Hacker News: sundarurfriend

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Calculus with Julia"

sundarurfriend — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 10:31:44 +0000

20 quadrillion ants is about 2.5 million ants per human - pretty insane to think about. I thought I had a grasp on their abundance, but I'd still probably have underestimated their numbers by an order of magnitude previously.

We still mog them on mass and volume though. 2.5 million of the average ant would only make the size of a human leg, if that.

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Ask HN: How do you manage skills files?"

sundarurfriend — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:40:04 +0000

Their claim is not about the prompt or skill tokens, it's about output tokens - skills can help the model bypass some thinking tokens or avoid reasoning deadends, and that way reduce output token usage. That's what they seem to have found empirically from their testing. (If it's truly 2x-4x, the time savings in waiting for the output is a pretty nice benefit too.)

New comment by sundarurfriend in "The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC"

sundarurfriend — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:20:37 +0000

That idea about keeping maintainer balance is pretty neat, interesting to see this kind of diligence in maintainership in the same project where legal ownership belongs to a single company, Google, via the Contributor License Agreement. My interest in jj cooled off a lot after seeing that, even though I realize in practice it's pretty unlikely to be of consequence - I just don't need even that kind of low probability Sword of Damocles hanging over my VCS, forks and drama in case Google decides to mess things up. (Good to see that the Readme has been changed to say it's not a Google-supported project btw, less misleading than the old claim that it's not a Google project at all.)

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Being ambitious and being a dad"

sundarurfriend — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:11:16 +0000

Because it's evolutionarily favourable - the same reason sex feels good. One is instantaneous pleasure, and the other is sustained doses of feelings of satisfaction, because they optimise for different things; but ultimately you can understand them easily if you think about how core they are to what evolution favours.

MIT neuroscientists discover the brain can reason without words

sundarurfriend — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 15:31:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811011140.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49287525

Points: 6

# Comments: 4

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Grok 4.6"

sundarurfriend — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 05:22:49 +0000

Yes, that was Grok's strongest point for me previously, and it's been basically unusable these past few weeks. I think there have been a few posts in the Grok subreddit (maybe on r/LoveGrok). It has a lot less personality which is a shame, but I'd take that if the answers themselves were good - but they lack information, have zero nuance, and repeat themselves pretty often too. Such a disappointing change.

Dog brains represent human facial expressions beyond positive-negative valence

sundarurfriend — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:37:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042%2826%2902278-9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49272228

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Asking "Was EvoMap's Evolver a reference" for Hermes gets deleted and blocked

sundarurfriend — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:12:27 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/issues/10232

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49208206

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Halloween Documents

sundarurfriend — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:54:43 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49165135

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Inverseminar

sundarurfriend — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 01:56:42 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2026-07-inverting-seminar-recover-scientific-papers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49140339

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

sundarurfriend — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 22:59:18 +0000

And yet, even for programmers, that output is full of info that is useless 99.9% of the time. That is just bad design. It is basically a debug log that is shown by default all the time, instead of written to a log somewhere for the <0.1% time it's useful.

And I point out the attitude because I've seen it for decades and seen the harm this kind of "it's just harmless extra info" type thinking has brought. I don't know what tone you're reading into it, but I'm quite literally and explicitly criticizing the attitude, not you personally.

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability"

sundarurfriend — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:51:53 +0000

> Because git is an open-source project written by nerds, it shows you all of this information. Feel free to ignore it!

This is the type of attitude that kept most Unix tools quite user-unfriendly for several decades. What information to show the user, and when, are important design decisions to make. Just dumping it all on the user and making them wade through it is not doing the user a favour. Thankfully newer tools seem to be better about this, which has brought the Unix shell forward by leaps, even if there's still ways to go. (You can still make a conscious design decision that the info needs to be all there, and git is one of tools where that's at least somewhat justifiable, but a lot of the time the attitude is more like in the quoted text, that dumping out more info is always better.)

OpenAI: PRC-linked influence operations are targeting AI debates in the US

sundarurfriend — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 22:03:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-china-data-centers-influence-campaign-2026-6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48483326

Points: 7

# Comments: 2

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia"

sundarurfriend — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:18:26 +0000

Agreed with all the rest of it, but

> to have the notebooks play nicely with the existing package environment system instead of being self-contained

isn't that just a `Pkg.activate` away? https://plutojl.org/en/docs/packages-advanced/

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Age verification for social media, the beginning of the end for a free internet?"

sundarurfriend — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:51:51 +0000

Because the patterns of consumption and harm are very different. It's the constancy and immediacy of social media that makes up the major part of its harm. It's not something where a 15 minute smoke break or a weekend binge is the main mode of consumption and harm. So the parents have a lot more opportunity and power to handle it if they give it reasonable time and attention.

Julia's Pluto notebook hits 1.0 release

sundarurfriend — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:04:26 +0000

Article URL: https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pluto-1-0-release/137296

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48325030

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by sundarurfriend in "Intern gets inspired by Bun to rewrite codebase into assembly"

sundarurfriend — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:07:54 +0000

The PR is here: https://github.com/thesysdev/openui/pull/517

Pretty hilarious, but also not that much of an exaggeration from other more "serious" PRs like this.

Intern gets inspired by Bun to rewrite codebase into assembly

sundarurfriend — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:07:54 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/KashyapVisharad/status/2055239392147718394

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48187102

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by sundarurfriend in "The Future of Obsidian Plugins"

sundarurfriend — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:34:39 +0000

I don't use Obsidian, and my assumption when I saw the title was I guess they're gonna be limiting it to a small set of corporate-blessed plugins.

I've come to expect that "The Future Of XYZ" titles from software companies means severely limiting XYZ or preparing XYZ for a shut down!

New comment by sundarurfriend in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

sundarurfriend — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:44:50 +0000

"whitespace, not brackets" from a sibling comment touches on it, but a lot of people, beginners especially (but not uniquely), are put off by symbols when reading code. Python is less symbol-heavy than most languages, by using whitespace and syntax and words (eg. `and` not `&&`, explicit `lambda x:` rather than `x =>`) in their place. It doesn't go so far as COBOL as to be cumbersome, but far enough to make a difference to a lot of people.