domain could not reason well in other domains? Intelligence is a generic, on-the-fly programmable quality. And perhaps your coding is different from mine, but it includes a great deal of general reasoning, going from formal statements to informal understandings and back until I get a formalization that will solve the actual real world problem as constrained.

New comment by lanstin in "AI Added 'Basically Zero' to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says"

lanstin — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:51:12 +0000

Have you ever tried to trick an LLM? Did you have trouble?

New comment by lanstin in "Don't host email yourself – your reminder in 2026"

lanstin — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:26:03 +0000

Email itself cannot be regarded as a reliable delivery method. That said, I host my own email service, have for decades, and often have problems sending to people. I am not running a product on it, and so my recipients usually will check in spam since they want my email. My family knows to txt if there is an email I need to read (that isn’t a mail hosting problem but I don’t really read email consistently). I also have a small web site where I can put family recipes and my resume and the odd file that is too large for email. And a mastodon instance, sync thing, dns, and an old fingerd I wrote in Lisp in 2008 when I was done being a stay at home dad and needed an industry job.

It is a great hobby, and a good way to keep aware of current trends in internet infrastructure. And, like riding a bicycle to commute, maximally free of red tape or external regulation.

New comment by lanstin in "Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it"

lanstin — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:32:47 +0000

The gas town discord has two people that are doing transformation of extremely legacy in house Java frameworks. Not reporting great success yet but also probably work that just wouldn’t be done otherwise.

New comment by lanstin in ""I Was a Director at Amex When They Started Replacing Us with $30K Workers" [video]"

lanstin — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 19:28:51 +0000

If this was about a useful part of the economy rather than financialized credit access, I would care. Paying 10x to US residents to provide a better Amex experience really doesn’t incentivize anything that is long term useful. Now when materials scientists and skilled scientific technicians are fired from US based jobs, well that is a problem. The economy in the US has fallen prey to the demands of irreality based capital which is seeking, not profit, not good products and healthy trade, but seeking to extract capital and to erect legislative barriers to Adam Smith style competition (between innovative small businesses striving to find an innovative way to push product utility up a bit). If you can’t brag about the good your job is doing for people, life, or history, try again.

New comment by lanstin in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

lanstin — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 14:27:03 +0000

Only if some smart companies start and keep choosing long term customer satisfaction over dollar measured growth.

New comment by lanstin in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

lanstin — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:14:40 +0000

Ideas don't count - it's persuasion and execution that matter. One of the several reasons that the rule is not ruled by smartness/rationality.

New comment by lanstin in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

lanstin — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:31:56 +0000

It isn't the managers it is the business. All those geniuses hired and over years and years no one came up with another business model but ads. I pay for ad-free YouTube and would happily pay for ad free search. As would many. Many people would like a google scale micropayments system that isn't ads. The failure to do this led directly to social media becoming customer devouring experiences rather than making good products people want.

New comment by lanstin in "AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder"

lanstin — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 20:06:36 +0000

Things that claude code/vibe coding is great at:

1. Allowing non-developers to provide very detailed specs for the tools they want or experiences they are imagining

2. Allowing developers to write code using frameworks/languages they only know a bit of and don't like; e.g. I use it to write D3 visualizations or PNG extracts from datastores all the time, without having to learn PNG API or modern javascript frameworks. I just have to know enough to look at the console.log / backtrace and figure out where the fix can be.

3. Analysing large code bases for specific questions (not as accurate on "give me an overall summary" type questions - that one weird thing next to 19 normal things doesn't stick in its craw as much as for a cranky human programmer.

It does seem to benefit cranking thru a list of smallish features/fixes rapidly, but even 4.5 or 4.6 seem to get stuck in weird dead ends rarely enough that I'm not expecting it, but often enough to be super annoying.

I've been playing around with Gas Town swarming a large scale Java migration project, and its been N declarations of victory and still mvn test isn't even compiling. (mvn build is ok, and the pom is updated to the new stack, so it's not nothing). (These are like 50/50 app code/test code repos).