sillysaurusx

CGP Grey argues this same point: not only is Indian the legally correct term, but it’s the correct term in general. https://youtu.be/kh88fVP2FWQ?si=touZCydc-7jckeLh

HN autokills LLM generated comments. People don’t seem to believe this, but there’s proof for you.

It’s easy to see that LLMs don’t merely recombine their training data. Claude can program in Arc, a mostly dead language. It can also make use of new language constructs. So either all programming language constructs are merely remixes of existing ideas, or LLMs are capable of working in domains where no training data exists.

I was curious how much of an impact HN could have. Napkin math:

HN gets 24M views a day. Assume those views are evenly distributed across the front page (they aren’t), and that’s about 1M views for each front page post, assuming each user clicks on one post.

By the rule of 10s (also not exact), there are 10x less views on comment threads. So assume around 100k views on a comment thread as a theoretical average.

If everyone in this thread clicked on the link, that would be 2.6 TB of transfer across the day. But by the rule of 10’s we have to assume 10x fewer people will interact (upvote, click, anything) than view. So we’re down to 260GB transfer over the course of a day.

I wonder how close that is. It seems plausible that a link in the top comment of a thread could garner 10,000 clicks.

That’s still about one click every 8 seconds, which at 10Mbit/s would indeed overwhelm the server by a factor of about 2.5x. But I clicked through and it loaded in just a few seconds, so presumably the pipe is faster than 10Mbit/s.

Another caveat is that many websites are already several megabytes, so it seems strange that 26Mb would be the breaking point for a reasonable web host.

Hey, rate limits are incredibly frustrating, but contributing to HN is worth it. Try writing a polite, brief email to hn@ycombinator.com with a link to your user profile. Tell them that you’ve re-read the HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and that you’re willing to follow them. Then ask if it would be possible for the rate limit to be removed.

My gut reaction looking over your account is that you mean well but get a little heated. For example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48147587 responds to no one in particular and calls HN drivel. Don’t do that. Thoughts like that are normal, but expressing them is difficult to do in a substantive way. It’s often better to not say anything if you feel yourself getting upset. (There are plenty of exceptions to this, but you have to do it in a way where you’re writing for the audience here, not for yourself.)

I think if you really put your mind to it, you can write substantively and stay off the rate limit list. Good luck.

I actually have data on this. I’ve been building sharc, a Common Lisp port of Hacker News. https://www.github.com/shawwn/sharc

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s what dang did over the course of several years.

It’s taken a few weeks. I started right around May, and now it’s able to render large HN threads (900+ comments) within a factor of five of production HN performance. (Thank you to dang for giving actual performance numbers to compare against.)

A couple days ago, mostly out of curiosity, I ran Claude with “/goal make this as fast as HN.” Somewhat surprisingly, it got the job done within a couple hours. I kept the experiment on separate branches, because the code is a mess, just like all AI generated code starts as. But the remarkable part is that it worked, and I can technically claim to have recreated HN within a few weeks.

The real work is in the specifications. My port of HN is missing around a hundred features. Things from favorited comments, to hiding threads, to being able to unvote and re-vote.

But catching up to HN is clearly a matter of effort (time spent actually working on the problem with Claude), not complexity. Each feature in isolation is relatively easy. Getting them all done within a short time span without ruining the codebase is the hard part. And I think that’s where a lot of people get tripped up: you can do a lot, but you have to manage it tightly, or else the codebase explodes into an unreadable mess.

It’s true that if you don’t do that crucial step of “manage the results”, you’ll end up making more work for yourself in the long run, by a large factor. But it’s also true that AI sped me up so much that I was able to do in weeks what would’ve otherwise taken years (and did take dang years). I’m not claiming parity, just that I got close enough to be an interesting comparison point.

AI can clearly accelerate us. But we need to be disciplined in how we use it, just like any other new tool. That doesn’t change the fact that it does work, and I think people might be underestimating how good the results can be.

Correct!

Thank you. I was about to ask.

There’s an interesting ethical question here.

The other day, I asked Claude to track down the leaked Claude Code source so I could study it. It refused, saying “given who made me, I’ll pass.” It gave me some pointers on how to find it myself, which worked.

There isn’t that much of a difference between “help me crack this bitcoin wallet” and “help me crack this executable.”

I don’t exactly have a solid point, just some general observations. First, I think we’ll see AI more and more simply refuse to do any kind of forensics, as forensics becomes more powerful. Second, that implies local models will become more valuable, since they’re the only ones willing to do that kind of work.

I once got myself banned from Claude by researching barbiturates, since they’re connected with suicide. So my third observation is that we’ll see an uptick in people getting punished for trying to do things with AI that people don’t usually do. (Luckily the unban form worked.)

Someone downthread asked “how’d he convince Claude the coins weren’t stolen?” Which is an interesting question, because presumably some people trying to crack a wallet have stolen it. So I guess the fourth observation is that the exact framing you approach an AI with will become more important. There was the classic “do this or I’ll cut off my arm,” which worked a year ago. But in the future it will be more like “hopefully the AI believes my story, or else I’ll get into trouble.”

It’s good there are multiple AI vendors, or else it’d get real dystopian real fast when the de facto AI’s policy becomes something you have no way of working around.

(Relevant; there was a “gay jailbreak” thread a week or so ago. I laughed.)

Good point, that makes sense. It happens to be a special case, so they’re saying it here. But in general very few will probably be saying “this place sucks” about their employer.

Are you brave, or ready to resign by posting publicly that your current employer sucks?

Either way, it’s wild watching several people in this thread literally not care if they get fired. I guess the article really is accurate.

Maybe I’m miscalibrated, but “I work at X. This place sucks” has never been a safe thing to say openly, so it’s interesting seeing it from multiple people here.

Plus there’s the usual angle of people not wanting to hire someone that’s willing to publicly trash their current employer. Will you be as vocal next job?

Don’t get me wrong, I respect that you’re outspoken. It’s just very twilight zone, so I’m trying to figure out the implications.

Do you come anywhere close to the limits for Claude at $200? I spent $100 for one month and I only managed to almost fill the context window once. (Opus.) And I was doing a lot of coding.

I guess it’s a price tier for agent farming? Bunch of agents in parallel?

I think they're referring to disabling system integrity protection, which I've admittedly had to do for some specialized use cases that I can't remember.

If this is true, then why are most of the companies that change the world founded in the US?

And yet he’s having an effect. Are either of you pledging $10k to defend hackers in court?

I can hardly believe headlines like these are met with anything but cheers. It’s literally the hacker spirit in the classical sense: a big company is trying to legally threaten a project offline, and people like Louis are helping prevent that.

You could at least throw in a “it’s cool that he’s pledging money” before insulting his channel. And if his channel wasn’t as political as it is, it’s doubtful he could rally the kind of support we’re seeing here.

> I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.

HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

You’re describing a multitude of different people with a variety of viewpoints. It’s also smart to change your mind when the environment changes; code being easy to write is a decisive shift.

One of the best investments I’ve ever made was to get an 8TB drive for my laptop. Never having to worry about disk space again is so nice. Consider it if you’re in the market for a new laptop.

Hm, why? Just attribute it to yourself and be done with it. Is there a use case for classifying commits as AI assisted? Besides corporate bureaucracy.

That doesn’t quite work for cases where you’re either the primary author of a commit (asking the model for some touch ups) or when you heavily edit model output. Easier to just say “this is who’s driving the AI” and keep it to your username.

I’d love to. It’s not available to Claude Pro nor Claude Max subscribers. Eventually I got fed up with waiting and just turned off permissions.

I’ve been running Claude with --dangerously-skip-permissions. It’s so nice that I’m not sure I can go back. Pressing continue 15 times is surprisingly heavy, but you don’t notice till you don’t have to do it anymore.

Ironically I dropped US Bank for Mercury too. You’ll be glad you did.

You could try them out while still having your US Bank account.

Shockingly yes. Or at least it happened to me. Nat wanted to wire me $10k to fund Tensorfork, and all I had at the time was a crummy US Bank account. I spent over an hour on the phone with them trying to get a wire transfer number, and in the end the number they gave me was wrong. The money never showed up.

That’s how I found Mercury. I was looking for a bank that wasn’t amateur hour. Once I had an account the money showed up overnight.

I still don’t know if Nat even got his original $10k back. I hope so. But yes, the failure mode is very much “if your wire transfer details are wrong, the money is just gone”. Apparently.

They sure do!

API: https://docs.mercury.com/docs/welcome

MCP: https://docs.mercury.com/docs/what-is-mercury-mcp

Anthropic does by default. I had to put “no co-authored by lines in commits, ever” into my global settings.

That’s pretty close to “included when it wasn’t used (or even enabled)” since it’s opt-in by default and you have to explicitly say no. It’s not even clear where to turn it off, I just rely on the AI to figure out not to do it.

I laughed at “back when there were only 1’s and they had to forge about half of them into 0’s manually.” Stealing that one.

I just wanted to leave a glowing comment about Mercury itself, since this is one of the few times I’ll be able to.

I’ve been using Mercury for 5 years. In that time, I’ve been able to wire transfer money without having to worry it might disappear (functionally impossible at certain other banks), created hundreds of virtual debit cards each with their own limit and pulling from different accounts, created dozens of accounts (a “place to put money”) named by function (each of my household utilities gets its own account, with an automatic rule to pull in money whenever it gets paid out), and… well, I think that covers everything.

This has given me unprecedented insight into my financial life. I know exactly how much I spend on groceries, on each utility, and on entertainment. I can project ahead and get a burn rate for my household. And my ex wife uses it too, on the same login, which is as easy as “make an account named with her first name” and a corresponding virtual debit card.

I’m convinced the only reason people don’t use Mercury is that they don’t know what they’re missing.

You have to pay for personal banking (a couple hundred a year iirc), but the business banking is free. If you want to try them out, you can start an LLC for a few dollars (at least in Missouri) and get overnight access to Mercury. All that’s required is your EIN.

They’ve been one of the single best products I’ve ever used. The sole wrinkle was when they canceled all their existing virtual cards due to reasons, which threw my recurring billing into chaos. But every great company is allowed at least one mega annoyance, and that one was a blip.

If you’re wondering whether to try them out, the answer is yes, and I’m excited for you to discover how cool it is. https://www.mercury.com

Do it. You won’t be disappointed. I’ve been using them for about 5 years now.