Hacker News: williamstein

New comment by williamstein in "Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale"

williamstein — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 04:51:58 +0000

If only one company had AI and nobody else did, then that one company would be expected to start seeing an explosion in growth/revenue. As it is, everybody has access to AI, so extensive use of AI should just result in keeping up with the competition. The ROI to spending on AI is "not dying".

New comment by williamstein in "[dead]"

williamstein — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 18:42:31 +0000

Turns into an Ad for exe.dev

New comment by williamstein in "Claude Opus 5"

williamstein — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:43:32 +0000

> This means that the model can support defensive cybersecurity work while still blocking vulnerability discovery in compiled binaries, which is more commonly used offensively.

Annoyingly, this is a concrete argument that open source software may be easier to attack.

New comment by williamstein in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

williamstein — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 22:00:31 +0000

Agreed, it's definitely Kevin. His writing style is unmistakable.

New comment by williamstein in "LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers"

williamstein — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:47:27 +0000

https://www.swiftlatex.com/editor.html for the wysiwyg editor says "We are working hard to fix the editor." It has said this for many years. I think I tried it once when it was live and it was pretty cool. My guess is people observed it could corrupt documents, so it was taken down.

New comment by williamstein in "The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection"

williamstein — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 22:18:35 +0000

I strongly disagree with "Claim 1: Every goal of code review can be served by agents at lower cost and higher throughput." They define the goals and include this one:

> "Knowledge transfer. Agents can actively generate on-demand explanations, architectural summaries, and updated documentation at merge time, which is a more reliable and scalable mechanism for propagating knowledge than the incidental commentary of a busy colleague.

Knowledge transfer is much more than what they claim. An critical goal of code review is making sure humans do deeply understand overall what software actually does. Code is far more precise and detailed than any "on-demand explanations, architectural summaries, and updated documentation."

New comment by williamstein in "How LLMs work"

williamstein — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:23:00 +0000

This interview https://youtu.be/oWOz2htozfI?si=qdQ0uZRoZOYeThOn from 2 days ago with a top researcher from OpenAI directly addresses the bitter lesson argument and the importance of scaling for the history of their models.

New comment by williamstein in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

williamstein — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:14:34 +0000

> Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the center for student conduct,” Garcia said. According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were caught cheating on take-home exams in spring 2026.

New comment by williamstein in "Wterm – A terminal emulator for the web"

williamstein — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:14:22 +0000

It seems like a big problem that xtermjs has is iOS copy/paste, so I fixed that today [1].

[1] https://github.com/xtermjs/xterm.js/issues/3727

New comment by williamstein in "Wterm – A terminal emulator for the web"

williamstein — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:06:33 +0000

This seems like a useful discussion of the relationship between wterm and xtermjs: https://github.com/agent-of-empires/agent-of-empires/issues/...

New comment by williamstein in "Wterm – A terminal emulator for the web"

williamstein — Fri, 29 May 2026 14:07:55 +0000

Wow, finally an alternative to xterm.js?

New comment by williamstein in "Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics"

williamstein — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:12:41 +0000

I maintain a website of scans of things Grothendieck wrote, pictures, etc. https://wstein.org/sga/

Codex downloaded by Xcode 26.4.1 reported as Malware

williamstein — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:24:24 +0000

Article URL: https://old.reddit.com/r/Xcode/comments/1t8bdf2/codex_downloaded_by_xcode_2641_reported_as_malware/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48095416

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by williamstein in "I'm going back to writing code by hand"

williamstein — Mon, 11 May 2026 02:24:17 +0000

He was NOT reading the code: "For 7 months I'd been prompting and shipping without ever sitting down and actually reading the code Claude wrote."

New comment by williamstein in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"

williamstein — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:12:08 +0000

https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/FLT

New comment by williamstein in "Mojo 1.0 Beta"

williamstein — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:25:11 +0000

Mojo is still NOT open source (the standard library is but not the compiler). Open source is table stakes for a modern programming language.

New comment by williamstein in "Claude Code removed from Anthropic's Pro plan"

williamstein — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:15:00 +0000

What does " Not mentioning the resets every 1 million customers" mean?

New comment by williamstein in "Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?"

williamstein — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:02:07 +0000

This guy is: https://youtu.be/sxX8BMscce0?si=1MuE3_cCH_uDabrT

New comment by williamstein in "We replaced Node.js with Bun for 5x throughput"

williamstein — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 05:30:13 +0000

SEA with node.js "works" for nearly arbitrarily general node code -- pretty much anything you can run with node. However you may have to put in substantial extra effort, e.g., using [1], and possibly more work (e.g., copying assets out or using a virtual file system).

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vercel/ncc

New comment by williamstein in "OpenClaw privilege escalation vulnerability"

williamstein — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:44:21 +0000

The current OpenClaw GitHub repo [1] contains 2.1 million lines of code, according to cloc, with 1.6M being typescript. It also has almost 26K commits.

[1] https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw