Hacker News: siddboots

New comment by siddboots in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

siddboots — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:30:24 +0000

Once a spec becomes sufficiently large and detailed and complicated, it becomes very difficult to ensure it is internally consistent. That's why I start every project with a METASPEC.md so that Claude can break up the task of writing SPEC.md into manageable steps.

New comment by siddboots in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

siddboots — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:00:48 +0000

They aren't saying that other models have the same overall level of capability. They are saying that the specific capability that the US Government tested is also available in other models.

New comment by siddboots in "CSS: Unavoidable Bad Parts"

siddboots — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:12:47 +0000

20 years ago everyone was sold css entirely on the premise that, once the standards were adopted by all of the browsers, we would all be writing purely semantic html with completely orthogonal and swappable css. And today literally no one designs web sites that way - html today is mostly specific to presentation. It feels like pretty dramatic technological failure to me.

New comment by siddboots in "Mouseless – keyboard-driven control of macOS/Linux/Windows"

siddboots — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 02:07:15 +0000

For Vim it isn’t replacing mouse necessarily. It’s giving you another way to navigate the cursor around the buffer by giving you absolute references rather than relative motions.

New comment by siddboots in "AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford"

siddboots — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:06:35 +0000

“Fed up” as a phrase comes from feeding livestock up to their fill. It’s very similar to how you would say “filled up”. So the upness comes from raising the level up to the limit.

New comment by siddboots in "Knitting bullshit"

siddboots — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:17:08 +0000

For a long time I thought that the AdSense business model was ultimately doomed because I assumed that people hate ads as much as I do. It turns out I was just wrong about what most people are willing to put up with.

New comment by siddboots in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

siddboots — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 12:43:54 +0000

While I'm really enjoying this paper, I think you are way overstating the significance here. This is mathematically interesting, and conceptually elegant, but there is nothing in this paper that suggests a competitive regression or optimisation approach.

I might have misunderstood, but from the two "Why do X when you can do just Y with EML" sentences, I think you are describing symbolic regression, which has been around for quite some time and is a serious grown-up technique these days. But even the best symbolic regression tools do not typically "replace" other regression approaches.

New comment by siddboots in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

siddboots — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:24:27 +0000

I’ve been building a toy for exploring elliptic functions, modular forms, and elliptic curves. Sorry mobile support is not there yet.

https://grge.github.io/weierstrass/

New comment by siddboots in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

siddboots — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 05:05:51 +0000

Well, that wasn’t my conclusion at all to be clear!

New comment by siddboots in "Charcuterie – Visual similarity Unicode explorer"

siddboots — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:38:45 +0000

Very cool concept and execution, well done.

I don't quite understand what is going on with the "spotlight" UI concept - I can click around on the characters and it highlights an area and it also reloads the landscape local to the character that I clicked on, so I can sort of traverse the similarity landscape this way. But I feel like I might be missing some part of the visual metaphor?

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.