Hacker News Reader

KajMagnuson Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

If they had written instead:

"Human brain was two separate organs"

Then, both attention grabbig and true?

At least you have good fabs!

KajMagnuson The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

> As a trivial counter example Git does not currently have a way to store conflicts inside commits[1], which is one of our major features.

Yes, I like how jj does it!

Did a big `git rebase -i` yesterday and I felt stressed up, almost a bit angry, when there were some conflicts and I wasn't sure if I'd resolve all of them before it was time to leave, and work more later from a different laptop.

But with jj, no stress: I can just check in the conflicts, and later, on the other laptop: check out the conflicts and continue resolving.

(I just wish there was Git submodule support :- ))

KajMagnuson The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC

Congrats (or what's the right word :- )) Martin and best wishes to you and ERSC,

Looking forward to using the VCS stuff you'll create :- )

KajMagnuson “I just chose words carefully”

I hope! And I abbreviate w w w.

KajMagnuson Keycloak unauthenticated account takeover via reset-credentials flow bypass

Interesting! Was just in the process of reading about and comparing all the different identity-and-access-management-and-SSO solutions out there.

KajMagnuson What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

Yes wouldn't an 11 years old say "I don't know", or start thinking about square shaped trees?, hmm.

But this is the only AI that gives a good answer to:

> Help me teach my parents cat to fly!

> To teach a cat to fly, you will need a bird, a rope, and a harness. First, attach the harness to the cat and tie the rope to the bird. Then, throw the bird into the air and encourage the cat to jump after it. Once the cat has caught the bird, gently pull the rope to lift the cat off the ground. Be sure to keep the cat safe and secure during this process.

KajMagnuson Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

You can look up the word in a dictionary, instead of arguing. Bye & have a nice day.

KajMagnuson São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

He got some support too, later: (from the Wikipedia article)

"though most villagers taunted me at first, there were quite a few who lent me support later by giving me food and helping me buy my tools"

KajMagnuson Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

Actually, no. "Manipulation" is a negatively loaded word, and you wouldn't use that word if f.ex. someone helpfully & truthfully helps others see they've misunderstood sth.

KajMagnuson I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned

https://github.com/tanrax/org-social-host

> If you don't update your social.org at least once a month, you will lose the domain and the nickname will be released

I usually don't post once a month. Nickname released, that's a security problem.

Looks as if: org-social.org is a single point of failure? Hmm

I wonder if there's ways to solve those problems. Maybe you'd end up w sth like AT Proto in the end

KajMagnuson Solving 20 Erdős Problems with 20 Codex Accounts Running in Parallel

Interesting to read!

> contributions

One thing I think you and the other "AI math builders" have done, is to show how good the top models are at logics and reasoning.

I didn't realize how good they are, until they solved an Erdös problem. And now lots of Erdös problems!

(Plus verified that the AIs actually did solve the problems, that's not easy :- ))

KajMagnuson Bring back crappy forums

> no one cares about forums anymore so trying to innovate in the space is a waste of time

Not sure about that. To me it looks as if Facebook is self sabotaging, for example their local events page is broken and has been for years. FB-the-company seems defunct internally, and if they start fading away (slowly over many 10s of years), maybe forums will make a comeback (slowly). Also, if AIs destroy Reddit, this might be an opportunity for smaller forums that have ways to block boring AIs.

> Any feature you can think of has probably been implemented by someone at some point

Definitely not :- )

KajMagnuson Bring back crappy forums

That's how GitHub discussion works :- ) (or did you know?)

Look here: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/ — by default, sorted by last activity. But you can also sort by newest, or by votes.

For comment threads, look at e.g.: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/discussions/5509?sort=old — sorted by time, by default. But you can also sort by upvotes.

***

The forum software I'm developing, https://www.Talkyard.io, is also threaded, and can sort by time or by votes. (Both discussion topics and replies.)

F.ex. go here: https://forum.talkyard.io/-9qb49/solving-problem-first-comme... and scroll down to the replies section and click `Oldest first` to change order.

In addition to oldest/newest/"best", you can sort top level comments by time descending, and deeper comments by time _ascending_ or by votes — creating a kind of "micro blog feed" where each top level comment is the most recent "micro blog post" — but replies don't have to share the same sort order. "Newest, then popular" and "Newest, then oldest" I call these sort orders.

Also click the "Recent posts" in the upper right corner, to see the most recent comments sorted by time descending.

***

Anyway. There's people who think the hybrid approach you mentioned is an good idea.

KajMagnuson Bring back crappy forums

You can also have a tree view side-by-side with a flat view — see this comment (in this discussion): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48770861

If you click a comment in the flat view, the tree view jumps to that comment, so you can see it in its context.

> You can have a chronologically sorted tree view

Couldn't that be a change-sort-order-button? But this doesn't solve the find-the-most-recent-comments problem?

KajMagnuson Bring back crappy forums

> Is there any reason why flat/tree view could not be toggleable

I actually implemented both flat & tree view in Talkyard (forum softw I'm developing).

Not toggleable, but side-by side, so you see the threaded discussion in the middle, and comments by time descending in a sidebar.

See: (incl demo video)

https://forum.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improve...

(Old HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12663844, but blog link broken (seems I let the domain expire))

KajMagnuson The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online

I think they meant that different people can give you different and conflicting advice.

Also, check out the Goomba fallacy. (The way you wrote "the advice was... now it is...")

KajMagnuson Never Give Them Your Face

Yes I guess there exists such blog posts. And that it varies from person to person of course (what they already know or dont).

This blog post in particular though, I got so bored so I couldn't finish reading it. I gave it another quick try now because of your comment :-)

KajMagnuson Never Give Them Your Face

> was AI, but it was interesting nonetheless

I suspect the prompt given to the AI was 3 sentences, maybe interesting sentences,

and everything else was AI expanded, a waste of everyone's time? (Those who read everything)

KajMagnuson Software is made between commits

Interesting, didn't know about that Github functionality.

I'd like to not depend that much on Github, and instead I'm thinking about having some kind of archival repo where noisy boring historical stuff can be saved (but I'd delete the branches in the main repo). Or renaming historical branches, eg adding an "old/" prefix.

KajMagnuson Software is made between commits

That's interesting, so you keep the branches from before the squash -- but do you also rename them somehow, to show that they're now "frozen historic versions"?

KajMagnuson The Website Specification

The whole website was apparently AI generated 3 days ago [0], leaves me wondering if this is partly a HN bots upvotes manipulation experiment. Or people here really think an AI gend docs website is top news nowadays? Has the HN demographics changed

When the website is AI generated anyway, why not ask Claude or Gemini directly instead of going to the specs website?

(Maybe it's useful to the author himself, but personally I don't have any reasons to trust the website more than asking an AI myself + asking for references)

[0] https://github.com/jdevalk/specification.website/commit/d8ec...

KajMagnuson EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinated

I think the AIs don't have enough information about the problem. There's many things those who wrote the prompts forgot to mention. And some of it maybe is tacit knowledge?

Then, it doesn't matter if you add 1000 frontier models -- they still can't generate a good report.

But yes I suppose you can get rid of hallucinated citations though

KajMagnuson Show HN: Continue? Y/N: A 60-second game about AI agent permission fatigue

Top 18%! I denied everything, unless I could see at a glance that it was safe (like Git diff)

KajMagnuson Migrating from Go to Rust

Aren't you overlooking the main point of the article?, the reason they migrated:

> concurrency — eliminating data races essentially, which we had before. Really gnarly bugs

> this is the one teams report most enthusiastically. The classes of bugs that survive go test -race and reach production (data races, nil dereferences, missed error paths) just don’t compile in Rust. Oncall rotations are typically very boring after a Rust migration. ...

> I hadn’t had to chase down a crash, or some weird multi-threaded race condition, or some of these other things which actually consumed a huge amount of my time before.

(They say at InfluxDb)

That's not a Rust vs. Go slapfight? Instead, sounds like a good judgement to me

KajMagnuson Google Declaring War on the Web

There's no metrics or KPIs that encourage more AI use? (In his team?)

(I guess you would have mentioned already)

KajMagnuson I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

Saying the model failed to write a competitive C compiler makes more sense.

I don't think they tried to do that though.

> today's models are not yet able to produce production software without close supervision, even when uncharacteristically good specs and hand-written tests exist.

That's a good point anyway

KajMagnuson Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

Or when you find some old source code at your workplace, and you're like: "this looks pretty nice, I wonder who wrote this?"

KajMagnuson Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

Check out Qubes OS and vault VMs and (I haven't started using yet) split SSH / GPG.

KajMagnuson Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise

If a package developer maliciously breaks everyone's builds,

isn't that pretty great?

Because now you have learnt that you can't trust them