Hacker News: sethev

New comment by sethev in "Your C is not standard C"

sethev — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:41:47 +0000

It was a joke and apparently the person who wrote the code thought that would be funny. execl actually replaces the current running process (the compiler) with the new one, so this very much does not doing anything useful.

New comment by sethev in "Thinking will become a hobby"

sethev — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:41:27 +0000

In the future we may need to go to the thinknasium to stay sharp. There was a time when, for almost everyone, it would have sounded silly to go to a special place to stay fit/strong.

New comment by sethev in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

sethev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:00:53 +0000

I think the onus is on you to explain why Turing would publish something he didn’t intend people to take seriously. It seems like an odd claim. Perhaps you mean he didn’t intend it to be interpreted the way it was in popular culture?

New comment by sethev in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

sethev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:56:32 +0000

I don’t accept the point of the article and it does in fact claim to be making a point about intelligence

New comment by sethev in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

sethev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:13:41 +0000

Fair - yes, it is ironic that his point was closer to "we can't possibly know/define whether a machine is intelligent" but somehow it got turned into "Turing's test will tell us when machines are intelligent".

New comment by sethev in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

sethev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 15:01:52 +0000

Yes, the Turing test has been misunderstood for a long time. Turing published it, though - it wasn't some offhand comment he made and it wasn't intellectually lazy.

New comment by sethev in "The LLMentalist Effect (2023)"

sethev — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:17:00 +0000

The challenge here is in trying to decide whether LLMs are intelligent or have a mind. Famously, the criteria for intelligence seem to slip with each advancement in technology. But going back to Turing, his test was actually more carefully phrased than we remember: he said that when machines could pass the test, the question of whether they are intelligent would become moot. That seems to be what we're actually seeing: if people can't tell the difference, it kind of won't matter whether they're "truly intelligent" or not.

New comment by sethev in "An investigation into the state of corvid–human relations"

sethev — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:13:35 +0000

Crows are fascinating creatures. My wife read that they will chase hawks and eagles away, so she started putting food out for the crows near the tree where they gather (we have chickens and ducks that we don't want the hawks near).

Now they bring trinkets as gifts and leave them near the tree. We also had a crow in the past that would make barking noises when it saw our dogs and freak them out. I'm convinced it was messing with them.

New comment by sethev in "Compression is prediction"

sethev — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:27:34 +0000

This immediately reminded me of the Hutter Prize (http://prize.hutter1.net/) - a contest that has run since 2005(?) based on the premise that compression is closely related to intelligence.

New comment by sethev in "DuckDB – Data power tools for your laptop, now in Clojure (2023)"

sethev — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:21:54 +0000

I'm just guessing but observability is often looking at small slices of hot data and then there's a vast set of cold data that is occasionally needed. Sounds like NVMe is for the hot data cache and object storage is for cold data.

New comment by sethev in "SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions"

sethev — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:15:07 +0000

Yes, agree. These are very sane defaults and match what I use..

New comment by sethev in "SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions"

sethev — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:11:56 +0000

Interesting idea - I like seeing a list of pet-peeves followed by a proposal for a straightforward way to have a set of 'alternative defaults' that remains backwards compatible. If you don't want to opt in, don't run the new PRAGMA edition = 2026.

Too often it's just a list of issues and a wish that everyone else will change.

In (mild) defense of SQLITE_BUSY - busy_timeout just tells sqlite to sleep and retry up to the timeout when it receives SQLITE_BUSY. It seems like a sensible default for a library to leave that up the calling code - which may have something else it could do while it waits. However, that logic often gets missed!

New comment by sethev in "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]"

sethev — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:14:18 +0000

I don't think it's a knock on the original prediction to say it didn't turn out to be true. In fact, at the time it probably felt like a pretty conservative prediction. That being said, if you think back to the year 2000, we were pretty far from building such a machine at that time.

To me it's an interesting lesson in how hard it is to predict technology advances which still applies to our own predictions of the future.

New comment by sethev in "We charge $10k a week to delete AI-generated code"

sethev — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 01:37:03 +0000

So true. Where do people think agents learned to write slop?!

New comment by sethev in "Can you build a recognizable World Map in under 500 bytes?"

sethev — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:28:55 +0000

it said recognizable, and I recognize this :)

New comment by sethev in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"

sethev — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:28:27 +0000

Right - but the big difference is that the received wisdom for healthcare is that the higher cost in the US is an unfathomable mystery and/or due to "waste". If you said "writing software is more expensive in the US because software engineers there have higher salaries" everyone one would nod their head in agreement.

New comment by sethev in "How to earn a billion dollars"

sethev — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:57:14 +0000

I'm actually making a very simple point. You said most of Jeff Bezos wealth is imaginary / not real. But he's proven that he can turn it into cash at a rate of at least $1B per year.

And again, he only owns 9% of Amazon. Of course if he dumped all of that stock at once the price would go down, but Bill Gates sold almost all of his Microsoft stock for cash and Microsoft stock has continued to go up. Jeff Bezos could certainly do the same and come out the other end with around $260B in cash - but he has zero reason to go do that..

Here's another way to look at this: do you have a retirement account? Is the money in there imaginary? If not, why not?

New comment by sethev in "How to earn a billion dollars"

sethev — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 01:11:50 +0000

Without making any value judgement, there’s a very clear distinction between earning wages as compensation for labor (even very high wages) and increasing your net worth through ownership of a company. That’s a valid distinction no matter how hard the second person works.

I have no idea if this is what AOC meant, but it’s clearly not possible to earn $1B via wages in compensation for labor.

New comment by sethev in "How to earn a billion dollars"

sethev — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:22:57 +0000

You're not even staying consistent in your own replies in this one comment. Let me boil it down: are the 11,000 people who earn their salary at Blue Origin getting real money or not?

My point is has nothing to do with despising blue origin - it's just a direct contradiction to your absurd belief that this wealth is imaginary. You can't fund that big a company on imagination!

New comment by sethev in "How to earn a billion dollars"

sethev — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:24:14 +0000

By legislation and policymaking - just like any other numbers we as a society end up picking (like the age to get a drivers license or buy alcohol or the income tax brackets).

Just like those cases, what other countries are doing would mostly be irrelevant - except, just like now, people may try to find arbitrage opportunities by getting creative about where they live.