Hacker News: msylvest

New comment by msylvest in "OpenAI’s accidental attack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"

msylvest — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 06:41:17 +0000

I have had a lot of sympathy for this statement, LLMs could lower the bar to use of formal methods. But thinking it over in the context of BDD-driven development I am no longer really that sure. Compare two scenarios: A) from a specification an AI agent develops a usual piece of code along with a BDD-style testsuite passed and B) same AI also delivers a formal test (Lean/Rocq..) and successfully executes and passes it.

Will human judgment really consider scenario B) more credible than A) ? By so much that it is worth the effort ?

New comment by msylvest in "Ask HN: How many of you hold an amateur radio license in your country?"

msylvest — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:21:05 +0000

I had a VHF+UHF bands, no morse, in Denmark half a century ago. Dropped it after a few years.

New comment by msylvest in "A standard protocol to handle and discard low-effort, AI-Generated pull requests"

msylvest — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:39:27 +0000

Around 1990 I attended ISO/JTC1 meetings generating standards for data communication. I still recall my surprise over the heated arguments over these words between the UK and the US delegations. (I'm from Denmark). In particular 'shall' and 'should' meant different things in English and American languages. ISO's first standard, ISO 1, states that ISO Standards shall be written in English so we had to do that, US delegation too. Similarly Scott Bradner stated in RFC 2219 how American conventions should be followed for future IETF STDs.

So I'm confident that the word 'shall' has a strong meaning in English; whether it has too in American legalese I cannot tell.

New comment by msylvest in "What happened to all the gold Spain got from the New World? (1985)"

msylvest — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:46:36 +0000

Some of all this gold is still on display in Spain. Earlier this year my wife and I visited Granada in southern Spain. Vast amounts, truely impressive, of gold are exposed in its Cathedral and in the burial place of Emperor Karl (Charles/Carlos) and his wife, Isabella. Alhambra is still the #1 sight there but if you can spare the time, do visit these two places. They are co-located in central Granada.

New comment by msylvest in "SWI-Prolog 10.0.0 Released"

msylvest — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 09:49:55 +0000

I learned about SWI-Prolog around 1994. Amazing that it is still available & updated - even with its original name :-)

New comment by msylvest in "Show HN: Timelinize – Privately organize your own data from everywhere, locally"

msylvest — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 02:06:34 +0000

Would https://litestream.io/ perhaps help?

New comment by msylvest in "Show HN: JavaScript-free (X)HTML Includes"

msylvest — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 08:24:07 +0000

I remember admiring the intent of XSLT when it was born. And how difficult it turned out to be to write; using XML framing makes it terse/verbose/arcane, eg. when compared to the compactness of regex/subs.

It is 2025 and now we've got LLMs to write our code - that may actually be a strong argument in favor of keeping XSL(T): It is a useful browser mechanism and LLMs makes it easier to harvest.

Does anybody have experience with LLM-generated XSL(T)?

New comment by msylvest in "HAM radio operators receive signals from Voyager 1 on Dwingeloo telescope"

msylvest — Fri, 20 Dec 2024 04:28:25 +0000

And Message Authentication Code

New comment by msylvest in "Something weird is happening with LLMs and Chess"

msylvest — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 10:23:26 +0000

Calling out to some chess-playing-function would be a deviation from the pure LLM paradigm. As a medium-level chess player I have walked through some of the LLM victories (ChatGPT 3-5-turbo-instruction); I find it is not very good at winning by mate - it misses several chances of forced mate. But forced mate is what chess engines are good at - can be calculated by exhaustive search of valid moves in a given board position.

So I'm arguing that it doesn't call out - it should gotten better advice if it did.

But I remain amazed that OP does not report any illegal moves made any of by LLMs. Assuming training material includes introductory texts of chess playing and a lot of chess games in textual notation (e.g. PGN) I would expect at least occasional illegal moves since the rules are defined in terms of board positions. And board positions are a non-trivial function of the set of moves made in a game. Does an LLM silently perform a transformation of the set of moves to a board position? Can LLMs, during training, read and understand board-position diagrams of chess books?

New comment by msylvest in "New Usage-Based Pricing Model: ZeroTier Essential"

msylvest — Thu, 01 Aug 2024 14:33:17 +0000

Thank you for writing this up. I'm an 'existing free user' and blocked the same way from the dashboard.

New comment by msylvest in "Notepad Tab"

msylvest — Tue, 28 May 2024 11:09:32 +0000

Neat! Couldn't but ask myself why the OP should need Ruby...

New comment by msylvest in "Ask HN: Hosting a CLI Tool via SSH?"

msylvest — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 08:00:42 +0000

I have not tried this out but https://github.com/charmbracelet/wish - a companion to soft-serve - could be helpful to you

New comment by msylvest in "SI Units for Request Rate"

msylvest — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 17:03:52 +0000

Within the area of viscosities reciprocal seconds is an accepted standard unit

New comment by msylvest in "Show HN: Biblos – Semantic Bible Embedded Vector Search and Claude LLM"

msylvest — Sat, 28 Oct 2023 02:05:45 +0000

Some years ago I was wondering what the words 'There is a balm in Gilead' means. Spent hours googling, both in English and Danish (my native lang). Found Jer 8:22 "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?" and inferred that Jeremiah must have associated Gilead's balm with (glorified?) healing processes.

So as a test I asked this service 'what is balm in Gilead' and it returned 4 other Bible sentences. Pressed 'Summarize', which unfolded comments on the 4 sentences and a summary of

'Overall, these passages present Gilead as a contested but fertile region east of the Jordan river. It was prized territory that was given to several Israelite tribes and seen as a divine provision. The name "Gilead" means "hill of testimony" referring to its choice lands. So the metaphor of "balm in Gilead" signifies the healing, restoration, and provision God can bring even in difficult times.'

My key observations:

1) The overall summary highly matches my own interpretations

2) Jer 8:22 was not referred - possibly because it does not define the concept, it just refers to its meaning

3) Inferring the summary from the 4 sentences is not easy but apparently AI can do so

I have a question on the generation of the overall summary: Is it based on on the 4 sentences only or does it include other biblical text behind the scenes?

New comment by msylvest in "Intel won't back down on chip ID feature (1999)"

msylvest — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 20:23:44 +0000

In those days I worked for Intel in a branch in Copenhagen, Denmark. Doing Ethernet stuff, pretty far from the CPU dev and fab running the company. Incidentally Phil Zimmermann, maker of PGP, was in town, giving a lecture on privacy. I had the chance of asking him of his opinion; he reflected and said: "I think Intel has made a mistake." I agreed but didn't expect Intel mgmt to take action on this. And for a year I was right. In 2000, the serial numbers were quietly removed. Just to be re-added some years later....

New comment by msylvest in "Denmark not offering second Covid booster shot to healthy adults under 50"

msylvest — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 06:24:28 +0000

Denmark is still offering boosters - in a prioritized manner. First those aged 85+, second 50+, even below that if exposed by diseases. From what is written I would expect (third) general 50- boosters to occur during winter if needed.

New comment by msylvest in "Major Danish newspaper apologises for only covering government Covid narrative"

msylvest — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 19:12:19 +0000

Right - I must have missed that

New comment by msylvest in "Major Danish newspaper apologises for only covering government Covid narrative"

msylvest — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 11:18:50 +0000

As a native Dane I can say that this translation is pretty good. What Ekstra Bladet is going to do with its recognition still has to be seen. I think that it has a point - the way vaccines have been used in DK is good but not good enough to control contamination. And this story has not been told by the authorities.