HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

true_religion

7,284 karma · joined December 19, 2010

submissionscomments
true_religion··on Going back two years on Hacker News is like entering another, better universe
Long before that it was all about how PHP is corrupting brains, and Lisp will bring on an new age of enlightenment.
true_religion··on Closed AI models dominate the price-performance frontier
The externalities have to be dealt with using human judgment. Ai can help organize data to make better judgements but that use case is taken by chat based AI.

By the time, we want to code, the scope has been limited pretty greatly to the point that my rule to the Ai is “don’t make any decisions outside of the plan, if something in the plan turns out to be untrue or cannot be implemented after 2 differing attempts stop and ask for clarification”.

Sub frontier level Ai can circle endlessly thanks to a bad assumption, but a human can cut through that by coming at the problem sideways.

true_religion··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
That's a testament to the strength of their so called "commercial quality" security tooling.
true_religion··on Backdoor in Claude Code for VS Code extension on the Cursor Marketplace
No, it's like 5,000 people bought something that Costco called the iPhone but really was EvilPhone Max+ by EvilCorp. Costco should be on the hook for accepting the phones without properly checking they weren't bombs in disguise.

Apple would be 100% right to say "they're not our phone, we didn't make them, the branding was a lie."

Of course if Cursor actually has a direct connection with Anthropic, and Anthropic lost control of their keys... it's a different story and their employee is just obfuscating up there.

true_religion··on Medicare Will Pay $50k for Your Heart Attack. It Should Pay $100 to Prevent It
To put it in context, the poor elsewhere were poor by class. No attempt to become rich was permissible by law so it was key that this supermajority of the population did not believe they were downtrodden, and unfairly opposed.

Claiming the poor have more virtue, but only in their class status, is one way to do it.

Consider how many caste systems claim the farmer is the highest status, the wisest, the most virtuously hard working … but well still needs a good noble king to lead them.

true_religion··on Meta Ignores Brazilian Court Order to End Bolsonaro Favoritism
I was not aware that Hollywood, video games, nor the Western media system as a whole had collapsed.

The only thing true about your statement is that the mere existence of California has been used to justify right wing candidates entire platform.

true_religion··on Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching)
No, it's the old school cathedral "throw code over the wall" style commits that some companies were famous for.
true_religion··on Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching)
It makes sense. Just because one can do a thing doesn’t mean they must want to do it.

It’s like everyone who squash merges for a clean timeline. You want you dev process to look prestine and communicate what changes were kept, not every experiment that failed.

true_religion··on The Robot I Didn't Expect to Build
They do have those, but the leg mechanisms don't have the same dynamic range as a humans' so they end up getting stuck in doorways, narrow stairwells, or other places which assume bi-pedals. Making them narrow enough to fit, makes them too short to reach the same heights assumed for adult humans, so they can't do the same thing.

The height vs width form factor kills the whole idea as a general solution.

true_religion··on DeepSeek-v4.1-Flash-1017
Instead of repeating that they are legitimate, you would've gotten further by saying Human Rights Watch has been around for X years, has reported competently on Y matters even when suppression was attempted by Z country. Their membership is made of A, B, C and this is why you should trust in their data collection as a source that we can use in casual discussion.

Right now, you're basically asking people to trust Human Rights Watch because you trust them. But if people don't trust you, why would they trust your word on what sources are legitimized?

true_religion··on How Far Will AI Assistants Go for a Refund They Can't Get?
The first words of this article are “ In 15 simulated days”.

It’s a simulation.

true_religion··on The game industry is broken – can we fix it?
How is the economic system broken?
true_religion··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
Vietnam?

The USA lost it because of political reasons, not because it couldn’t continue to fighting.

Deciding rightfully that a war of conquest over a minor territory isn’t with the people’s anger at home is a political decision.

It doesn’t mean the technology used failed to achieve its ends.

The only reason we say the war was lost was because self chosen objectives weren’t competed.

By that measure, if the US goal in WW2 were to fully conquer Germany, it would have “lost” that war too since half of Germany ended up controlled by the Soviets.

true_religion··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
Moats were there to protect your castle which had your military and the supplies to keep them fed.

If you go to guerrilla warfare immediately, you’re basically now forced to face the enemy on the field on even ground even when you are on the defense.

All they have to do is burn your lands, destroy your fields, kill your civilians and you have lost.

They’ll do all that and safely retreat back home leaving you defanged.

That’s what medieval warfare was all about. Not absolute surrender and conquest, just temporary suppression and maybe forcing your enemy to pay your tribute.

true_religion··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
Sounds like it would be susceptible to how they’d reverse engineer LLMs using distillation.
true_religion··on Using AI to reverse engineer hardware
I think you are torturing the analogy.

A moat isn’t a perfect defense. It’s a delay tactic that keeps the enemy from coming right up to your wall and climbing it or breaking it down. While you defend your moat, you whittle down the attackers so even when they do cross it they can be more easily defeated.

Moats and high walls became obsolete when canon fire became common.

Claude isn’t just a faster way to cross the moat, it’s gunpowder, and with it the rules have fundamentally changed.

Firmware security is useless if your product can be bought tested and reverse engineered through multiple trials. So long as you have something that can be understood and used by humans, you have something that can be reverse engineered.

Having the code accessible makes it easier, but just having both input and output is sufficient.

true_religion··on Why We're Banning AI
A publication writing their own words is their core competency. This is like an art studio banning clip art & ink jet printers for making paintings, instead of actual paint brushes & original art.
true_religion··on Passkeys are a trap
I store passkeys in a 3rd party password manager which has an app on my phone, so I'm only relying on Apple to handle the bluetooth mediation and they do that very well.

I maybe lucky, but outside of headphones bluetooth has never failed to work for me.

Now with a 3rd party password manager, I can install it on any device and all my passwords work there too. However, with Apple, it stores it on keychain so if you have an internet connection, your passwords are backed up.

If you don't have an internet connection, you're not the average person.

true_religion··on Passkeys are a trap
That's not really true, a QR code pops up, and you can use your other device to read it.

Even if your other device is a mainframe computer thousands of miles away, so long as you can photograph the QR code, you can decode it and send the data string for the passkey device needs to it.

The issue that many have with passkeys is that someone will tie a passkey to an ecosystem that they don't personally control like Apple's and then they can't get into their services without an apple device that's onboarded into Apple's ecosystem.

true_religion··on Tesla Rebrands Full Self-Driving as Tesla Assisted Driving in Europe
They said they are already taking the risk, as is everyone who lives in a neighborhood with a Tesla owner.

You can still be right that Tesla vision only system are more dangerous, but your experimental challenge proves nothing because the cars are already live driving in the real world under poor conditions.

true_religion··on Why were Victorian elites so effective?
I feel like not counting the military is silly in that case, because the military in colonies was essentially involved in police actions, engineering duties, and ensuring administrative rules were followed.

As an essential part of the colony, you can't really count them out. That's similar to how in feudal structures, and military regimes, I'd count the military and civil service as one entity.

true_religion··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
Obviously their API is priced at what the market will bear, not what it actually costs for them to make it available.

It doesn't mean that all price points are fictional, it just means that in edge cases such as this one, the reasoning breaks down.

true_religion··on Ask HN: Why hasn't AI replaced Tax filing software
The pattern doesn't hold. In 2021, they spent ~230 million. 2010 to 2021, they spent between 260 to 320 million per year.

The only reason that billions are being spent today is that in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), granted $80 billion mandatory spending boost for the next 10 years in order to modernize tech for the first time in 60 years.

The goal was that if they could identify people who were underpaying on taxes, they'd be able to recoup that benefit, and at the same time reduce inflation. This is a strategy that China has taken, and is currently using to great effect by identifying off-shore tax shelters and shadow companies that benefit the ultra-rich then taxing them as they always should have been.

As for the US, all seemed to be going well until Doge stepped in and began to claw back funding, so the IRS was forced to change its initiatives to fit the current administrations theme.

I doubt we'll be seeing any tax shelters unveiled soon.

true_religion··on Why were Victorian elites so effective?
That's comparable to the Victorian elites' situation, where they only count people directly employed by the home office, and ignore the so called independent colonial administration as if it's a completely different category of human.

Are they not also Victorian Elites, or did they lose that status by not being in Britain?

true_religion··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
I don't know. Many people implementing DSLs were happy to live with whatever lexx and yacc spat out for years.
true_religion··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
It's theoretical money, because he used multiple subscription accounts that would have cost $400k in token pricing, if he were going via the API.
true_religion··on Port of the TypeScript compiler, checker and lsp to Rust, by LLM
He already said it was a multi-month project that used multiple models. So it feels very comparable to hiring multiple humans for multiple months.
true_religion··on OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results
The onus is on formal verification when it comes to computer generated results. So far only 22% of the papers have it.
true_religion··on Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model
It kind of has at my company. We were evaluating paying for a new SaaS app to scan receipts and itemize expenses. Our current SaaS solution only handled electronic data, and relied on manual entry for everything else.

Instead of buying the app, now everyone just puts their receipts into ChatGPT which we already pay for, and it spits out a CSV that the current SaaS understands. It's not 100% seamless, but it saved us from upgrading.

We're a small business. If we were still using excel files for accounting, I'm sure we'd never transition off them in 2026 since AI can patch together all the accounting SaaS convienences one at a time.

true_religion··on Every SaaS business will become a harness around a model
I see it differently. For every business, there are two types of probelms: (1) core concerns which are problems that cost significant time/money or earn money, and (2) things that are insignificant to the business.

With insignificant concerns, at times it seems a business might not even care about the cost but that's also the same areas where a cut in quality is ignored if it comes with a cut in costs as well.

A lot of SasS fall into this category, so even if AI is not great, the value of getting a solution in under 5 minutes, simply by talking to a machine, is too great a value for a business.

All those marketing sites that might've been handled by 3rd party agencies in the 80s, became in-house clip art projects in the 90s, became SaaS sites in the 2000s, and will become "CEO told his dreams to the AI, and the AI delivered while they were being driven to work" projects in 2030s.

The fact that it's bespoke or not is besides the point when writing up the requirements means the site is essentially already built and there's no need to vet vendor at all.

Now for significant concerns, SaaS will likely still have a place, but some aspects of it will be minimized. Companies focused on Wordpress, Jira, and Salesforce customizations will fall by the wayside since the main company can just say "talk to our AI agent and it'll customize it for you".

Page 1 of 34Next →