Hacker News: ubj

New comment by ubj in "Agents need control flow, not more prompts"

ubj — Thu, 07 May 2026 22:53:11 +0000

I've said this before, but it's interesting to see momentum go back and forth between the flexibility and ease of everyday language, and the formal rigor of programming languages.

It feels like we are still discovering the optimal operating range on a spectrum between these two domains. Perhaps the optimal range will depend on the specific field in question.

New comment by ubj in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

ubj — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 14:53:53 +0000

There was an interesting article in the Atlantic recently where a journalist spent a year participating in sports gambling. Part of the article discusses the effect it had on his psychology towards participants he had put his money on.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/online-sports-b...

Sports is one thing, but the potential for threats / intimidation towards news reporting, politics, etc. is a huge concern.

New comment by ubj in "Airfoil (2024)"

ubj — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:10:19 +0000

The author of the Airfoil article has made several similar tutorials on various topics:

https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

For machine learning, Distill.pub has some excellent hands-on tutorials. For example, here's one on momentum:

https://distill.pub/2017/momentum/

Rust at Scale: An Added Layer of Security for WhatsApp

ubj — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 06:21:07 +0000

Article URL: https://engineering.fb.com/2026/01/27/security/rust-at-scale-security-whatsapp/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46791742

Points: 266

# Comments: 144

New comment by ubj in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

ubj — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 01:32:33 +0000

Octave has not implemented all of Matlab's functionality. You can see a list of Matlab functions that have not yet been implemented in Octave at the link below. It's a long list.

https://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/file/tip/scripts/he...

EDIT: If the original link above isn't working, here's a fairly recent archived version:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250123192851/https://hg.savann...

New comment by ubj in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

ubj — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:29:43 +0000

Matlab is an great tool, if you can afford it.

It was a very unpleasant feeling when I graduated from my PhD and realized that most, if not all, of the Matlab scripts I had used for my research would now be useless to me unless I joined a company or national laboratory that paid for licenses with the specific toolboxes I had used.

I'm glad that a significant portion of tools in my current field are in open source languages such as Python and Julia. It widens access to other researchers who can then build upon it.

(And yes, I'm aware of Octave. It does not have the capabilities of Matlab in the areas that I worked in, and was not able to run all of my PhD scripts. I have not tried RunMat yet, but am looking forward to experimenting with it.)

New comment by ubj in "Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025"

ubj — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 01:52:49 +0000

This is apparently such a common misunderstanding that it was put at the bottom of the C++ iceberg:

https://victorpoughon.github.io/cppiceberg/

New comment by ubj in "Implications of AI to schools"

ubj — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:40:20 +0000

One of my students recently came to me with an interesting dilemma. His sister had written (without AI tools) an essay for another class, and her teacher told her that an "AI detection tool" had classified it as having been written by AI with "100% confidence". He was going to give her a zero on the assignment.

Putting aside the ludicrous confidence score, the student's question was: how could his sister convince the teacher she had actually written the essay herself? My only suggestion was for her to ask the teacher to sit down with her and have a 30-60 minute oral discussion on the essay so she could demonstrate she in fact knew the material. It's a dilemma that an increasing number of honest students will face, unfortunately.

New comment by ubj in "In orbit you have to slow down to speed up"

ubj — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:23:25 +0000

Buzz Aldrin (who was the second person to walk on the moon) wrote his MIT thesis on methods for astronauts to handle the complexities of orbital dynamics when performing rendezvous maneuvers in orbit:

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12652

New comment by ubj in "Claude Code on the web"

ubj — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:20:04 +0000

Very curious to see what usage limits are like for paid plans. Anthropic was already experiencing issues with high-volume model usage for Pro and Max users. I hope their infrastructure is able to adequately support running these additional coding environments on top of model inference.

Just to be clear, I'm excited for the capability to use Claude Code entirely within the browser. However, I've heard reports of Max users experiencing throttled usage limits in recent months, and am concerned as to whether this will exacerbate that issue or not.

JuliaC: Package for compiling and bundling Julia binaries

ubj — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 20:25:19 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/JuliaLang/JuliaC.jl

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45630111

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ubj in "Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games"

ubj — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 21:49:48 +0000

Platinum Medal: Complete a gold medal task in the presence of multiple children between the ages of 3 and 8. The children must remain safe throughout (and after) the entire process.

New comment by ubj in "How has mathematics gotten so abstract?"

ubj — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:19:02 +0000

Science involves both deductive and inductive reasoning. I would in turn argue that mathematics is a science that focuses heavily (but not entirely) on deductive reasoning.

New comment by ubj in "ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner"

ubj — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 13:37:21 +0000

> Anyone knows what Mojo is doing that Julia cannot do?

First-class support for AoT compilation.

https://docs.modular.com/mojo/cli/build

Yes, Julia has a few options for making executables but they feel like an afterthought.

Totally Safe: Memory Vulnerabilities in Safe Rust

ubj — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 01:37:18 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/viktorlott/totally-safe

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44706386

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by ubj in "How to Firefox"

ubj — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 13:00:46 +0000

[EDIT]: I was wrong, uBlock Origin Lite was addressed by the article and does not have the same features.

New comment by ubj in "Switching to Claude Code and VSCode Inside Docker"

ubj — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 12:31:00 +0000

I use Claude Max with it. Haven't personally tried the API yet.

New comment by ubj in "Switching to Claude Code and VSCode Inside Docker"

ubj — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 06:31:31 +0000

I use DevPod [1] to run Claude Code within Docker-based dev container environments, and it's been fairly seamless. It lets me run environments locally and focus Claude's context on just the repo I want it to work on.

[1]: https://devpod.sh/

FOKS: Federated Open Key Service

ubj — Thu, 10 Jul 2025 12:49:21 +0000

Article URL: https://foks.pub/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520419

Points: 301

# Comments: 71

Dev jobs are about to get a hard reset and nobody's ready

ubj — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 23:39:18 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1lhgdbd/dev_jobs_are_about_to_get_a_hard_reset_and/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44351176

Points: 49

# Comments: 88