Hacker News: siddboots

New comment by siddboots in "Good CTE, Bad CTE"

siddboots — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:55:23 +0000

I think your assumption about inlining is essentially correct. As far as I know postgres was the last major rdbms to have an optimiser fence around CTEs.

New comment by siddboots in "Some things just take time"

siddboots — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:03:21 +0000

I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly.

In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude and pals, and now it is very close to a finished product. One one hand there's no doubt in my mind that the LLM tools can make this sort of thing faster and let you churn through ideas until you find the right ones, but on the other hand, if I hadn't had that slow burn of mostly just thinking about it conceptually for 10 years, I would have ended up vibe coding a much worse product.

New comment by siddboots in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

siddboots — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:12:46 +0000

Openclaw has 20k commits, almost 700k lines of code, and it is only four months old. I feel confident that that sort of code base would have a no coherent architecture at all, and also that no human has a good mental model of how the various subsystems interact.

I’m sure we’ll all learn a lot from these early days of agentic coding.

New comment by siddboots in "Resistance training load does not determine hypertrophy"

siddboots — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 04:46:56 +0000

I think the total volume idea is more flawed than you realise. Pretty much everyone would be able to achieve greater volume, on any exercise, just by decreasing the weight, so your high rep caveat is covering up for quite a lot. This is true mathematically for an Epley style model for example.

New comment by siddboots in "Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?"

siddboots — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:32:35 +0000

To add to this, I find talking to it about code quality or architecture issues can work quite well. Just treating it like another developer. Saying, “I’m not happy with the way the project is going because of X, and Y” and then making a plan for how to get things back on track. Maybe putting a complete rewrite on the table, or maybe just having it record the agreed code style principles in CLAUDE.md, etc

New comment by siddboots in "Why are your models so big? (2023)"

siddboots — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 23:55:11 +0000

I think I have almost the opposite intuition. The fact that attention models are capable of making sophisticated logical constructions within a recursive grammar, even for a simple DSL like SQL, is kind of surprising. I think it’s likely that this property does depend on training on a very large and more general corpus, and hence demands the full parameter space that we need for conversational writing.

New comment by siddboots in "Project Euler"

siddboots — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 05:51:51 +0000

Concrete Mathematics is probably the best single book that you could read to prepare you for some the problems beyond the first 50. It’s extremely fun, and also mathematically serious. A large portion of PE problems are exactly in the cross sections of number theory, combinatorics, and computation that is covered in this book.

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

New comment by siddboots in "Beets: The music geek’s media organizer"

siddboots — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:44:45 +0000

Well, one might use picard to find a musicbrainz release id, so that beetz has something to grab on to when importing.

New comment by siddboots in "Category Theory Illustrated – Natural Transformations"

siddboots — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 12:19:45 +0000

It's just a good set of models to use to think about all sorts of different mathematical systems, kind of like a unified vocabulary. Beyond undergraduate level, category theory these days plays a huge role within many vast fields - e.g., algebraic geometry, algebraic topology, or representation theory.

New comment by siddboots in "AI tools I wish existed"

siddboots — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 05:36:44 +0000

I do this at the moment in my hand rolled personal assistant experiment built out of Claude code agents and hooks. I describe my workouts to Claude (among other things) and they are logged to a csv table. Then it reads the recent workouts and makes recommendations on exercises when I plan my next session etc. It also helps me manage projects, todos, and time blocked schedules using a similar system. I think the calorie counter that the OP describes would be very easy to add to this sort of set up.

New comment by siddboots in "Crimes with Python's Pattern Matching (2022)"

siddboots — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 22:21:24 +0000

Can you explain why? Genuinely curious as a lover of case/match. My only complaint is that it is not general enough.

New comment by siddboots in "Why LLMs can't really build software"

siddboots — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 02:45:10 +0000

In my experience, complicated rules like this are extremely unreliable. Claude just ignores it much of the time. The problem is that when Claude sees a failing test it is usually just an obstacle to completing some other task at hand - it essentially never chooses to branch out into some new complicated workflow and instead will find some other low friction solution. This is exactly why subagents are effective: if Claude knows to always run tests via a testing subagent, then the specific testing workflow can become that subagent’s whole objective.

New comment by siddboots in "I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class"

siddboots — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 02:32:01 +0000

This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material.

Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.

New comment by siddboots in "Logical implication is a comparison operator"

siddboots — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 12:03:17 +0000

This perspective is the inspiration for much of lattice theory. When you consider implication as an ordering, then "x and y" becomes max(x, y), "x or y" becomes min(x, y). True becomes the top term, False becomes the bottom. One of the neat implications is that much of what we think of as being propositions in boolean algebra also work in the wider setting of Heyting algebras i.e., any lattice that also has implication.

New comment by siddboots in "Ask HN: How much of OpenAI code is written by AI?"

siddboots — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:53:14 +0000

Sometime very soon we’ll cross a threshold where most people can do most of their coding through a tool like Claude and be more productive. It will feel like coding still, breaking and building things, but they will get more done in the same time. Everyone will switch.

New comment by siddboots in "Opencode: AI coding agent, built for the terminal"

siddboots — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 06:57:38 +0000

This ain’t what you asked but I’m using Claude Code with a pro subscription and I get about an hour use out of it before I run out of tokens. Then I spend 4 hours thinking about how to set up my context for the next session.

New comment by siddboots in "Show HN: Do you know RGB?"

siddboots — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:16:47 +0000

I’d say this is firmly about knowing how colour mixing works, and not about memorising.

New comment by siddboots in "A deep critique of AI 2027's bad timeline models"

siddboots — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:57:05 +0000

I think both approaches are useful. AI2027 presents a specific timeline in which a) the trajectory of tech is at least somewhat empirically grounded, and b) each step of the plot arc is plausible. There's a chance of it being convincing to a skeptic who had otherwise thought of the whole "rogue AI" scenario as a kind of magical thinking.

New comment by siddboots in "No Pay, No Work; Early Career Lessons"

siddboots — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:32:56 +0000

Maybe lack of empathy, although I don't think it's because managers are especially unempathetic people. We have a deeply encultured expectation that deference, gratitude, and loyalty are owed much more in the upward direction, than the downward direction. We expect employees to act as though they are subjugated, rather than merely subordinate.

New comment by siddboots in "Oliver Heaviside and the coaxial cable (2016)"

siddboots — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 00:27:55 +0000

I like to tell my colleagues that the Heaviside function is so named because it is heavier on one side than the other.