Hacker News: sealeck

New comment by sealeck in "Small models also found the vulnerabilities that Mythos found"

sealeck — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:10:35 +0000

Why does the false positive rate matter if you have a verifiable oracle? You can just disregard anything that fails the oracle

New comment by sealeck in "Every GPU That Mattered"

sealeck — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 20:21:40 +0000

Dystopian present

New comment by sealeck in "ICAO issued new power bank restriction on flight"

sealeck — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:21:13 +0000

Surely the other way around? Phone QA process >>> disposable vape QA process...

New comment by sealeck in "Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem"

sealeck — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:19:27 +0000

Yes and making a horse drawn cart drive itself was thought to be impossible so why don't we have faster than light travel yet...

New comment by sealeck in "Bombadil: Property-based testing for web UIs"

sealeck — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:57:24 +0000

> I found an (as of yet not-root-caused) error in sqlite (no crash or coredump, just returns the wrong data, and only when using sqlite in ram-only-mode).

You should report this to the SQLite developers - they are very smart and very interested in fixing SQLite correctness bugs!

New comment by sealeck in "A new California law says all operating systems need to have age verification"

sealeck — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:02:36 +0000

> Stallman has always been right. It's mind boggling just how right he was about everything.

Mind boggling right about not allowing GCC to be used as a library, his comments on Jeffrey Esptein, a refusal to in any way compromise (e.g. the GNU/Linux meme), etc...

Oh and a recognition that free software, while nice, does not in any way solve the underlying issues he claims it does. Similarly to how letting everyone walk around their local water treatment facility and perform chemical tests doesn't really work and instead the state regulates and hires experts to monitor the water supply...

New comment by sealeck in "Can you reverse engineer our neural network?"

sealeck — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:39:29 +0000

> Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling

How does Jane Street skim money from those who hold passive index funds?

New comment by sealeck in "Layoffs at Block"

sealeck — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:37:41 +0000

> The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.

Um, no?

New comment by sealeck in "Layoffs at Block"

sealeck — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:36:31 +0000

> I reckon this move is related to bitcoin doing poorly. A LOT of their revenue is bitcoin related and I reckon they realized they're going to have an absolute stinker of a Q1 '26 result...

I had to look this up - in the last 12 months total revenue was ~24 billion of which ~8.5 billion was from the Bitcoin "ecosystem"! Truly bizzare to stake your company on this...

https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001512673/55ca61a...

New comment by sealeck in "Layoffs at Block"

sealeck — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:27:25 +0000

> Musk has shown that Twitter can operate with 5% (approximately?) of the workforce he inherited

Is X profitable? I don't think the argument was that Twitter couldn't _operate_ with 5% of the workforce (i.e. skeleton sysadmin crew), the issue was whether Twitter could make money and remain a viable business.

It seems that Twitter is no longer a viable business (i.e. less advertising spend, decline in users - especially high-value advertiser targets who now spend more time on LinkedIn, etc).

> laying off a lot of people was seen as a sign that the company was in trouble, but not now

I agree that saying you are laying people off because of AI is a lovely narrative for failing companies!

New comment by sealeck in "Layoffs at Block"

sealeck — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:19:43 +0000

> instead of, well, producing more, better products faster, thus increasing its competitiveness?

Probably because this is not Block's business strategy. If they could do this, then they would...

New comment by sealeck in "Layoffs at Block"

sealeck — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:18:39 +0000

> probably the most honest message you’ll ever see

Interesting that this is your takeaway; it seems that this is effectively an investor-friendly way to admit that Block hired too many people over the course of the pandemic and doesn't necessarily have obvious expansion/growth (that would require people to write more software) on the roadmap.

"Oh the business isn't going too well so we need to lay people off" - said no CEO ever, but "AI go brrrr" makes investors happy!

New comment by sealeck in "How we rebuilt Next.js with AI in one week"

sealeck — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 23:30:08 +0000

> there will be copyright issues

Next.js is MIT-licensed. Cloudflare's rewrite is... also MIT licensed...

New comment by sealeck in "Looks like it is happening"

sealeck — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:34:52 +0000

There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build viable).

That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...

New comment by sealeck in "OpenAI, the US government and Persona built an identity surveillance machine"

sealeck — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:06:43 +0000

Why is this LLM spam?

New comment by sealeck in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"

sealeck — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:58:51 +0000

> Its like going 70 mph in a sleepy subdivision because a road sign on the interstate says you can go 70 there.

> Trump is taking an law that says "You can do X if Y" and saying "I can do X"

I think it's more like going 70mph downtown because there's a sign saying "if onn an interstate you can do 70mph" -- the "if on an interstate" is pretty important there!

New comment by sealeck in "Testing Postgres race conditions with synchronization barriers"

sealeck — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:46:23 +0000

Do you have examples of deadlocks/livelocks you've encountered using SERIALIZABLE? My understanding was that the transaction will fail on conflict (and should then be retried by the application - wrapping existing logic in a retry loop can usually be done without _too_ much effort)...

New comment by sealeck in "The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday"

sealeck — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:09:54 +0000

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!

New comment by sealeck in "An Update on Heroku"

sealeck — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:28:56 +0000

Even when you build cool things it's respectful not to plant them in HN comments :)

I think the usual solution to this is to talk about cool stuff you've done that is only incidentally relevant to the product you're selling. For example, some detail on how you built a technical system or solved a problem, etc...

New comment by sealeck in "GPT-5.3-Codex"

sealeck — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 21:34:12 +0000

Converge towards what though... I think the level of testing/verification you need to have an LLM output a non-trivial feature (e.g. Paxos/anything with concurrency, business logic that isn't just "fetch value from spreadsheet, add to another number and save to the database") is pretty high.