umvi
umvi on Hacker News
Gilbert Gottfried or Wallace Shawn?
I agree, but there's a tradeoff which is that not every language/data format supports duration types:
Ruby:
config = SOML.load_file('config.soml', symbolize_names: true)
config[:timeout] # what are the units? SOML::Duration non-Ruby type
Ditto for if you convert to/from JSON. My opinion is that config files should be as dumb and simple as possible. If you want humans to be able to read/write fancy stuff like "72h" for config, build a UI layer for the human to use in front of the config. Then they can click a little calendar icon to select the date. The backing config uses dumb iso 8601 string instead of a magical date type baked into the config language.
> durations like 30s are real values, so nobody has to guess the unit of timeout: 30
Pet peeve of mine, but I would argue that it's better to always keep units baked into the key.
If you have:
timeout_s: 30
Then unit information will never be lost, because the unit is always marshalled as a part of the key name and you don't have to worry if the target language has a duration type or not.
If you have:
timeout: 30s
Then unit information
probably won't be lost, but could in the following scenarios:
- Target language doesn't have duration types (looking at the list - Ruby?)
- If you ever need to convert to/from a data format without durations like JSON
So basically you have to use SOML across your entire stack and always use languages that have native duration types, and also you have to be careful never to convert SOML to/from JSON (which is highly likely if you ever have to interface with external APIs). Do any of those things and you'll likely run into a unit confusion scenario at some point.
But there are going to be lots of configs that won't have native type like size. Again, just include units in key:
max_size_bytes: 30000000
In conclusion, my opinion is to KISS by including units in the key name and by sticking to bool/number/string primitives, hence why I almost always use JSON for everything (though if I could be granted one wish, it would be for JSON spec to allow for dangling commas)
Yeah, and when I was in ROTC we "learned lessons" from Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan as well ("leaders complain up", etc). I still don't take much stock in fictional leadership. I'd much rather do case studies of real life leaders who were great than study fictional leaders. Watching Band of Brothers would have been better IMO because at least Lt. Winters was a real person (even if Damian Lewis didn't portray him with perfect accuracy)
He's fictional though... It's easy to make a fictional ideal leader. How about real life examples? "Dalinar Kholin taught us what good men do with power" vs. "George Washington ..."
AI is quite good at vanilla as well. Do you actually need a framework? If most of your pages are static with a tiny sprinkle of interactivity, React might be overpowered. TS + HTML + CSS is all most sites need (that's my hot take).
Easy to see the slippery slope from "safety" to "DRM". Abliterated/open models will become increasingly important for AI freedom if they aren't made illegal first...
My question is: what percentage of frontier LLM's coding/troubleshooting prowess is due to SO, and if non-negligible, what will replace SO in the future as the premier training repository for coding LLMs? GitHub issues and such, maybe?
Posted by
umvi on Monday October 19, 2026 @06:05PM
from the bryanpg.com dept.
Oh, I haven't been keeping up. I assumed it was still TS since it prompts me to run npm all the time.
Can't wait until we get really well designed harnesses written in a compiled language that doesn't bloat my computer. Will probably have to be written by a company other than OpenAI because codex is like the exact opposite of everything I just listed
These apps are awesome, but they make me a little nervous. I can just imagine when a "clean room Rust" Oracle DB (re)implementation hits GitHub that Oracle would not just sit there and take it but would instead rain lawyers down from the sky... Ditto for other companies that have hornet's nest legal departments.
I too have a 4a that is still ticking thanks to Lineage!
The only problem I've discovered is that group texts sometimes don't work (I can't see others' replies or worst case I don't receive the group text at all). Not sure if anyone else has run into this, seems like it could be related to RCS and unlocked bootloader not playing nice.
On the other hand, just because a group of people agree something is art doesn't make it so. Or heck, maybe it does. I guess I could spend years perfecting my unique "prison wall fecal impact technique" and as long as lots of people can identify the nuances of my unique technique, and as long as it makes them feel emotions, I'm sure it can be considered art and can find a home in a modern art museum. But then to paraphrase Syndrome... "[When everything is art, nothing is]"
> What would 10 maintainers do on sudo?
Well, if other projects with a glut of devs are a sign, probably integrate AI into it somehow
Same point as zero sugar sodas... Enjoyment of the flavor even though it provides no nutrition or energy
As a diabetic, I would love "mirror wheat" which behaves like normal wheat (ie can make breads, etc) but has zero carbs/calories because the body can't digest it. Mirror glucose would be nice too, though allulose is already a pretty close stand in for mirror glucose.
Start increasingly punishing OpenAI. We are acting like "oh well, AI is just too powerful to be contained" but I think its more like "OpenAI is run by cowboys who are good at making LLMs but bad at everything else"
Posted by
umvi on Thursday September 10, 2026 @09:00AM
from the show-hn dept.
https://www.bryanpg.com/pragma_twice/
Hey HN, I'm Bryan. I released Pragma Twice earlier this week in anticipation for Steam's "Programming Fest". Pragma Twice is a programming puzzle game in the same vein as Untrusted (https://untrustedgame.com/). You have to write real JavaScript code to incrementally improve your playable character's "kernel" over the course of the game. Beating levels autonomously (without keyboard inputs)...
> I don’t like to think about how I’d do that with git.
git cherry-pick + git rebase -i (to swap commit order)?
?
I like the idea of jujutsu, but I must not operate at a scale where its "killer features" would truly shine. Git hardly ever gets in my way, I have never had to do complex octopus merges or anything like that. It's usually: feature branch, implement, merge, and occasionally fix a merge conflict. JJ seems like it's more for people that like to have tons of active branches that they are constantly switching between whereas I usually only work on 1 thing at a time. I've never thought to myself "git is so frustrating I wish there were something better" because I only use the same 5 commands over and over every day and they never get in my way. Not to mention jj has its own share of esoteric syntax with all the "@--+::" business and I'd have to re-wire my brain to remember those symbols instead of `ref~N`, etc.
Im also a T1D and in my own experience high carb diets are extremely difficult to control BG with. You are chronically elevated/high or roller coastering, while with low carb diet its much easier to stabilize BG and keep sugar levels normal. With low carb diet I have achieved an a1c of 5.6 which would be impossible/dangerous with high carb diet. Dr. Bernstein's "Law of small numbers" and all. But yes, you are correct, it was a simplification.
Well I'm a T1D and I'm not generally worried about DKA because I wear a CGM and keep my blood glucose below 140 mg/dL
Ketones are only going to be present if you are exceptionally bad (very high carb diet) or exceptionally good (very low carb diet) at managing your blood sugar. It's not going to be terribly useful for your average diabetic who has fairly good control over their blood sugars.
I feel like collecting, curating, and protecting high quality corpuses of "truth" is going to become increasingly important for high quality AI.
There will come a day (and probably soon) when "training on the public internet" (Reddit, etc) will taint your model with metric tons of corporate contamination, political poison, and other adversarial content intentionally crafted to bias AIs for various reasons (corporate gain, geopolitical information warfare, etc). Basically the AI-equivalent of SEO.
Sometimes OOM Killer can stop it before it wrecks too much havoc, but often everything grinds to a complete halt and I have to just power cycle.
Hmm, yeah before "DeltaDB" I have a big list of things I would rather they develop/fix:
- Vertical activity bar (https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/pull/58868#issuecommen... - rejected because it "doesn’t match our design vision for Zed")
This is my #1 annoyance: clicking microscopic icons at the very bottom of the screen to switch views.
- Don't crash my entire PC when there's a large (100+ MB) JSON file in the working directory
- Don't freeze when resuming from suspension (I suspect this is GPU-driver related on linux) forcing me to `killall zed-editor`
So basically: wind generators power electrolysis to create hydrogen, the hydrogen is fed to a normal Haber-Bosch plant which is still powered by coal or gas. So basically the wind power is just replacing the carbon footprint of a single input (hydrogen) to a H-B plant?
yeah you'd have to make a "mathematical grammar" to cover all the cases. one problem with current mathematical notation is that it is optimized for writing by hand, not with keyboards. If you want to write mathematical notation with keyboards you have to use a complex typesetting tool like LaTeX to position all the super/sub-scripted, nested, etc. symbols.
And it all seems arbitrary anyway. Why are trigonometric functions written in english ("tan" being short for "tangent") but other stuff uses greek letters and other stuff still uses esoteric/abstract symbols? Why is the integral symbol shaped the way it is, and why use super/sub symbols for the bounds versus `integral [0,Inf] ...`?
In my ignorance, I'm assuming math is the way that it is because that's the way it's been for centuries, and messing with it harms its ubiquity. Math notation is not the way that it is because it's particularly well thought out. It's centuries of legacy tech debt that can't be changed. Kind of like how English is a crappy language in a lot of ways, but we can't change it now because too many people use it and you'd never get enough momentum to switch.