Hacker News Reader

upghoston Beyond the 70%: Maximizing the human 30% of AI-assisted coding

Is anyone actually getting anything out of AI assisted coding? I find AI autocomplete especially horrible, though the chat interface has been helpful in preventing me from actually learning obscure bash parameters.

In all seriousness though, 2024 DORA report shows that for every 25% of coders adopting AI coding within an organization, delivery throughput reduces by 1.5% and delivery stability reduces by a whopping 7.2%.

(you can sign up to get the report here[1], sorry I don't have a direct link to provide)

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops

upghoston Xata Agent: AI agent expert in PostgreSQL

Watched the video. That is an absolutely fantastic UI. Seriously, huge props. This makes the project actually useful (as opposed to "why not just code this myself?"). Well done Xataio!

upghoston DELETE, DELETE, DELETE [pdf]

Agree or disagree with the goings on, I find it interesting that these government memos and executive orders are still crafted with such beautiful prose. Who are these stalwart writers weathering the storm?

upghoston Definite clause grammars and symbolic differentiation

DCGs are now up for formal adoption in the Prolog ISO specification[1].

If at all possible, please encourage your national ISO representatives to vote for its adoption.

For the US it's ANSI SC 22 WG 17.

[1]: https://www.iso.org/standard/83635.html

upghoston Ask HN: Should there be new RPN calculators to replace the TI-84?

I use numworks frequently these days (as a software eng just need to do some quick math and not worth writing code or spreadsheet for, not talking about student use). I bought the thing but they have a free phone app too, works exactly the same.

I can't ever remember how to use my TI-89 but the numworks is pretty intuitive

upghoston Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

I'm still a huge fan of gemma-22b. Looking forward to this one!

upghoston US Ends Support For Ukrainian F-16s

I've been unable to find a primary source confirming this information or providing technical details on the significance or consequences of the decision.

Every article I've seen parrots the same language and they all point back to this same article[1] as the source of the information, but the article itself provides no proof whatsoever or explanation.

This smells like propaganda. And it seems to be quite effective here. Before going for each other's throats on this maybe it would be better if we verified the facts.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2025/03/07/france-to-t...

upghoston Ask HN: Recommend resources that helped your game dev journey?

Agreed. I spent a year going down the wrong path before finding this resource, but it saved me from going four more years down the wrong path.

upghoston ZeroVer: 0-based Versioning: cutting-edge software versioning for minimalists

squint can't tell if this is serious or satire. I'm kinda convinced, seeing as software really never is "1.0", but now I think maybe I'm just getting old and gullible.

upghoston Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death (1988)

Does anyone know what the comment is in the top right of the blackboard? "why cant x sort" or something?

upghoston Egg prices are soaring. Are backyard chickens the answer?

> - Your wife may one day want a chicken to live inside the house. You may one day agree to this, and then miss it when the chicken is living outside the house again...

Please, PLEASE tell us this story!!

upghoston Show HN: Scripton – Python IDE with built-in realtime visualizations

well, I didn't know I could use clerk with my IDE. Thanks for pointing that out!

upghoston Caddy – The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS

Interesting. Is this supposed to be an NGINX/reverse-proxy replacement, or is it complementary?

upghoston How Copyover MUD Servers Worked

Spoiled web developer here. Since I have no way to test this, I have some questions! It seems like this whole thing could've been simplified to calling exec. Whats with the whole pipe/fork thing if you are just going to kill one process, clone the other (with exec), and the kill the original. Is the pipe crucial to transferring the contents of memory, or something?

upghoston The return of the buffalo is reviving portions of the ecosystem

I wish the article dove into this a little. Very interested in why the large herds are so important. Seems counter-intuitive, you know? Like they would consume lots of resources? Would be very interested in understanding the ecology better. Do you (or anyone) happen to have some resources on this?

upghoston Autonomous AI Agents Should Not Be Developed

Wow, great observation. Thank you. Makes sense. I'd never heard of a "position paper" before.

upghoston Autonomous AI Agents Should Not Be Developed

This is a purely procedural question, not supporting or critiquing in any way-- other than this reads kind of like an editorial with the format of a scientific paper. The question is... are there rules about what constitutes a paper or can you just put whatever you want in there as long as you follow "scientific paper format"?

upghoston AI by Hand Exercises in Excel

Wow, this is extremely hard to do and shows an advanced level of mastery. Unlike in code, the computations need to be established not only conceptually but spatially. I did some very crude versions myself for a simple NN on the XOR problem prior to implementing my own NN stack on GPGPU compute shaders for Unity and used the numbers as references to make sure my calculations were correct, but my spreadsheets were no where near as beautiful or correct as these. Well done!

upghoston Microplastics in the human brain

do we need a unit conversion for how many spoonfuls of plastic are in a plastic spoon?? seems like it might be important for this article.

Well article says a teaspoon has 7g mass, and just spitballin here but I'd say a plastic spoon has about 1g/cm^3 density. And there are 4.83cm^3 in a teaspoon. So I guess in fact there are 1.44 teaspoons of teaspoon in the brain. Or would that be 1.44 tsp^2...?

But I'm an American and I have at least 3 imperial teaspoons of microplastic in my brain or gosh darnit I'm 2 bald eagles short of a touch down. If you know what I'm sayin.[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42958104

upghoston The APL Challenge

Conversely, after many years of dabbling I still consider myself a complete novice at APL and array programming. However, my studying of array langs made learning LLMs fairly trivial. In particular, studying APL's inner product from the Mastering Dyalog book was the key to understanding the self-attention mechanism from Attention is All You Need and how it communicates semantic information across the positionally encoded tokens.

I'd still probably struggle to do anything mildly complex in APL, though, sadly. It hasn't fully clicked yet, but maybe one day!

upghoston The APL Challenge

Ahhh this is fantastic. Exactly what I was looking for. As I said before not that smart, but hopefully a little smarter than I was before. The shared library documents, if I can figure them out, would allow for a libdyalog-clj, which would be extremely exciting. To me, anyway, and maybe like six other people haha.

Thank you, jodrellblank, for being patient with me and for this information.

upghoston The APL Challenge

Adám is awesome. I'm an avid follower of his criminally underviewed YouTube channel[1].

[1]: https://youtube.com/@abrudz

upghoston The APL Challenge

Very cool! I don't quite know how I would use that to fully embed Dyalog. Very large class..?

upghoston Ask HN: How do you prompt the "advanced" models

I'm usually a LLM project hater but gotta say RA.Aid looks pretty rad :) Kinda reminds me of Open Interpreter[1] from back in the day, but all grown up.

[1]: https://github.com/OpenInterpreter/open-interpreter

upghoston The APL Challenge

You can embed GNU APL. I did it once with Clojure[1], tho it wasn't too popular. If they hired you to do Python should probably do that instead of embedding APL into Python. (I don't follow my own advice)

I would love to embed Dyalog but last time I tried I wasn't smart enough. If anyone from Dyalog feels like throwing cycles at it let me know!

[1] https://github.com/jjtolton/libapl-clj

upghoston OpenAI announces SoftBank partnership as fallout from DeepSeek continues

#bless. this is probably the more interesting story

Edit: after reading, not that interesting. The headline is the whole story.

upghoston OpenAI announces SoftBank partnership as fallout from DeepSeek continues

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altmans-answer-to-deepseek-i...

does anyone have an archive link to this link (from the article)?

upghoston Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5k years

"Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the FIRST TIME in 5,000 years then killed"

upghoston Data-Oriented Exploits via Programming Language Synthesis [pdf]

> Data-oriented programming (DOP) is a methodology for embedding malicious programs into fixed executable vulnerable binaries.

Whoa, this is gonna be a wild ride.