<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: lesam</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lesam</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:20:18 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=lesam" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think AST aware code reading is criminally underused by agents - you don't need a header file if you can see a listing of all the functions in a library.<p>Similarly, I don't read the whole file a function is in while editing it in an IDE, why should a coding agent get the whole file polluting its context by default?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2026 01:26:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956932</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956932</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47956932</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Sloppy Copies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Except this isn't 'an app from a spec', it's the potemkin village of an app whose goal is to get ad impressions and a credit card number.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:36:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914111</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914111</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47914111</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Thoughts on slowing the fuck down"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When your bridge falls down, you don't call an incident and ask your engineer to fix it, you sue them.<p>In software there's a lot more emphasis on post-hoc fixes rather than up front validation, in my experience.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:30:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520526</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520526</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520526</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think Adams was prescient, since in his story the all powerful computer reaches the answer '42' via incorrect arithmetic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:08:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492238</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492238</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492238</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is interesting, but doesn't have to be correct.<p>If Blockbuster had kept pouring money into the new service, maybe it would have lost it all - I see no reason to think Blockbuster's movie rental franchise business would have 'transferrable skills' to allow it to succeed at streaming.<p>If it had been trying to pivot into a pizza delivery business (perhaps more transferable, in terms of locating franchises etc) would Icahn still have been 'killing' it?<p>My point is, maybe it was already dead and Icahn just prevented it from wasting a lot of money on the way down the drain.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 10:08:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362484</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362484</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362484</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If it's lasted 10 years and someone is still using it after all that time, that seems like a pretty good signal there's a lot of value in the 'garbage'?<p>I've seen a lot of 'fixes' for 10 year old 'garbage' that turned out to be regressions for important use cases that the author of the 'fix' wasn't aware of.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2026 12:50:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261031</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261031</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47261031</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If markets were regulated to trade in coordinated 1s auctions, instead of nanosecond precision first-come-first-served matching of orders, markets would function just as well without needing a ton of what the HFT crowd does. It's a massive waste of brilliant minds.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:33:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180322</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180322</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47180322</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "AIs can generate near-verbatim copies of novels from training data"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That seems like a legal question - if the model weights contain an encoded copy of the copyrighted material, is that a 'copy' for the purpose of copyright law?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:04:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125104</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125104</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125104</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Dead Internet Theory"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Before photography, we knew something was truthful because someone trustworthy vouched for it.<p>Now that photos and videos can be faked, we'll have to go back to the older system.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Jan 2026 11:12:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677635</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677635</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677635</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Drones that recharge directly on transmission lines"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Depends. When millions are on the line between companies, people are surprisingly willing to take a hand-created excel file as 'proof'. For example: <a href="https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-guy-failed-to-fix-all-numbers-in-alleged-fraud" rel="nofollow">https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/tricolors-excel-g...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:06:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568875</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568875</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46568875</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If there’s anything I would want to run to verify, I ask the author to add a unit test. Generally, the existing CI test + new tests in the PR having run successfully is enough. I might pull and run it if I am not sure whether a particular edge case is handled.<p>Reviewers wanting to pull and run many PRs makes me think your automated tests need improvement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 07 Dec 2025 18:05:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183646</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183646</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183646</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>In fact ‘computer’ used to be a job description: a person who computes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 12:02:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913908</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913908</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45913908</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "GLP-1s are breaking life insurance"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Aren’t “Big Life Insurance” and “Big Annuity” pretty much the same companies?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Jul 2025 19:11:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552689</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44552689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Ask HN: Why are dating apps so bad? Why hasn't anyone made a good one?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A quick search says Hinge charges a monthly subscription, is that not correct?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:30:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154894</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154894</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44154894</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The NDP party does not want a Conservative landslide government either, regardless of Mr. Singh’s pension.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 06 Jan 2025 18:13:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613326</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613326</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613326</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Who died and left the US $7B?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This still leaves open ‘buy, don’t borrow, die’ as a way for the dynastically wealthy to opt out of paying capital gains tax.<p>I think the sensible option is making death a taxable event, rather than borrowing (with perhaps exceptions for the family farm, but not for the family billion dollar business).<p>And the second best solution is eliminating the step-up basis, which without deemed disposition at death is just a free gift of capital gains tax rebates to heirs of the most wealthy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 09 Oct 2024 19:42:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41791843</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41791843</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41791843</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Hash Ordering and Hyrum's Law"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>C++ gives both ‘map’ and ‘unordered_map’, and in my experience idiomatic C++ uses unordered_map unless you actually need a tree.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Oct 2024 11:44:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729716</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729716</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729716</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "CrowdStrike accepting the PwnieAwards for "most epic fail" at defcon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Actually generally the legal system would decide that, not “the market”.<p>I.e. investors have assigned roughly zero probability to CrowdStrike bearing the full cost of this incident, and set the market price accordingly.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 11 Aug 2024 22:03:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219603</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41219603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "Solving Recurrence Relations"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When I was interviewing for more junior roles, “find the nth Fibonacci number” was a popular question.<p>It was always fun to hit the interviewer with this, it’s exponentially faster than the memoization they were usually expecting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 May 2024 11:54:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40342247</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40342247</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40342247</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by lesam in "In Praise of Idleness (1932)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The author is suggesting normalizing a 20 hour work week, and an approximate doubling of hourly wages for the majority of workers. (And continuing to reduce the hours worked per week until full employment is reached).<p>Work that is unattractive would presumably still be incentivized by higher wages.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 May 2024 16:20:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40266006</link><dc:creator>lesam</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40266006</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40266006</guid></item></channel></rss>