Hacker News: roywiggins

New comment by roywiggins in "Integer multiplication below n log n"

roywiggins — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:30:14 +0000

First, Don't Panic! and consult your copy of Dr. Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveler's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations.

New comment by roywiggins in "Integer multiplication below n log n"

roywiggins — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:19:02 +0000

You can bootstrap a tiny duration of prescience into arbitrary durations by passing back the same message over and over as many times as you like.

If you know what will happen in one minute, write down the message you see yourself writing down in one minute. In a minute, do the same thing. Now you can pass messages back two minutes.

New comment by roywiggins in "A browser-native classic Visual Basic VB6 IDE"

roywiggins — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 23:49:34 +0000

The GUI parts are or were.

And parts of their patient portal website were still VB6 on the backend a decade ago, not sure that's true anymore. Visual Basic 6 as a web backend.

New comment by roywiggins in "Pi Durable"

roywiggins — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 23:36:36 +0000

Some of the delta is newish:

https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/opus-47-tokenizer-analys...

Show HN: Jevlang. delegate every if/while condition to Jev

roywiggins — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 03:26:26 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/RoyWiggins/jevlang

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852920

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by roywiggins in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

roywiggins — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:34:07 +0000

Right, yes, this sort of style certainly can be produced by writers, especially ones who are working in a particular corporate universe. That's where LLMs got it from! It just sucks that everyone "writes" like that now. Every new one-person project or company is incongruously spouting corporatese. Don't we get enough of that already? Flattening everything into American corpo-speak sucks.

New comment by roywiggins in "Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived"

roywiggins — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 23:19:59 +0000

The website is obviously and gratingly LLM-voiced. I don't know how people aren't tired of paragraphs like this yet:

"Visual FoxPro is a 32-bit program, and that decides more than it appears to. It is why a table stops at two gigabytes, why a memo file stops at two gigabytes, and why a big report runs out of memory on a machine with plenty to spare. The limits are signed 32-bit numbers buried in the file handling, not a licensing decision anybody made."

and

"The editor checks what you type through that very compiler, so what it underlines and what the runtime refuses cannot drift apart."

Like, what? Who talks like that?

New comment by roywiggins in "HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?"

roywiggins — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:05:28 +0000

It's not hard to sandbox Pi without adding anything substantial to the actual size of the system prompt, which is what HarnessTax is mostly measuring. Wrapping it in nono.sh costs approximately zero tokens.

(I do think Pi should ship with more than zero builtin sandboxing though)

New comment by roywiggins in "HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents?"

roywiggins — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 02:04:45 +0000

I've found the experience of using Pi with local models feels a lot snappier than both OpenCode or Claude Code.

New comment by roywiggins in "Libraries Run Rust Inside Python (With PyO3)"

roywiggins — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:05:53 +0000

For me, it's simply that I have to read Claudese instrumentally for work enough that I am not going to spend my neurons reading it idly. I am not mad about it or anything, it just sucks to open up a blog post and realize that it's just Claude again under a different name.

New comment by roywiggins in "Libraries Run Rust Inside Python (With PyO3)"

roywiggins — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 15:57:31 +0000

> reach for, a Rust extension does the work

ai; dr, sorry

New comment by roywiggins in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

roywiggins — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:58:49 +0000

No less than Shazam is?

New comment by roywiggins in "Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For"

roywiggins — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:21:33 +0000

Pangram flags it. It also talks about "quietly" and "the gap". It's AI.

New comment by roywiggins in "Europe's "Less" Is Doing More Than Anyone Gives It Credit For"

roywiggins — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 16:21:08 +0000

ai; dr, sorry

New comment by roywiggins in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

roywiggins — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 01:39:42 +0000

If there's a machine that automatically turns electricity into proofs then mathematics becomes a different thing altogether.

New comment by roywiggins in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

roywiggins — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:22:24 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

New comment by roywiggins in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

roywiggins — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:18:48 +0000

Today, maybe. Where's the law of nature that says it won't be generating novel insights in two years? Five? Ten?

New comment by roywiggins in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

roywiggins — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:13:42 +0000

If AI can generate questions and then answer them, what are the people for?

New comment by roywiggins in "Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions"

roywiggins — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:17:29 +0000

> I chained this bug with an n-day sandbox escape and flagged the v8CTF.

https://serotav.github.io/Writeups/v8/when-sorting-leads-to-...

New comment by roywiggins in "Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived"

roywiggins — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 02:11:02 +0000

A similar site, also LLM-assisted, that does a better and more evocative job of composing stories.

https://random-lives.github.io/random-lives/