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matt_daemon

401 karma · joined October 3, 2021

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matt_daemon··on Start Doing Graph Theory
If you like graph theory Dijkstra’s in Disguise is a great read: https://blog.evjang.com/2018/08/dijkstras.html

Related HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17745779

matt_daemon··on LISPy things you can do in 64K bytes of core (2019)
This is somewhat confusing as there is a fairly well known toy Lisp interpreter called Lispy written by Peter Norvig

https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html

matt_daemon··on Nokia Design Archive (2025)
I love whenever this is posted everyone gets so mad about the UI (it is terrible)
matt_daemon··on Why travellers are obsessed with foreign supermarkets
As someone who just went to a Trader Joe's for the first time I can say it was a real thrill
matt_daemon··on OpenLogi
Very basic flow of adding a device connected via Bluetooth seems broken. Would love this to work but think it needs a few more months development.
matt_daemon··on Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
It’s never been clear to me why the HN algorithm isn’t public. It’s obviously nowhere near as complex as something like Twitter, and of course isn’t a trade secret. The fact it’s private only furthers speculation like this.
matt_daemon··on Our position on open-weights models
“We care about safety so powerful open models are bad” - and what of OpenAI? What if Mythos got into the wrong hands? It’s a pretty weak argument
matt_daemon··on Who Is America's Homer?
Dylan came to mind after reading the Chapman answer, not least because of his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
matt_daemon··on A dock that wakes up reliably
Anyone know what that keyboard is?
matt_daemon··on Networking and the Internet, from First Principles
It’s become somewhat of a HN “flex” to call something out as AI slop, and it almost always comes across as preachy and just plain wrong
matt_daemon··on Punk, or why I don't stream anymore
Poor George
matt_daemon··on Codeberg Is Down
> For the time being, it appears that all three servers are without power.

This strikes me as odd, only three servers?

matt_daemon··on An oral history of Bank Python (2021)
This is one of my fav blog posts
matt_daemon··on Cohere's First Model for Developers
> Hardware (minimum): 1× H100 @ FP8

Cool to see this but seems like it would be pretty expensive to run

matt_daemon··on Not everyone is using AI for everything
It baffles me that Hard Fork is so popular when they regularly have such uninformed takes
matt_daemon··on If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know
NIMBYism
matt_daemon··on Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
It kind of ended up being a funny dance between 538, the NYT and The Athletic. The original sale to The Athletic probably would've made the most sense for 538 (in hindsight). Then the NYT obviously realised what they'd lost with 538 departing, and end up buying The Athletic a few years later.
matt_daemon··on Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically
NYT has a weekly version of this for those interested

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/17/upshot/flashb...

matt_daemon··on Artemis II safely splashes down
I had this in the back of my mind today https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....

Glad they got home safe and sound!

matt_daemon··on Music for Programming
It would be impossible for me to not sing along to ABBA
matt_daemon··on Tailscale's new macOS home
I really thought this was going to be an Apple acquires Tailscale post
matt_daemon··on We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
Same in Australia and only recently (that is, in the last year) has there been any restrictions on showing gambling ads during live sports events.

It’s difficult to compare how normalised it is here versus what the US is currently going through.

As for sportspeople throwing games, well that’s been happening for as long as betting has been around as well, see countless examples from football (soccer) and cricket.

matt_daemon··on Apple Business
Apple's cloud software has been buggy as hell for a long time, at least for me.

I'm in a family iCloud group with my parents... one day I just woke up and had all my podcasts and music replaced with my Mum's :/

Would not want this anywhere near a "business" experience

matt_daemon··on I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop
> Finally, I’d like to note that this sort of dev work goes beyond hubris. It’s dangerous. The more we assume we know without verifying, the greater the risk. In this case, the dev is risking someone else’s livelihood.

I think this is a bit of an overstatement. The dev states it’s her brother’s business, and one can assume he’s asked her to help him out.

Getting the service to be 100% perfect is of course a near impossible challenge, but that’s most likely not the business owner’s concern — they simply want a way to avoid totally losing business. If the service can convert even 10% of customers with a rough quote and timeline it’s most likely useful.

matt_daemon··on Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line
Curious if this has anything to do with Silicon Valley types getting into carnivore diets (though it's been happening for years so maybe not)
matt_daemon··on On The Need For Understanding
There are a few emotional trigger points that LLMs seem to cause in programmers and this is a common one -- the need for deep, first-principles understanding that LLMs make obsolete.

One thing that gets me in a lot of pieces like this is they kind of assume people have no agency, that now that these tools exist we won't be able to help ourselves but use them despite our better judgement.

The broader topic which I don't see discussed so much are values. If you value deep understanding, well you should continue programming and learning in such a way. In some cases you may just want to use a language model to spin up a quick tool or PoC. And there is an entire grey area in between. It's a value judgement to decide what you use LLMs for, as much as what you don't.

matt_daemon··on What Is a Tort?
A torte is (according the Wikipedia):

> a rich, usually multilayered, cake that is filled with whipped cream, buttercreams, mousses, jams, or fruit

So you could be excused

matt_daemon··on Mark Zuckerberg creating new Applied AI engineering company, reorganises teams
Hard to not delight in the schadenfreude
matt_daemon··on Larry Page has moved to Florida
HN rage bait
matt_daemon··on Why I Joined OpenAI
> Mia the hairstylist got to work, and casually asked what I do for a living. "I'm an Intel fellow, I work on datacenter performance." Silence.

How could she not know?

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