Hacker News: malisper

New comment by malisper in "Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust"

malisper — Tue, 05 May 2026 02:38:00 +0000

> what looks like a massive undertaking for vibe coding

fwiw, I suspect it's less of an undertaking than you may think. I've been playing with AI to rewrite Postgres in Rust[0] over the past couple of weeks and I found the AI to be exceptional at doing rewrites. Having an existing codebase you can reference prevents a lot of the problems you have with vibecoding. You have an existing architecture that works well and have a test suite that you can test against

Over the course of a month I've gone from nothing to passing over 95% of the Postgres test suite. Given Jarred built Bun, I bet he'll be able to go much faster

[0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

New comment by malisper in "Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months"

malisper — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:29:24 +0000

I've been working on a project to build a new Postgres based database in Rust[0]. I'm four weeks in and have 93% of the Postgres test suite passing. I've found agents to have worked really well for this as I have an existing codebase that has good architecture that I can point my agents at. It's also easy to debug as I can diff what my agents are doing and what Postgres is doing.

I've had to get multiple codex accounts, but there was a brief period of time where I tried API usage to see how expensive it would be. In about an hour I spent $650 of credits. I had codex estimate how much I would be spending if I was doing pure API usage and it estimated around $10k/week.

For context Postgres is 1M lines of C code. It's looking like pgrust will come out as less lines of code than Postgres and at peak I was adding over 100k lines of code in a day. I would estimate it would take a team of 5 software engineers at least 3 years to get to where I got in a month with a couple Codex subscriptions.

[0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

New comment by malisper in "Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode"

malisper — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:07:40 +0000

Since there's a lot of questions about what this means, let me explain.

Anthropic has two different products that are relevant here: the Claude API and Claude Code. The Claude API has usage based pricing. The more you use, the more you pay. With Claude Code, you can get a monthly subscription which gives you a fixed amount of usage. Comparing equivalent token generation between the Claude API and Claude Code, Claude Code with a subscription is much cheaper.

When it comes to third party products such as OpenClaw and OpenCode, Anthropic has made it clear those products should be using the Claude API and not the internal Claude Code APIs. OpenClaw and OpenCode have both been using the internal Claude Code APIs as when a user has a Claude Code subscription, the internal Claude Code API gives you tokens at a much cheaper rate than the Claude API. Presumably Anthropic makes Claude Code cheaper than the Claude API because they are willing to give users a discount for them to use Claude Code vs a competing product such as OpenCode.

It looks like until recently OpenCode tried to get around Anthropic's requirements by offering "plugins" in OpenCode that would allow users to use their Claude Code subscription in OpenCode. This PR mentions as much at[0][1]:

> There are plugins that allow you to use your Claude Pro/Max models with OpenCode. Anthropic explicitly prohibits this.

> Previous versions of OpenCode came bundled with these plugins but that is no longer the case as of 1.3.0

This PR seems to be in response to Anthropic threatening OpenCode with legal action if they keep using the internal Claude Code APIs.

  [0] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0L310
  [1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/pull/18186/changes#diff-b5d5affc6941bf7bb19805cc8f556cd1b9ae73ffd99e520120700536b166f8c0R321

New comment by malisper in "AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out"

malisper — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:58:24 +0000

Three consecutive months of decline starts to look more like a trend. Unless you think there's a transient issue causing the decline, something fundamental has changed

New comment by malisper in "AI Adoption Rates Starting to Flatten Out"

malisper — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 16:51:58 +0000

From the chart, the percentage of companies using AI has been going down over the past couple of months

That's a massive deal because the AI companies today are valued on the assumption that they'll 10x their revenue over the next couple of years. If their revenue growth starts to slow down, their valuations will change to reflect that

New comment by malisper in "Mixpanel Security Breach"

malisper — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 21:08:47 +0000

To be fair to OpenAI, their privacy policy[0] does provide some detail. They don't mention Mixpanel explicitly, but OpenAI does mention they share your information with third-party web analytics services:

> To assist us in meeting business operations needs and to perform certain services and functions, we may disclose Personal Data to vendors and service providers, including providers of ... web analytics services ...

OpenAI likely provides this disclosure to comply with US state privacy laws, but it's inaccurate to say they didn't disclose that they won't share your information

[0] https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy/

New comment by malisper in "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack"

malisper — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:40:14 +0000

Not exactly. Step E in the blog post:

> Gemini exfiltrates the data via the browser subagent: Gemini invokes a browser subagent per the prompt injection, instructing the subagent to open the dangerous URL that contains the user's credentials.

fulfills the requirements for being able to change external state

New comment by malisper in "The Leaderboard Illusion"

malisper — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:55:29 +0000

> Also, ARC AGI reported they've been unable to independently replicate OpenAI's claimed breakthrough score from December

Can you elaborate on this? Where did ARC AGI report that? From ARC AGI[0]:

> ARC Prize Foundation was invited by OpenAI to join their “12 Days Of OpenAI.” Here, we shared the results of their first o3 model, o3-preview, on ARC-AGI. It set a new high-water mark for test-time compute, applying near-max resources to the ARC-AGI benchmark.

> We announced that o3-preview (low compute) scored 76% on ARC-AGI-1 Semi Private Eval set and was eligible for our public leaderboard. When we lifted the compute limits, o3-preview (high compute) scored 88%. This was a clear demonstration of what the model could do with unrestricted test-time resources. Both scores were verified to be state of the art.

That makes it sound like ARC AGI were the ones running the original test with o3

What they say they haven't been able to reproduce is o3-preview's performance with the production versions of o3. They attribute this to the production versions being given less compute than the versions they ran in the test

[0] https://arcprize.org/blog/analyzing-o3-with-arc-agi

New comment by malisper in "Gemini 2.5"

malisper — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:10:35 +0000

Other models aren't able to solve it so there's something else happening besides it being in the training data. You can also vary the problem and give it a number like 85 instead of 65 and Gemini is still able to properly reason through the problem

New comment by malisper in "Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model"

malisper — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:28:56 +0000

if the three numbers are a, b, and c, then either a+b=c, a+c=b, or b+c=a

New comment by malisper in "Gemini 2.5"

malisper — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:17:48 +0000

I've been using a math puzzle as a way to benchmark the different models. The math puzzle took me ~3 days to solve with a computer. A math major I know took about a day to solve it by hand.

Gemini 2.5 is the first model I tested that was able to solve it and it one-shotted it. I think it's not an exaggeration to say LLMs are now better than 95+% of the population at mathematical reasoning.

For those curious the riddle is: There's three people in a circle. Each person has a positive integer floating above their heads, such that each person can see the other two numbers but not his own. The sum of two of the numbers is equal to the third. The first person is asked for his number, and he says that he doesn't know. The second person is asked for his number, and he says that he doesn't know. The third person is asked for his number, and he says that he doesn't know. Then, the first person is asked for his number again, and he says: 65. What is the product of the three numbers?

New comment by malisper in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

malisper — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:30:56 +0000

Because Google's revenue is $2M/employee while a startup's will be $0/employee

New comment by malisper in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

malisper — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:29:55 +0000

That's already priced in

New comment by malisper in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

malisper — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:28:14 +0000

The 50k/yr value of the 1% equity already prices in future dilution. Just because the equity is going to be less than 1% in the future doesn't mean it's not worth $50k/yr today

New comment by malisper in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

malisper — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:26:50 +0000

> As a founding engineer, I do almost the same amount of work as the founder (e.g. 90%), and get only 5% or less of the reward.

If you believe you're doing 90% the work of a founder and getting paid 5%, then you should be an actual founder and get paid 20x as much as you be as a founding engineer

New comment by malisper in "1% Equity for Founding Engineers Is BS"

malisper — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:59:01 +0000

If you do the Math, 1% seems fair. The typical YC company raises a seed round at a valuation of around $20M. 1% of that with standard vesting terms equates to $50k/yr.

If the typical founding engineer equity was 5%, that would equate to $250k/yr which would mean most startups would have greater total comp than Google.

New comment by malisper in "Kelly Can't Fail"

malisper — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 01:35:12 +0000

I need to do some Math, but I wonder if there's a better strategy than Kelly betting. An assumption made for Kelly betting is the bets are independent of each other. That's not the case in the problem given.

After making a bet, you gain information about the contents of the rest of the deck of cards. I could see it being possible to do better by pricing in that information into your bet.

New comment by malisper in "I tried every top email marketing tool"

malisper — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 20:23:21 +0000

It's interesting to note none of the email tools I'm most familiar with are mentioned by the author. It's clear the author is a different demographic from me given they said they want to stay under $200/mo. Some of the tools I hear companies use the most are:

  - Customer.io
  - Iterable
  - Braze
  - Marketo
  - Salesforce Marketing Cloud

My understanding is Customer.io is what most startups use these days with larger companies using one of the other four.

New comment by malisper in "Evaluating a class of infinite sums in closed form"

malisper — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 17:26:57 +0000

This is pretty neat! I was toying around with the problem and it appears you can use generating functions to derive the same sequence of operations. If you start with:

  G(x) = 1 + x + x^2 + ... = 1/(1-x)

The coefficients of this polynomial is the sequence (0^0, 1^0, 2^0, ...)

If you take the derivative of G(x) and multiply by x you get:

  x * G'(x) = x + 2*x^2 + 3*x^3 + ... = x * d/dx 1/(1-x) = x/(1-x)^2

The coefficients of this polynomial is the sequence (0^1, 1^1, 2^1, ...). If you repeat this step, you get a polynomial whose coefficients are (0^2, 1^2, 2^2, ...) and if you do this operation N times, you can get a closed form of a polynomial whose coefficients are (0^N, 1^N, 2^N, ...).

The infinite sum converges for -1 < x < 1. If you set x=1/c, you get the infinite sum

  0^N/c^0 + 1^N/c^1 + 2^N/c^2 + ...

which is exactly the sum we are trying to solve for. This means you solve any infinite sum of the form given by taking the derivative of 1/(1-x) N times while multiplying by x each time. Then plug in x=1/c at the end.

New comment by malisper in "Solving Probabilistic Tic-Tac-Toe"

malisper — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:19:40 +0000

This is accounted for because the second equation looks at sequences of two moves and not just one. After a sequence of two moves there are two possibilities. Either the state has changed or it has not. This is reflected in the left and right side of the second equation.