Hacker News: sashank_1509

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Claude Fable 5"

sashank_1509 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:11:29 +0000

I played textual chess with Fable. It took around 15 moves before it made a large blunder. I asked it to give its reasoning per move and it mistakenly assumed a piece was protected when it wasn’t and after the blunder it realized its fault and did not suggest an illegal move. Other LLMs lost game state far earlier. But a good human chess player can keep the game state in his mind much longer, so this random eval shows a big improvement over old AI models

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Claude Fable 5"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 23:34:45 +0000

Can you give an example of the problems you are trying to solve?

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 05:05:37 +0000

I guess I work in tech. Maybe it’s different elsewhere but even there I think it’s probably lower than most of the world among similar classes of society.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:07:56 +0000

Yes exactly, the American bias level right now is probably as low as it can get humanly.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:42:16 +0000

India is 31, Netherlands is more dense than India. Would not have expected that, but then I remember that India has a massive desert, and the Himalayas. So I guess it makes more sense now.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Switzerland wil have a referendum to cap population at 10M"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:36:30 +0000

I’d disagree. I’m not American or British but and in my experience Americans or British are the least ethnically biased people on the planet. Any other group, I could believe that they are biased but not Americans, or British. Something in their particular culture right now.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "The Lottery – Shirley Jackson (1948)"

sashank_1509 — Thu, 28 May 2026 17:25:13 +0000

I’m a native English speaker, my quote was trying to question whether it is really one the classics of American literature or not. Might not be appropriate use though. “The classics of American literature” might have been more appropriate.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "The Lottery – Shirley Jackson (1948)"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 26 May 2026 01:27:24 +0000

I remember reading this as a naive 14 yr old, because it was one of “the” classics of American literature apparently. It scarred me for months later. I hated it.

Now looking back, I don’t think this story would scar me as much anymore. But I still don’t see the point it. Is it an allegory for something deeper than what it is. I still don’t like it much anymore!

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Bun support is now limited and deprecated"

sashank_1509 — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:26:41 +0000

Has bun really shipped using a million line vibecoded PR. I know they merged it, but merging something in a new dir doesn’t mean anything compared to what code is actually running for customers. It’s crazy if the vibecoded rust version is what’s running for customers and not just some experimental hack.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

sashank_1509 — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:01:01 +0000

Why’d you say that? IBM, GE, Ford have all been disrupted

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Microsoft starts canceling Claude Code licenses"

sashank_1509 — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:48:31 +0000

Welp, this is the future we live in now

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

sashank_1509 — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:37:35 +0000

Frankly I think any QoL measure between a western and a Japanese life are meaningless.

If you’ve ever worked for a Japanese corp under a Japanese boss, you would basically experience that your life is hell. As a westerner we are even subjected to far lesser rules and customs than a Japanese, and yet to me it still felt far more stifling and unbearable than any western company I worked for. Western companies have different failure modes, but intense unspoken micromanagement and stupid expectations was never one of them.

And I was a supposed “subject matter expert”, to be treated better than rank and file. That said, this clearly works for Japanese people, many of them are happy, I think they would be miserable under a western firms “do whatever the f you want as long as you get results” culture. To each their own.

Japan in some sense is stagnating if you compare it to a GOAT like US, but Japan of 1910s was also probably stagnating compared to US, in its own terms Japan is doing fine and their political situation is much more civil. So GG to them

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

sashank_1509 — Fri, 22 May 2026 16:30:06 +0000

I might be gatekeeping, but I consider a mark of actual healthy capitalism, to be creative destruction, the biggest companies of 1 generation are destroyed by the next generation and the churn keeps going on. Nothing ever lasts except the system.

By this criteria, in the entire world, only US and UK seem to do capitalism properly. Whether the current age of tech companies survive till 2050s is to be seen, (we are already seeing signs of OpenAI, Anthropic joining them but it is to be said if the existing monopolies of say Microsoft will be disrupted).

In other countries, big companies have been the same for hundreds of years, from Japan to Germany to Korea to India. This is no longer capitalism as much as it is some soft form of Feudalism, where the same set of families hold power for generations at a time till some major fortune swings occur.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Learnings from 100K lines of Rust with AI (2025)"

sashank_1509 — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:28:42 +0000

It’s all written by AI and you can’t tell for sure if the tests are good. You can eyeball some but eyeballing 50k lines of code takes a lot of time. You just trust AI and YOLO, find errors later

New comment by sashank_1509 in "The Aperiodic Table"

sashank_1509 — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:46:54 +0000

Aside and maybe controversial:

If I didn’t know that the author used AI, then I would have liked this way more. But that is because I would assume the author did this on his own and that would feel like a cool quirky thing to do. I just don’t care for a cool quirky thing if an AI made it.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

sashank_1509 — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:33:58 +0000

“Masters only programs” is a bad hack that needs to be gone. It is just a cash grab from overseas students desperate for a Visa to work in the US. Many of these programs are highly exploitative and leave overseas students with crippling debts and have almost no academic merit. I’ve seen this in supposedly good schools like CMU that offer Masters in Software Engineering which is basically a cash grab for overseas students. And many other made up masters programs. Very few 2-3 masters programs in CMU are genuine, and even then they just become a way to funnel unpaid labor to professors who before had to rely on undergrads, now have a steady stream of poor master grads willing to put in large amount of times to pad their resume or for a pitiful stipend. It inflates professor egos, and enables more brutal lab cultures that require working on weekends etc. and this is still in a relatively good school like CMU, gets much worse in other schools. Govt should just ban this whole system.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Care homes and hotels in Japan shut as expansion strategy unravels"

sashank_1509 — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:39:50 +0000

What is the demographic looking to immigrate to Japan. I’m surprised to hear Chinese as my outsider view was that China was as good if not better place to live compared to China, is it because they’re afraid of their government and want a liberal democracy instead?

Or is folks from poorer and more distressed countries looking to come to Japan.

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Germany has become the largest ammunition producer in the world"

sashank_1509 — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 23:18:46 +0000

Maybe your thoughts will change if they invade you again a few elections later

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

sashank_1509 — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:29:13 +0000

Was there no fear of being haunted by spirits?

New comment by sashank_1509 in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

sashank_1509 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 09:37:01 +0000

wtf I’m going to wager that this is a local myth. Just using corpses as fuel feels a bit antithetical to human traditions