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scythmic_waves

Re:You could have invented transformers from memory on Sunday October 18, 2026 @11:24AM (#50141884)
Really cool perspective and a great write-up.

Aside: I feel like this could be another intro example for students on how exponentials are a limit of a sequence of polynomials. We usually first see this in compound interest [1]. But I remember having a similar ah-ha moment when I first saw matrix exponentiation.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_interest#/media/File:...

Re:Intuitive concurrent programming in any language on Saturday October 17, 2026 @11:27AM (#50131952)
This project lacks a compelling sales pitch. It mentions that LF is better than actors but I also don't see no reason to believe that.

It does offer a deep dive into what reactors are but why would I bother to learn? If OP reads my comment, that's what I would add to this landing page. Show me why the alternatives mentioned are inferior.

Re:Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:49PM (#50037028)
Great advice, will do. I don't engage with HN a ton and I didn't realize this was the state of discourse on LLM prose.
Re:Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster on Saturday October 10, 2026 @04:09PM (#50036646)
At what point did I "invalidate facts"?
Re:Why DuckDB 2.0 is faster on Saturday October 10, 2026 @03:57PM (#50036555)
I also love the visualizations but I'm getting heavy LLM vibes from the prose:

> One setting drives this,...

> The cost is now about the rows you actually touch, not rounds times table size.

Etc.

I get the brain scramblies [1] from trying to parse this writing style at work so I hate to see it elsewhere. Apologies if I'm wrong. But if I'm not then OP don't use an LLM to write for you. It's hazardous to your reader's health [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipUJq-odt5Q

[2]: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/how-to-keep-enjoying-program...

Re:I Don't Like LLMs on Sunday September 27, 2026 @02:24PM (#49869366)
I find it hard to believe in something so ill-defined and with such heavy religious undertones.

I'm open to the dualist's position on consciousness if that's what you're really asking. Though that's more because I find the physicalist's position so untenable [1] that I'm forced to consider alternatives.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/#NumbAbst

Re:I Don't Like LLMs on Sunday September 27, 2026 @01:49PM (#49869001)
1. I hardly made an argument, merely stated a position.

2. "of sufficient complexity" is doing a lot of work here. Read Ted Chiang's article. I agree with him: there's nothing that prevents software from being conscious in principle. But there is also no reason to suspect that LLMs in particular are conscious based on very reasonable assumptions about what that would look like.

Re:10 Tells of a Slop UI on Sunday September 27, 2026 @11:08AM (#49867294)
Did you even open TFA?

> Slop UI is the UI that AI cooks up that looks off, where it’s not supposed to be, doesn’t serve a purpose or when a UI is too generic.

> This is seen in vibe-coded UI without a vision. Vibe-coded UI can look great when done right, but most don’t. And it makes the apps look cheap and unappealing to use.

Those are paragraphs 3 and 4.

Re:I Don't Like LLMs on Thursday September 17, 2026 @07:30PM (#49748189)
LLMs are software programs. Waste no more time considering than an LLM is conscious than you would considering that a running copy of Microsoft Word is conscious.

There's a great article by author Ted Chiang discussing this in depth [1].

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial...

Re:Ambient CSS v3 – Blender meets CSS on Tuesday September 01, 2026 @04:58PM (#49528105)
What's a good example that comes to mind for you of it done right? I don't do much frontend so I think I just uncritically accept whatever design is put in front of me.
Re:Things I want in a modern relational query language on Sunday August 23, 2026 @04:08PM (#49412116)
I agree that an LLM could also generate the code for a new query language. But my point is that fewer people will attempt to author a new query language in the first place because an LLM will be writing the queries either way. So the effort would be less impactful.
Re:Things I want in a modern relational query language on Sunday August 23, 2026 @10:52AM (#49409312)
Some overlap here with some of my favorite essays on why SQL is lacking:

https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/against-sql

That particular post ends with a wish-list of items so it's the most similar to the OP. But there are others on the site that I quite enjoy (click on the home icon and search "SQL" on the page).

My personal take is that SQL will continue to reign for a long time because of the how monumental the task of replacing it is due to the inherent complexity of databases. LLMs make this worse because they're really good at translating prose to SQL. Now that it matters less how annoying SQL is to programmers, SQL will become more like assembly over time: something mostly computers write because it's complicated for humans to deal with directly. This is deeply ironic given that SQL was ostensibly designed to read like prose, i.e. to be easy for humans.

Re:The lattice of sets of natural numbers is rich on Thursday August 13, 2026 @10:40AM (#49286702)
> The power set lattice (P(N)) of all sets of natural numbers, not to scale, some sets omitted...
Re:Elixir v1.20 released: now a gradually typed language on Thursday June 04, 2026 @10:50AM (#48399563)
Anecdotally, it is very much different in Elixir land. I occasionally see bugs related to something being unexpectedly `nil` but it's pretty rare IME.

I'd love to evidence what I'm saying with specific numbers since this kind of discussion would benefit from being as objective as possible. Sadly I don't have them. But I still believe what I'm saying and I have a few guesses about some of the causes:

1. Immutable data - so, so many bugs are caused by data mutating out from under you in subtle ways. If you write `x = 1` in your Elixir function, nothing can change the value of `x` except an explicit rebinding. You can then write e.g. `y = f(x)` and know `x` remains unchanged after. Note: this is also true even if the variable is a composite type. `my_struct = blah()` will remain the same in it's entirety no matter what you do with `my_struct`. This is different than in JS where e.g. you can change the contents of an object even if it's declared `const`.

2. Assertive style - the Elixir community favors writing things in an "assertive" fashion [1]. Briefly, this a way of writing code that will fail the moment an assumption is broken rather than letting the issue propagate.

3. Pattern matching (somewhat like destructuring in JS) - Elixir code actually ends up feeling "typed" with pattern matching. E.g. `%Time{} = today = Date.utc_today()` will attempt to bind `today` to the result of `Date.utc_today()` and will raise a `MatchError` when the result, a `%Date{}` struct, fails to be a `%Time{}` struct. Or `[a, b] = [1, 2, 3]` will raise a `MatchError` because `[1, 2, 3]` isn't a list of length exactly 2. You can use pattern matching to write very assertive code quite tersely.

These reasons are all local properties of code. But when all its parts are written in this way, a program as a whole gains a level of correctness that's hard to achieve in a dynamically typed language without them.

Also these reasons aren't exhaustive, but they're top of mind when thinking about this topic.

[1]: https://dashbit.co/blog/writing-assertive-code-with-elixir

Re:Monad Tutorials Timeline on Thursday April 30, 2026 @10:47AM (#47963383)
I read this years ago and I think it's the best one I've read. Thanks for writing it!
Re:Online age verification is the hill to die on on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @12:42PM (#47950889)
I think it's because, without further context, it's so hard to argue against. Pretty much every person in every culture cares deeply about their children. So if you can successfully hitch your position to that idea, it too becomes hard to argue against.

It's the same with tough on crime. "What, you want criminals to keep getting away with it?!"

Re:Show HN: Tiao, A two-player turn-based board game on Sunday April 26, 2026 @07:53PM (#47916127)
It's fun! I play some chess but I am not a natural at this game. I think I need an AI easier than easy haha
From the conclusion:

> The primary trade-off observed is the increased calculation time for OLS and SVD steps. Consequently, the next phase of this work involves implementing these operations within custom Triton kernels to amortize latency. By viewing the cache through the lens of reconstruction fidelity rather than just memory capacity, we can develop more sustainable architectures for long-context inference.

Reading between the lines, the increase in latency was so significant that they didn't want to include it before they had a chance to try and optimize the problem away first.

Still interesting research. Hope they get good results!

Is it?

Your reasoning relies on this being true:

> [CRQCs] will be slow, expensive, and power hungry for at least a decade

How could you know that? What if it was 5 years? 1 year? 6 months?

I predict there will be an insane global pivot once Q-day arrives. No nation wants to invest billions in science fiction. Every nation wants to invest billions in a practical reality of being able to read everyone's secrets.

Re:Good CTE, Bad CTE on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @08:55AM (#47586683)
That was also a great read, thanks!
I dabble in "um actually"s myself (especially given that my original comment was one), so no worries :)

I don't disagree with your comment exactly. But I primarily wanted to push back on a common response to scientific works. Something to the effect of "Well obviously, everyone knew that!".

Except they didn't because they (presumably) didn't actually investigate. And even after the science, they still don't _know it_ know it. But post-scientific inquiry, they have a much stronger claim to the knowledge than they did before. So the type of dismissal in the root comment is seriously missing the point.

It's not a tautology because it's not guaranteed. There are plenty of plausible sounding claims that fail to be true. That's why science is needed: to provide _empirical_ evidence for/against a claim.
Re:Plastic is made from milk and it vanishes in 13 weeks on Monday March 02, 2026 @11:16AM (#47219948)
It's possible to use manufacture whey protein without cows:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whey_protein#Microbial_product...

It's not theoretical either. You can buy vegan dairy products made from this method today.

Re:It's hard to justify Tahoe icons on Monday January 05, 2026 @04:15PM (#46505070)
Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment: I expected that button to turn off the animation immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow background to "melt" the snowflakes?
Re:Utopian Scholastic on Monday January 05, 2026 @04:03PM (#46504928)
Wow fever dream is right! The beginning reminds me of 'Dark City' (1998):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO6ApZlxqo8

Sidenote: is that Clancy Brown doing the voice over on the 'Home' commercial?

I used this recently for my resume and I recommend it.

I have the technical background to write Latex and Typst documents but I honestly didn't want the headache. Plus I'm the type to futz with styling all day long instead of putting down actual content. RenderCV was simple to use and did exactly what I wanted.

Yep. I punch literally everyone I meet in the face.

I have the power to do it. Why would I not?

> as a code reviewer [you] are only expected to review the code visually and are not provided the resources required to compile the code on your local machine to see the compiler fail.

As a PR reviewer I frequently pull down the code and run it. Especially if I'm suggesting changes because I want to make sure my suggestion is correct.

Do other PR reviewers not do this?

Re:Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig on Thursday December 04, 2025 @05:58PM (#46154375)
Borgo [1] is basically that.

Though I think it's more of a hobby language. The last commit was > 1 year ago.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40211891

Re:The (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh on Monday October 06, 2025 @02:48PM (#45494807)
The first link is a mistake. It's supposed to be the thing being discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45170164.

The 2nd link seems reasonable to me? Why does a study about 25k workers in Denmark (11 occupations, 7k workplaces) not count as evidence? If there was a strong effect to be found globally, it seems likely to be found in Denmark too.

Also, what about the other links? The discussions about the strange accounting and lack of profitability seem like evidence as well.

If anything, this article struck me as well-evidenced.

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