Hacker News: prpl

New comment by prpl in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

prpl — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:39:49 +0000

sure it’s not tricky. But everybody does it different and OpenAI couldn’t even be bothered to do it right when benchmarking their models

New comment by prpl in "Humans missed 1 in 3 threats approving AI agent commands across 40k game runs"

prpl — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:10:35 +0000

For one, I’ve been working on a generic sandbox environment

github.com/brianv0/formwork

You should be easily able to hide/lock down files, network, and MCP tools from an agent and it shouldn’t be up to the agent.

New comment by prpl in "There Will Come Soft Rains (1950) [pdf]"

prpl — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:49:24 +0000

It’s been a very long time, but I read Alas, Babylon in middle school.

I remember aspects of their modern existence also being problematic (IIRC a house in florida with lots of windows doesn’t fare well without AC)

New comment by prpl in "Boris Cherny on Trying to Get Claude Code to Rewrite the Claude App"

prpl — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 03:27:30 +0000

I’ve been formalizing behaviors to requirements and building more end to end tests to verify them. In reality, every requirement needs a verification element. Secondly, building traceability in your unit/integration tests helps “keep it honest” about how much it has built and verified.

Mostly I’m borrowing heavily from model based systems engineering and adapting it to some form of constitutional spec driven development.

New comment by prpl in "NSF pilots 4-year PhDs with industry research placements"

prpl — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:15:58 +0000

My impression is that many of the indian engineering schools are some form of trade school and it shows. A lot of people are very good at churning out things, but they vastly prefer to use well defined tools for their trade and do a lot of work impassionately. Taking the creative path or even reflecting on failures isn’t natural.

On the other side of things, you have PhDs coming out of the US with too many ideas and the inability to deal with basics such as sprint planning and CI/CD.

Not sure if this will help, but I would love it for the Colleges of Sciences peoples instead of a postdoc.

New comment by prpl in "JEP 540: Simple JSON API (Now in Incubator)"

prpl — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:34:53 +0000

Yeah you could go with just Number though, and then keep almost everything a BigInteger/BigDecimal under the covers (or dynamically choose the correct class)

New comment by prpl in "New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium"

prpl — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:20:15 +0000

Are you being serious or sarcastic?

New comment by prpl in "Knoppix"

prpl — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:37:23 +0000

I built a 40 (later 80) node cluster with clusterknoppix ~2006 to run a bunch of physics simulations off of old library computers after I replaced a bunch of PSU fans. Kept my cubicle toasty until we moved them into a random subterranean room I think was used for some early nuclear research at university.

New comment by prpl in "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"

prpl — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:31:58 +0000

Salesforce runs Salesforce on postgres with LSM:

https://vldb.org/cidrdb/2026/a-multi-tenant-relational-oltp-...

New comment by prpl in "Israel targeted Gaza children resulting in genocide, UN inquiry says"

prpl — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:35:22 +0000

you've had an account for four years, and _this_ is your comment?

New comment by prpl in "Job application asked for my SAT scores"

prpl — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 22:16:51 +0000

SAT isn’t an IQ test, and probably all sorts of people took it before they had cultural awareness or a diagnosis that would have lead to different testing conditions had it been taken after diagnosis, let alone the fact that test scores are not comparable.

GPAs similarly not comparable over large time ranges, schools, or degrees without normalization you can’t get.

New comment by prpl in "AI outperforms law professors in Stanford Law study"

prpl — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 01:00:21 +0000

there’s really no limit to how many times and ways you can review something with AI, except dollars.

New comment by prpl in "Rubin Tracks Skyscraper-Size Asteroids and Failed Supernovas"

prpl — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 14:27:24 +0000

They are not all filtered early nor are they necessarily missing from images. The data can be embargoed until orbits change effectively.

New comment by prpl in "Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files"

prpl — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:02:06 +0000

Right, people haven’t internalized that these are really just scripts in natural language.

New comment by prpl in "'AI washing': firms are scrambling to rebrand themselves as tech-focused"

prpl — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:51:03 +0000

Oracle is the hilarious version of this -

9i - "internet"

10g - "grid"

11g - "also grid"

12c - "cloud"

26ai - "ai"

various other examples. One really annoying thing is this has also happened in open source projects too - generic things that, sure, help out with AI tasks are now "AI" things.

New comment by prpl in "Anthropic acquires Stainless"

prpl — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:03:32 +0000

"rely" is overly strong in these cases usually (more like "make use of")

New comment by prpl in "Alert-driven monitoring"

prpl — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:00:21 +0000

> The real core of infrastructure monitoring isn’t dashboards. It’s the alerts.

“it’s not X it’s Y”

at this point when I see this pattern in writing I assume most if not all of it is AI generated - same with em-dashes.

This is not to discount the idea that alerts are more important than dashboards (I work directly in observability) - but just to say that I personally shut off reading anything else with these patterns because, generally speaking, the rest of the content is just not original or interesting.

New comment by prpl in "Distributed DuckDB Instance"

prpl — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:10:01 +0000

Can you build most of this with Ray?

New comment by prpl in "S3 Files"

prpl — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 18:15:23 +0000

For files up to 100kB of size, this should effectively be really close to the same price as S3 when writing (didn't check reading so much, but the writes/PUT is always much more expensive than read/GET)

Would be really useful pre-compaction and to deal with small files issue without latency penalties

New comment by prpl in "I ported Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii"

prpl — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:45:09 +0000

Adversarial software development is also when I do my best work