Hacker News: mahogany

New comment by mahogany in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

mahogany — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:27:41 +0000

Foot racing was never a broad source of income for humans. There is a massive difference. The question will be: what economic value can humans produce in the future with AI tools? There is a chance that the answer is "not much". That is the scary part.

New comment by mahogany in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

mahogany — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:59:04 +0000

The internet did not lead to a rapid diminishing of human economic value across the economy. Whether AI will kill us all is a distraction. Think more practically. Think about the future of economic value given a scenario where AI is capable of everything a human can do. Our entire society is built around economic value. Our individual survival and wellbeing is based on it. What happens when you are not needed by those who hold the resources?

New comment by mahogany in "Attention is all you have"

mahogany — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:24:48 +0000

Some people will quibble with the definition, but I agree with the spirit of this. I have pruned all my web traffic down to a few sites, and Hacker News and Reddit are the two that remain where I feel that pull for my attention. Hacker News is better than, say, TikTok, but I still find myself reaching for it to distract me from other things in my life. It is "easy". Like 24 hour news, the FOMO is still strong (you can always refresh and find some novelty), and reading a bunch of internet comments is a guaranteed cheap fix for dopamine (or whatever).

When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.

New comment by mahogany in "I am often wrong"

mahogany — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:15:28 +0000

I've only used the Claude TUI, but it is extremely sluggish. It takes 1-2 seconds minimum to launch on a MBP M4 with 48 GB of memory. I have also encountered plenty of display-related bugs that you can find documented all over the internet. If you had to group this into a software quality bucket, it certainly would not fall into "good". Maybe "mid".

New comment by mahogany in "Real-SWE: Benchmarking AI models on private, real-world, enterprise codebases"

mahogany — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 12:58:56 +0000

Don't you need to run each model several times and take some average since their outputs can change for a fixed prompt? How do you test for that?

New comment by mahogany in "Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]"

mahogany — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:22:54 +0000

The thread is not really about what's legal; the topic is integrity. It sounds like, based on the fact that you wouldn't do it yourself, you agree that it's not a good thing to do.

New comment by mahogany in "Asynchronous I/O in DuckDB: Work, Thread, Work"

mahogany — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:52:58 +0000

Note that SET memory_limit is a soft limit and can be completely ignored for some tasks, so this wouldn’t be the same as having a limit on physical memory.

New comment by mahogany in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

mahogany — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:52:34 +0000

Taking Anthropic’s whole AI framing to its obvious logical end: if this is true as written, why was Jarred needed at all in this loop? It seems like an utter waste of time for a highly paid Anthropic employee. Can’t Anthropic have a top level agent that is looking at all interesting unsolved problems and orchestrating subagents via the same process?

New comment by mahogany in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

mahogany — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 01:28:55 +0000

The difference now is about the scale. What percentage of the labor force do you think were “computers”? It is not comparable to a potential disruption of huge swathes of the workforce in a short time span. That’s what people are worried about.

New comment by mahogany in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

mahogany — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:27:07 +0000

> No, I think people will demand to not live in poverty

What about other countries in the world where people... live in poverty?

> Capitalism allows people to escape poverty by personal effort

Isn't it possible that there is a future where AI makes the average value of human labor (or, "personal effort") plummet? Perhaps capitalism will lose some of its edge against a technology like this.

New comment by mahogany in "SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?"

mahogany — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:47:05 +0000

The comment is making fun of a Claude-ism where it becomes super “honest” about stuff.

It’s a joke but there is an underlying real effect where this type of language is psychologically manipulative and I would guess makes people believe LLMs output more than if it didn’t use “honest” (or “load bearing” or whatever super serious important sounding word).

New comment by mahogany in "Ask HN: Does it still make sense to write code by hand?"

mahogany — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 01:57:16 +0000

You may be right but it seems like a different type of tool when it does the thinking for you. I feel like your analogy is closer to a good autocomplete rather than an agentic LLM loop. Agents feel like a genuinely different technology.

Maybe it’s more like an HVAC installer has a tool which tells them where to position the furnace. After many years, will they forget why the furnace should go there? Or maybe it’s like the HVAC installer has a tool which auto attaches the pipes. Hopefully it attached cold to cold and hot to hot, but the HVAC installer hasn’t had to do this in a while so they kind of forgot how to do it manually, and so will just trust the tool.

New comment by mahogany in "Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:34:38 +0000

I was primarily pushing back on anti-screens in its absolute sense, and being somewhat pedantic. However, I largely agree with you, especially considering how screens are most often used today.

New comment by mahogany in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 20:24:02 +0000

If it were a human (going off of memory as it has been a while), they would probably be using mathscinet and their university library to obtain copies of these papers online. Many old papers are digitized and available by these means. I’m sure the AI companies have it all easily accessible and/or the entirety of mathscinet is in the training data. The “personal correspondence” is possibly lifting from another paper or journal but yeah that is a bit odd that they wouldn’t source where they lifted that from directly.

I can’t say if the citations are accurate because I didn’t check.

New comment by mahogany in "Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:08:05 +0000

I am skeptical of using AI for a tutor and would not give it to my kid, but I find the staunch no-screens sentiment equally ridiculous and similar to saying no-books.

Do you have kids? Are you telling me that you and the other parent spend (or spent) 100% of your time with your 5 year old? We spend a ton of time with our kid but also he watches educational TV. Unless you are privileged enough to have a nanny, having your kid constantly with another person is unrealistic to me. Then it is a matter of what they will do alone, and I don't see how a screen is inherently worse than other solo activities. I played video games and tinkered with DOS when I was a young kid and learned a lot, which led to my current career.

New comment by mahogany in "Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:57:22 +0000

Screens are a medium. I don't see how they are inherently bad, although it is probably correct that screens carry the most bad content out of any information medium. But my kid has learned how crayons and instruments are made by watching Mr Rogers, and I simply don't see how he would have learned that via some other medium in the same amount of detail (visual and auditory together). He has seen jazz and classical musicians explain and play their instruments. He has seen how adults interact with each other and respect one another through Mr Rogers and (older) Sesame Street. I've then seen this translate into his real world behaviors. You think that is fundamentally bad?

New comment by mahogany in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:53:01 +0000

You would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?

New comment by mahogany in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:42:03 +0000

> Just run both pgrust and postgres and compare the output.

The space of inputs and outputs is infinite. You can't prove programs are the same by "just" testing a bunch inputs.

New comment by mahogany in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

mahogany — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:37:25 +0000

Of course, if the rewrite is all of those things, then it seems like a good option. The whole point is how do we know if it actually is better.

New comment by mahogany in "I'm opening VSCode less and less every day"

mahogany — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:55:37 +0000

Genuine question - do you feel that you understand a code change well enough by only viewing diffs, enough to push the Claude code as “your own”? I can see this for some types of PRs but for anything that is relatively complex or touches multiple files, I personally have to open an editor and navigate through the code paths to really grok if an AI’s (or a human’s for that matter) change is correct.

Is this something people widely vary on? I suspect a lot of people are not like me given that I do see people saying things such as “I rarely use my ide/editor any more” with AI, hence my question to you. Maybe I’m just bad at keeping the code base all in my head.

I do agree with you that I feel that I am coding less myself and I do miss that for sure. But the job demands otherwise.