<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: vikramkr</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=vikramkr</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 18:55:29 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=vikramkr" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's a list of like 6 things. And each of those less complicated a question then the seven thousand questions people throw at you when you complain about something not working right on a Linux distro or about speeding up build times for a new tool or configuring webpack or like pretty much any software tool. What lint rules are you using are you using poetry or uv are you running on Mac windows linux or wsl how are your security groups configured in aws - some tools are more plug and play but it's quite the stretch to say that asking "how is your code organized, do you have your agents.md config file set up, do you have tests, and how large is the codebase" is some sort of unmanageable list of questions for a software engineer to think through when figuring out wtf is going on with some new tooling they're using</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 12:40:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206737</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206737</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206737</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My take is there was one big inflection point around opus 4.5 when they got the agentic stuff working and now whether or not it works depends on whether your use case/area of software engineering is profitable enough for the companies to have spent a bunch of money generating synthetic data to RL on, or if it's similar enough to areas that they've done that for. With similar enough being a very loose constraint given how much overlap there is in a lot of coding fundamentals. Tbh if the models aren't working for you now I don't think they're gonna be working for you in 6 months</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 12:33:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206664</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206664</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206664</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's very real but probably very domain specific. It got really good at a lot of traditional web dev stuff, bash, sql, and writing one off scripts to accomplish random tasks (hence all the agent stuff taking off). And they got good at staying on task. That may not translate to game dev because from what I understand a lot of these gains are basically around post training methods driven by synthetic data generation etc (with potential caveats on how synthetic that data actually is lol). I wouldn't be surprised if the areas of code the llms are good at now are straight up just product decisions of where to allocate budget for generating those synthetic data sets, and game dev stuff might not be at the top of the list because the customer base for that might not be as big</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 12:28:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206608</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206608</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48206608</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If I had to guess - lumber costs might be dominated by labor costs? If they don't have guest worker programs it might not be cost effective anymore as wages go up</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 10:56:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205762</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205762</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205762</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's not actually a thing. Very few trees we plant have specific male vs female plants. One of the few that does that gets brought up in this context, ginko, tends to have male trees preferred because the fruit kind of reeks. Ginkgo fruit is also toxic so you really don't want masses of it getting washed into local waterways in ecosystems the tree isn't native to - not a great time for the local wildlife. A significant supermajority of all the rest of the trees that you plant in cities are gonna have male and female flowers on the same plant or male and female structures within the same flower.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 20 May 2026 10:53:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205750</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205750</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48205750</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Why did Clovis toolmakers choose difficult quartz crystal?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For examples from more recent history think giant scissors used for ribbon cutting ceremonies, the golden spike used to signal completion of the intercontinental railroad, or like all the stuff related to militaries like changing of the guard that are ceremonial. Or even something like leaving a celebratory emoji on the first or merged by a new hire or a box of donuts on someone's birthday. Or bringing out the champagne after closing on a house. Theres just a ton of ritual in day to day life, and even more surrounding big high impact moments that might leave behind a bunch of artifacts like weddings and funerals</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 20:39:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172998</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172998</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172998</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> TanStack is no way saver than npm. No one understands TanStack.<p>Pandas is also in no way safer than pip. Because pandas is a library and pip is a package manager and that comparison makes no sense lmao. It sounds like you maybe don't really get or use typescript and don't even really use like basic mypy style types in python (or don't get the difference between what a zod/pydantic validator does vs what a mypy/typescript type system does - zod is also only on the boundary). Which is OK but but there's a difference between not getting why a stack is useful or not having experience with it versus confidently and comically declaring that nobody else understands types either while seeming not understanding what any of the parts here do</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 10:55:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106492</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106492</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48106492</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "How I write software with LLMs"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For models that reveal reasoning traces I've seen their inner nature as a word calculator show up as they spend way too many tokens complaining about the typo (and AI code review bots also seem obsessed with typos to the point where in a mid harness a few too many irrelevant typos means the model fixates on them and doesn't catch other errors). I don't know if they've gotten better at that recently but why bother. Plus there's probably something to the model trying to match the user's style (it is auto complete with many extra steps) resulting in sloppier output if you give it a sloppier prompt.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:35:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396835</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47396835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Can I run AI locally?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Just a tier list I think</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:33:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367285</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367285</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367285</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "MacBook Neo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That's only like a 100 dollar student discount right? Seems pretty standard</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:52:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251211</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251211</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251211</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "MacBook Neo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm seeing a ton of comments like that one about how apple is holding ipados back but am I going crazy or wasn't the big story of iPad is last year how many updates it got to make it more of a desktop replacement? Like half the features you mentioned were added last year plus a calculator app right? There was specifically a whole iPad os refresh that was well received as finally massively boosting iPad pro capabilities? Like, very recently?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:51:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251187</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251187</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251187</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "MacBook Neo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean durability is as or more important than repairability and apple products have a reputation for lasting a long time and holding their value. And getting software support etc. In general I think tech nerds underestimate how much people value durability over repairability and how hard it can be to sell repairability. Ive found that "this product is repairable" can be interpreted by people im trying to convince to buy a framework as "this product will need to be repaired and it's going to be your problem." On the other hand Apple's reputation for durability means that buying a used MacBook to save money is a serious and popular option which is by far the most environmentally friendly option compared to any new device, however repairable. The repairability <-> sustainability relationship isn't as straightforward as people suggest in the real world imo</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:47:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251120</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251120</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47251120</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "MacBook Neo"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I haven't been on campus in a few years but even then paper was basically absent on campus. A class where a professor wouldn't allow tablets or laptops to take notes would be an aberration and a PITA. I remember I had to write like a paper check once and I had to physically go buy a pen since neither I nor anyone around me had a regular writing utensil on hand.<p>The exception was when people were taking orgo or a diagram heavy class. For that semester not everyone would have a tablet and some people would have pens and pencils. Or writing classes that still required a handwritten essay for the final exam</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:37:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250981</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250981</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250981</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Invention of DNA "page numbers" opens up possibilities for the bioeconomy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you live near a community bio lab see if you can join up and take some classes to learn some basic lab techniques. And some sort of intro bio class via mooc/textbook/local college class whatever if you can but community lab is honestly a great place to start if you have one.<p>The main thing to keep in mind is that all the stuff that involves analogies between software and biology is almost universally a bullshit oversimplification that you can safely ignore. It's just that software is so profitable and there's so much vc money in it that there's a ton of pressure to be like "oh we can program biology like we program computers." We can't - we invented computers but didn't invent biology. Biology is the end result of 4 billion years of unchecked entropy - it's a chaos system, non deterministic in the wildest ways, impossibly complicated, and yet something we are getting astonishingly good at understanding and engineering.<p>Basically, all the biologists that started companies that were like "we can program biology like we can program computers" are bankrupt now.<p>On the other hand, the computer scientists that respected the nature of biology and pushed the limits of computing to develop Alphafold - giant models trained on the full complexity of biological data - finally created computer systems that could handle biological systems like protein folding at an extraordinary level of capability. They won a nobel.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:22:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915560</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915560</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915560</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Microsoft forced me to switch to Linux"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean - steam deck was a pretty significant inflection point quite recently. Making gaming viable on linux via a popular consumer product is a huge deal and starts to kill one of desktop linux's single biggest barriers to adoption.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 15:16:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796427</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796427</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46796427</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the thing we're measuring is a the ability to write code, visually reason, and handle extrapolating to out of sample prompts, then why shouldn't we evaluate it by asking it to write code to generate a strange image that it wouldn't have seen in its training data?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:44:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214172</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214172</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214172</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Mistral releases Devstral2 and Mistral Vibe CLI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The difference is that the worker you hire would be a human being and not a large matrix multiplication that had parameters optimized by a a gradient descent process and embeds concepts in a higher dimensional vector space that results in all sorts of weird things like subliminal learning (<a href="https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/</a>).<p>It's not a human intelligence - it's a totally different thing, so why would the same test that you use to evaluate human abilities apply here?<p>Also more directly the "all sorts of other things" we want llms to be good at often involve writing code/spatial reasoning/world understanding which creating an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle very very directly evaluates so it's not even that surprising?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:43:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214165</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214165</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214165</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Vibe Code Warning – A personal casestudy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And why should the workers who work on the bridge be denied happiness and satisfaction from their work? Building and creating physical stuff is incredibly rewarding in concept for so many people - especially in a culture that values/glorifies physical and manual labor like parts of the US. I mean bob the builder is a popular kids show and "all boys are fascinated by big trucks and construction projects" is both an incredibly common stereotype and to a significant extent just a true statement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 11 Nov 2025 06:19:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884597</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884597</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45884597</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "Use DuckDB-WASM to query TB of data in browser"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you want to learn it the best way is probably to come up with a personal project idea that requires it specifically? Idk how much you'd get out of a book but you could always do a side project with the specific goal of doing it just to learn a particular stack or whatever</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Nov 2025 14:16:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781809</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781809</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45781809</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by vikramkr in "AI won't use as much electricity as we are told (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And what about the predictions of energy use that did pan out, like air conditioning and stuff? Also in 1999 how many personal computer companies were restarting nuclear power plants to fuel their projected energy consumption? Feels like a weird argument to make when the investments into AI I fra are literally measured in gigawatts. Feels like a weird argument in general - ai consuming lots of energy isn't some weird degrowth conspiracy theory</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:40:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347731</link><dc:creator>vikramkr</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347731</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45347731</guid></item></channel></rss>