Hacker News: lz400

New comment by lz400 in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

lz400 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 23:11:19 +0000

Top 200 that work partially in public. A good example is Mitchell Hashimoto. Works open source, uses AI a lot and writes about it. Next gen AI will learn from the lessons people like him share

New comment by lz400 in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

lz400 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:06:29 +0000

I mean, having a curated dataset of the works and posts of the top 200 coders in the world (at least the public ones) is not very difficult. I’m sure these articles like the one in OP will be very easy to mark as “high value training data”. I think you’re letting your bias blind you

New comment by lz400 in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

lz400 — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 08:59:03 +0000

>Hmm... How will it filter out those by the dumbest coders in the world?

if you know, and I know, and the guys at openai and anthropic know... not a big leap that the models will know too? many datasets are curated and labeled by humans

New comment by lz400 in "How to effectively write quality code with AI"

lz400 — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 01:17:07 +0000

The best thing about this is that AI bots will read, train on and digest the million "how to write with AI" posts that are being written right now by some of the smartest coders in the world and the next gen AI will incorporate all of this, making them ironically unnecessary.

New comment by lz400 in "Apple to soon take up to 30% cut from all Patreon creators in iOS app"

lz400 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:31:10 +0000

Makes me think of the concept of involution in Chinese business and how they understand all of this very differently, and how difficult it is to compete because of that.

New comment by lz400 in "Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing"

lz400 — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 01:30:22 +0000

I do a lot of data processing and my tool of choice is polars. It's blazing fast and has (like pandas) a lot of very useful functions that aren't in SQL or are awkward to emulate in SQL. I can also just do Python functions if I want something that's not offered.

Please sell DuckDB to me. I don't know it very well but my (possibly wrong) intuition is that even giving equal performance, it's going to drop me to the awkwardness of SQL for data processing.

New comment by lz400 in "What is the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for you?"

lz400 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 01:20:23 +0000

This is not to me but a friend of mine was climbing Mt Fuji in _winter_ (this is a serious thing you need to be prepared for, alpine climbing with lots of snow and ice) when he slipped and started sliding down the mountain out of control.

When he was about to fall to his death a father and son that happened to be there in a struck of luck managed to grab him and save his life. My friend had banged a few rocks in the way down so his leg was fractured and they had to help him down for hours.

They saved his life and risk theirs to ensure he had the best chance. They visited my friend in the hospital where he was grateful and teary eyed. And then the father and son asked him for money, straight up. My friend of course agreed on an amount to them, all in all, he didn't know how to repay them anyway and this was oddly simple. I found everything heroic and strange at the same time but a good story.

New comment by lz400 in "The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Partner on Sora"

lz400 — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 06:16:34 +0000

In the meanwhile...

Google should demand another $1bn from Disney to crush the lawsuit

https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/disney-hits-google-with-ce...

New comment by lz400 in "IBM to acquire Confluent"

lz400 — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 10:26:38 +0000

I have similar stories, I showed the Confluent consultants a projection of their Kafka quote vs Kinesis and it was like 10x, even they were confused. The ingress/egress costs are insane. I think they just do very deep discounts to certain customers. The product is good but if you pay full ticket it probably doesn't make sense.

New comment by lz400 in "Crypto hoarders dump tokens as shares tumble"

lz400 — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 01:32:43 +0000

If you see the bitcoin charts, price has gone up a lot in the last few years but volume has tanked. Do I read this right that now crypto is basically a smaller market where a bunch of whales scam a ever dwindling but never completely disappearing flow of fools and marks?

New comment by lz400 in "Tesla's European sales tumble nearly 50% in October"

lz400 — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 01:29:59 +0000

What would it take to reconnect there? evidence that FSD and robots are vaporware?

New comment by lz400 in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

lz400 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 23:54:59 +0000

It would be funny if what you get from a read only human brain is a sort of memento guy who has no capacity to remember anything or follow a conversation... kind of like an LLM!

New comment by lz400 in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

lz400 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 01:22:01 +0000

I'm not an expert but as far I understand, plasticity is central to most complex operations of the brain and is likely to be involved in anything more complex than instinctive reactions. I'm happy to be corrected but it is my understanding that if you're thinking for a while on the same problem and establishing chains of reasoning, you are creating new connections and to me that means it's fundamental in the process of thinking.

New comment by lz400 in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

lz400 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 07:24:01 +0000

I mean, _we_ probably can't think with our wetware on a read-only substrate. It doesn't establish it as essential, just that the only sure example in nature of thought doesn't work that way.

New comment by lz400 in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

lz400 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:29:58 +0000

>If we took your brain and perfectly digitized it on read-only hardware, would you expect to still “think”?

it wouldn't work probably, brains constantly alter themselves by forming new connections. Learning is inseparable from our intelligence.

New comment by lz400 in "How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise"

lz400 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 14:56:05 +0000

Even if/when the bubble pops, I don't think NVIDIA is even close to need rescuing or being in trouble. They might end being worth 2 trillion instead of 5 but they're still selling GPUs nobody else knows how to make that power one of the most important technologies in the world. Also, all their other divisions.

The .com bubble didn't stop the internet or e-commerce, they still won, revolutioned everything, etc. etc. Just because there's a bubble it doesn't mean AI won't be successful. It will be, almost for sure. We've all used it, it's truly useful and transformative. Let's not miss the forest for the trees.

New comment by lz400 in "Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study"

lz400 — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 03:16:07 +0000

Very interesting story. If I may ask, looking back, do you blame Montessori for the “lack of real world preparation” or do you think rather that it was the regular school that had a bad system and you were in a better one and should have stayed there? If you had stayed there until uni do you think you’d adapted well to higher edu?

New comment by lz400 in "Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study"

lz400 — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:44:45 +0000

I want to offer a different data point. I took my daughter to a Montessori-adjacent school for 3 years. It's not Montessori exactly and they didn't advertise as such but they had a different European name attached to it that is downstream from Montessori. They had multi-age education, stressed in children directed learning and individual growth, they didn't have exams, etc.

I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where:

- No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon.

- Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true.

- The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc.

I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.

New comment by lz400 in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

lz400 — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 01:21:46 +0000

That's not correct. It counts the total number of school shootings. Some of those shootings had no victims. The total of students shot is also provided with some more elaboration with charts here.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2...

As you can see your number of 13 makes no sense, there were 200-300 students shot (!)

New comment by lz400 in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

lz400 — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 17:32:10 +0000

I think there are actually more school shootings than mass shootings because mass requires ~4 victims and school doesn't. There were ~330 shootings in 2024. 70 people died. 200 wounded.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/us-school-shootings-2...