Hacker News: svieira

New comment by svieira in "Major Investors Are Skeptical Anthropic IPO Can Achieve $1.5T Valuation"

svieira — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 04:51:02 +0000

> As an imaginary example, I wouldn't be shocked if some company like Jane Street is secretly investing a billion dollars to create the highly specialized synthetic RLVR data needed to train an AI that gives them an average .08% edge on a certain kind of commodity, equity or asset trade.

The crazy thing is ... it's not imaginary, nor is secret, it's literally a video on YouTube from five months ago - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J-GUnfSqeE (though that facility is only showing of ~$200 million worth of compute).

New comment by svieira in "Ask HN: What's your current AI agentic setup?"

svieira — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 06:31:34 +0000

There are perhaps more dozens of us than we expect, eh?

New comment by svieira in "How I use AI (Oct 2026)"

svieira — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 19:57:25 +0000

:raises-hand: I still don't know this. But my definition of "coding" may be different from yours, might it not?

New comment by svieira in "Building an AI-native engineering org"

svieira — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 19:52:38 +0000

Now the real question is "is the revert rate the same because you still have the same process, or do you fix-forward more often now, so your revert-rate is because of higher-severity incidents?"

New comment by svieira in "StackOverflow now gets fewer than 1000 questions a month"

svieira — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 14:41:18 +0000

> a good choice

For who?

New comment by svieira in "What shall I teach my son?"

svieira — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 04:46:21 +0000

"SOCRATES: Yes, Callicles, if he have that defence, which as you have often acknowledged he should have—if he be his own defence, and have never said or done anything wrong, either in respect of gods or men; and this has been repeatedly acknowledged by us to be the best sort of defence. And if any one could convict me of inability to defend myself or others after this sort, I should blush for shame, whether I was convicted before many, or before a few, or by myself alone; and if I died from want of ability to do so, that would indeed grieve me. But if I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one’s soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils. "

- Socrates (via Plato), Gorgias

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1672/1672-h/1672-h.htm#:~:te...

New comment by svieira in "DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models"

svieira — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 18:12:12 +0000

> Along with desperately loving entertainment, they desperately want companionship.

And I am presuming that the companionship that people need is the companionship of other human beings. Otherwise, tamagotchi, fish, cats, dogs, parrots, and horses are already perfectly good companions. AI can help fill in for some of those other ones (tamagotchi especially), but it cannot replace human companionship.

New comment by svieira in "DeepInfer: High-performance inference framework for DeepSeek models"

svieira — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:18:55 +0000

> People will have more artificial friends than human friends within ~20-30 years.

That would be awful, presuming that the artificial friends are not people.

Separately, you might like Count to the Eschaton by John Wright with its ultimate project being "the sophistication of all matter".

New comment by svieira in "I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories"

svieira — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 20:51:39 +0000

I recently re-read Venus, Inc. and the number of times that the satire didn't hit because it read too close to our current reality was quite depressing.

New comment by svieira in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

svieira — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:07:18 +0000

> don't allow

Is this "allow" or "encourage"? If "allow", how do you do that deterministically or at least fail-closed?

New comment by svieira in "'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey"

svieira — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:52:18 +0000

In the vein of these 2 minutes of Guy Steele's talk on Fortress (How to think about parallel programming: Not! https://youtu.be/dPK6t7echuA?si=huyI3LR8LVaB6Yen&t=1589) I think that the real thing here is "do not hide what is important nor obscure that which ought to belong to the user". The question is (as always) "what is important"?

And I think that the "tool" vs. "automation" delineation is one of the clearest and most succinct takes on _how to talk about this problem_ that I have seen in the past few years.

New comment by svieira in "'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey"

svieira — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:49:03 +0000

Is a query planner an agent? (It might be, I'm not sure semantically the "agent" vs. "automation" distinction will aid as much in the discussion as "tool" vs. "automation", but I'm open to being completely off base here).

New comment by svieira in "The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening"

svieira — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 20:00:58 +0000

> Give me the quick automated decision every time

Don't we already have this experience and isn't it called "the Google support experience"? And I don't know about you, but I don't like it.

New comment by svieira in "'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey"

svieira — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:00:25 +0000

Via LinkedIn (ai-tool-rich-hickey-kjl8e) but I suspect that we're rate limiting slop from there. Mods, feel free to swap out the original link if I was just-wrong about that.

'AI' Is Not a Tool by Rich Hickey

svieira — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:00:25 +0000

https://gist.github.com/svieira/619d60dea942a8d4498cba3bb6b1...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50060269

Points: 318

# Comments: 193

New comment by svieira in "Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash?"

svieira — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:36:16 +0000

> These systems are inherently immoral (it’s just a lot of matrix math)

(nit) "immoral" is "anti-moral". I suspect you want "amoral", that is "without" or "separated from" morals.

But, if you wanted "immoral" ... what about matrix math derived from gradient descent is inherently "immoral" in your view?

New comment by svieira in "Pi Durable"

svieira — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:59:10 +0000

> If you wanted to go absolutely wild, some hypervisors can checkpoint the memory of a running VM and revert back to a prior version memory and all. I can’t imagine a way to make money off that

You may want to check out what Antithesis is doing in this space - https://antithesis.com/ Specifically, https://antithesis.com/docs/resources/deterministic_simulati...

New comment by svieira in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

svieira — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:52:13 +0000

The Boys On The Boat was good, working through Magnifica Humanitas (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/docume..., but in dead tree form) for my mind stretching.

New comment by svieira in "Coding Is Not Solved"

svieira — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:50:45 +0000

Where did you jump to?

New comment by svieira in "What About Rails?"

svieira — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 16:52:10 +0000

> I described the problem to the agent and it figured out WAY faster than I would have been able to that the customer's clock was set incorrectly.

:blinks: The architecture of your service relied on customer clocks being correct? That is, you built a distributed service without a clock synchronization primitive that relied on the clocks being sychronized?