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tluyben2

11,388 karma · joined December 18, 2010

Entrepreneur, Tech & Business.

https://flexlists.com

Email: tycho at e-lab dot nl

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tluyben2··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
Because the result is the same. We did split test and when something is wrong we retry with fable or opus to see what it would do. But I did say seem; I am not a researcher, just someone running a business and it seems faster, cheaper and with the same outcomes so far. Subscriptions last much longer now for no visible degradation yet.
tluyben2··on Claude Code regularly sends each background agent’s transcript to its model
I now run Jev in front of claude code and the results so far have been very good. It picks Haiku far far more often than I would think to use it and it works very well.
tluyben2··on JavaScript Demos in 140 Characters
Nice work; I remember browsing it during covid.

Tried AI for a standalone html page snippet renderer[0].

I tried just feeding it snippets one by one and that worked, but the raymarching ones it could not get going until I gave it the dwitter github repos. Now most, but not all (simple to fix manually though), work.

Also interesting to see Claude is terrible at trying to write the art (the demos itself) and seeing what it tries to do; not surprising given the challenge.

[0] https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d8b357df-5982-48c6-be58-7...

tluyben2··on Pseudo, a Common Lisp macro for pseudocode expressions
I like it, and indeed neatly shows the power of Lisp. The JS variety (well the one that I could come up with) is far less elegant, but works [0] (well, mostly). It really shows how the different LLMs stack up; some really cannot get anything right, but something like openai/gpt-4o-mini seems to get it right mostly (8/10).

[0] https://github.com/tluyben/pseudo-js

tluyben2··on Rork – Build any cross-platform mobile app, fast
Similar to others, the unevenness of prompt results makes pricing per message quite tricky; it generated a nice looking app for me in the first go, I asked for an enhancement and it spent the rest of my free messages on trying, and failing, to fix 1 TS error that came from that enhancement. As this is using one or more of the openai/anthropic/google models, I also know that it probably won't be able to actually fix that error without my (either in code or specifically telling it what to do, which is coding) explicit help and just loop until I burn through whatever plan I have that way.

I got a cheap 1 year account on replit and it suffers from this of course; first few prompts yield amazing results and then it gets stuck. This is fine for me as I can fix it myself and by now I have good feeling of which type of error the current llms will just loop forever on, but it is hard to justify the pricing model of per message because for people who cannot fix it themselves and need to vibe on it; spend 50 bucks/mo for looping over one error for a day and that's that; pay more or wait or eject and go to another; I see non devs (vibe-only devs?) doing the latter so you never retain clients; they pick the good deals every month and move from one to the other.

So far only cursor is reasonable (that I know off) because it continues after the paid messages run out with the slower requests; you can go on forever.

tluyben2··on Gemini 2.5
That was what I tried on the train [0] a few weeks ago. I used Groq to get something very fast to see if it would work at least somewhat. It gives you a PDF in the end. Plugging in a better model gave much better results (still not really readable if you actually try to; at a glance it's convincing though), however, it was so slow that testing what kind of impossible. Cannot really have things done in parallel either because it does need to know what it pushed out before, at least the summary of it.

[0] https://github.com/tluyben/bad-writer

tluyben2··on Why is Hacker News still keep this hard-to-use UI and has such poor readability?
I tried to vibe code (I don't like the term and normally would never) this as someone here suggested, so here [0]. It did not 'quite' take less than an hour and it's not usable yet for writing (just reading); it does have working dark mode though.

I only helped out when it was completely stuck (twice), other than that I didn't read or check the code, just talked (voice) ideas to it when it was done while doing other (not vibe) coding while it was looping over it. I did, I guess stupidly, dictate the tech; I wanted to try Go + htmx; that probably didn't help; probably Python and/or React would've lead to better results.

[0] https://github.com/tluyben/go-hn

tluyben2··on Incremental compilation instantly rebuilds the Zig compiler [video]
Turbo c was slow, Turbo Pascal and later object pascal were (and are) very fast.
tluyben2··on Building Personal Software with Claude
Cline works well for me.
tluyben2··on Show HN: SupGen, an model-free program synthesizer by examples / dependent types
I think this was the video?

https://youtu.be/GddkKIhDE2c

tluyben2··on From where I left
I for one partially wrote a few mobile games with LOAD81 ; I was travelling and only had my Pandora with me; I wrote all the logic tested them all out with load81. Of course I had to actually get them on a mobile platform device and create a better UI, however all the logic and most of the UX was all done in lua on load81.
tluyben2··on Show HN: Trilogy – A Reusable, Composable SQL Experiment
This is great; I have been thinking about this for a long time. I like reading about past and current implementations that try to better sql; from a programming and a data science and performance perspective. I am aware of the ones you linked and some others like 'Real' (shakti.com) sql and some enhancements from papers.

Anyway; nice one! Will try.

tluyben2··on Show HN: Dracan – Open-source, 1:1 proxy with simple filtering/validation config
I feel your pain. I have been making things like this in Go;

https://github.com/tluyben/go-proxy

https://github.com/tluyben/redis-sentinel-proxy

just to make them easier to instrument for my experiments. The first one I made because after trying all tutorials on haproxy/nginx to make proxying work without the target domain being resolvable (so no dns entry until it's up), I got annoyed (nothing worked while everything only and gpt said it should work) and just did it like this. Also it makes it very easy to throw in my own, complex as I want rules and logging and telemetry (to whatever I want) at any level.

The second I needed to test an existing, not able to change (they have an old version running they cannot update at the moment, don't ask) software against a redis sentinel setup.

The main thing is that I am more and going towards having the program language as config instead of greenspun's tenth rule where everyone builds some annoying and limited 'almost (usually esoteric) programming language' as config language over time. I want that hard lifting to be done in my native language (Lisp, Go, Rust) and have the config be for ip addresses and ports only.

tluyben2··on Dito – an advanced Layer 7 reverse proxy server written in Go
We had a specific use case that was needed urgently which we couldn't get working with any of the standard systems, so we used Go. Works very well. It is sometimes simply a matter of time; we needed it before the morning (for a launch) and in discord/reddit people were providing solutions with haproxy, nginx, traefik etc that should work according to the docs but just didn't.
tluyben2··on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models
This model is, thankfully, far more susceptible for longer and elaborate explanation as input. The rest (4,4o,Sonnet) seem to struggle with comprehensive explanation; this one seems to perform better with a spec like input.
tluyben2··on Notes on OpenAI's new o1 chain-of-thought models
This model did single shot figure out things that Sonnet just ran ran in a loop doing wrong and reddit humans also seemed not be able to fix (because niche I guess). It is slow (21 seconds for the hardest issue), but that is still faster than any human.
tluyben2··on Brain overgrowth dictates autism severity, new research suggests
Not related (at least as far as I can see), but I read a lot of startup materials translated from Portugal Portuguese to English and often was quite confused about what it said, indeed sentences like the gp here. Then I learned Portugal Portuguese proper and found out its sayings and humor that doesn't translate. Mostly because it's not funny (to me, which makes it hard to translate) but also because there is nothing useful to translate it to in English (sometimes there is in Scottish and Irish but often not in England or US english).
tluyben2··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
Sure, but not in the case of maximising performance if that is your goal. Which is what we are talking about here… wringing every ounce of overhead from it is basically the business case; at least one of them.
tluyben2··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
This is a new implementation not related to Q (same main author of course though).
tluyben2··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
Not for all cases, but he (and his team) take the time to squeeze performance out of things where others just say 'it's fast enough'. There was a monh+ long conversation why all most used json parsers are so terribly slow etc. Not many people take the time to try to optimise the last drop of blood out of everything, especially if you have shareholders or deadlines; you settle for 'good enough'.
tluyben2··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
It is for APL/k/j; you see patterns popping up in very dense code which does a lot, which does make it readable really once used to it. But most people never get to that point (or even ever look at APL of course).
tluyben2··on Arthur Whitney releases an open-source subset of K with MIT license
There is a lot to learn from him; tiny binaries, super fast performance; programming style you like or don't, that's fine. To have a 200kb binary that's a programming language + database is very nice. It's great we can study a part of it and probably more in the future. We went overboard with bloating and complexity; it's good to be shown you can write current enterprise/commercial products that fits in the memory of an 80s homecomputer without changing your style of programming or tools you use for it. IMHO anyway.
tluyben2··on Eye exercises for myopia prevention and control: comprehensive systematic review
These were some of the first 'self help' books that were sold by internet 'marketers'. Most of them you could find for free, but they would charge a few $ for them and 'cure your eyesight'. Never knew that could actually work because of that.
tluyben2··on Someone has been attempting to DDoS us for weeks and we do nothing
Similar problem and similar-ish product 0]; we get DDoSsed a lot and I don’t know why. We had to put Cloudflare botfight to stop it. That works very well, but what do you do if CF doesn’t exist?

0] https://flexlists.com

tluyben2··on Show HN: dockerc – Docker image to static executable "compiler"
Can it be done for docker compose (in theory) too?
tluyben2··on KamilaLisp – A functional, flexible and concise Lisp
Impressive feature list with a book to learn the language.

Featured on Arraycast:

https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode74-kamilalisp

tluyben2··on Functional Programming in Idris 2
This was a good read for me. Recommended.
tluyben2··on Vector Databases: A Technical Primer [pdf]
I found the code of Qdrant very readable (with nice comments in the top) even if you are not (quite) aware of how vector databases (exactly) work. You need to be a programmer, but with that as a given, it reads surprisingly easy for a production database (that companies like OpenAI etc use).
tluyben2··on Show HN: Dbeel – A distributed thread-per-core db
Yeah, same in Dutch 'debiel'.
tluyben2··on Where Have All the Websites Gone?
There was a difference between hosted blogs, forums etc before and the new 'social-fied' ones we have now. It's not revolutionary, but it's a big enough change from 2 when that started to warrant some different tag imho. Blogs on blogger etc you still discovered yourself, now it's just an endless stream of garbage I don't care about (even though 'it knows me') with ads 'sprinkled' (hosed) in there on most platforms.
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