Hacker News: omcnoe

New comment by omcnoe in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

omcnoe — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:27:33 +0000

To be fair to GitHub, "GitHub" Actions is just Azure DevOps Pipelines wearing a mask. Which I think explains a lot about it's quality as a feature. It was brought in as a rushed copy-paste of the existing Azure DevOps feature very quickly post acquisition.

I have to regularly use Azure DevOps and the whole platform is painful, and now is rotting on the vine. I hear there is internal strife at Microsoft between Azure DevOps and GitHub products.

New comment by omcnoe in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

omcnoe — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:17:21 +0000

Devcontainers (I know it's not a full VM, but it's most prominent version of this "isolated development environment" concept) wouldn't fully protect you against this. Github credentials are automatically pulled into the container. If you are using other cloud services that need to be accessed within the container, this cred stealer will grab their creds too.

It would limit the blast radius, which at least is an improvement.

New comment by omcnoe in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

omcnoe — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:10:45 +0000

These malicious packages are being caught by the authors, and by automated package security scanners, not just by end users. npm should start setting this 7 day cooldown as default.

New comment by omcnoe in "Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message"

omcnoe — Mon, 11 May 2026 19:13:46 +0000

I’d honestly expect to see regulatory intervention if they tried this.

New comment by omcnoe in "OpenAI’s WebRTC problem"

omcnoe — Sat, 09 May 2026 08:20:49 +0000

An eventual goal is likely to allow interacting with the LLM directly via audio tokens in input/output skipping tts and stt completely.

New comment by omcnoe in "Care homes and hotels in Japan shut as expansion strategy unravels"

omcnoe — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:51:19 +0000

This really is a great blogpost, I'm really glad you shared it.

New comment by omcnoe in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

omcnoe — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:19:51 +0000

Yeah there is some degree of awkwardness created by the interaction, but I think it’s less about needing specific libraries to map well and more about getting a good understanding of what the interop rules are, and what the shape of the underlying generated output actually looks like.

C# interoperability loosens guarantees (particularly immutability) that F# code normally relies on. There are surprising limits that come up in generics because of how they map to C#.

New comment by omcnoe in "I built a Game Boy emulator in F#"

omcnoe — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:14:03 +0000

Fable is great but it has a surprising number of these hidden behaviour changes that are really hard to detect when writing code against it.

New comment by omcnoe in "Bugs Rust won't catch"

omcnoe — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:30:07 +0000

My understanding is the uutils development process involved extensive testing against the behaviour of the original utilities, including preserving bugs.

New comment by omcnoe in "Asahi Linux Progress Linux 7.0"

omcnoe — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 14:42:51 +0000

I think there is also the added challenge that ARM macs are a moving target, and Apple has less than no desire to provide any kind of stability or support for Asahi Linux. Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time, Apple will make future changes that are really awkward for Asahi and will not care one bit because they can do the compat work on their own software.

New comment by omcnoe in "Amateur armed with ChatGPT solves an Erdős problem"

omcnoe — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:39:00 +0000

Model output reflects on your input, and the effect is self reinforcing over the course of a whole conversation. Color you add around a problem influences the model behavior.

A "dumber"/vague framing will get a less insightful solution, or possibly no solution at all.

I don't even necessarily think this is a critical flaw - in general it's just the model tuning it's responses to your style of prompt. People utilize LLMs for all kinds of different tasks, and the "modes of thought" for responding to an Erdos problem versus software engineering versus a more human/soft skills topic are all very different. I think the "prompt sensitivity" issue is just coming bundled along with this general behavior.

New comment by omcnoe in "Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era"

omcnoe — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:39:07 +0000

Does non-artificial intelligence have clean instruction/data separation?

New comment by omcnoe in "Changes to GitHub Copilot individual plans"

omcnoe — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 02:00:37 +0000

I found the Copilot harness generally more buggy/disfunctional. After seeing a "long" agent response get dropped (still counts against usage of course) too many times I gave up on the product.

It doesn't matter how competent the actual model is, or how long it's able to operate independently, if the harness can't handle it and drops responses. Made me think are they even using their own harness?

At least Anthropic is obviously dogfooding on Claude Code which keeps it mostly functional.

New comment by omcnoe in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

omcnoe — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:52:38 +0000

Is Composer 2 a bad model because Cursor are bad at training models, or because they are compute constrained? This deal will provide the answer to that question.

New comment by omcnoe in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

omcnoe — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:50:24 +0000

I think it also represents a bet that in some sense Cursor's model capabilities are resource limited rather than talent limited. If that's true, $60B will end up being a bargain. If not true, well it's an expensive lesson but that's the nature of things.

New comment by omcnoe in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

omcnoe — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:47:02 +0000

Problem is basically, that if the option works out (Cursor truly has the talent to train a frontier model on SpaceX's infrastructure, and were simply lacking the infra before) the fair price would be way way more than $60B.

OpenAI tried to acquire Windsurf last year for $3B and couldn't.

New comment by omcnoe in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

omcnoe — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 01:41:01 +0000

It's true that Cursor doesn't have their own frontier models, but they are training their own models. They just aren't at frontier level yet. The $60B/$10B deal looks like a bet that this is a capital/GPU constraint rather than a capability one.

New comment by omcnoe in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

omcnoe — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:30:51 +0000

The problem is, the ways that it's great are hard to put into words and explain for someone unfamiliar with the game. At least, not in a succinct way. At the most basic level it's just block pushing puzzles ("Sokoban").

New comment by omcnoe in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

omcnoe — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:26:51 +0000

Trying to copy is a bit harsh, but he has credited it as an inspiration for what's possible within the Sokoban format. I believe he was a playtester for SSR before it released, mid The Witness development.

New comment by omcnoe in "A simplified model of Fil-C"

omcnoe — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:35:36 +0000

If you can correctly add all the required explicit bounds checks in C what do you need Fil-C for?