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Rperry2174

309 karma · joined July 6, 2017

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Rperry2174··on Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Huge chance I'm underestimating how many of these there are, but where do people find all of these unsolved equations/ciphers/etc?

Is there some sort of enumerated list somewhere that we can run as a test suite and then we can make a bigger deal about the percentage of that list that we're burning down as these models improve?

Rperry2174··on As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing
Whatever AI is doing to how we find / share information aside, I do think that one under appreciated effect is on how software (and other things) get built. Lowering the barrier to entry for writing code and other tasks feels democratizing , but we may just not have had enough time to see how that hopefully has positive effects a decade out.

Its funny how fast we forget that when Google came out and arguably now many would laugh at the statement "all the good, companies like Google brought to the internet"

Rperry2174··on New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]
Honestly whether or not this was effective seems less important to me than the adoption numbers.

Text book reading in this course was 10-15% at baseline ... but this AI thing got 90% voluntary usage ungraded.

Even if its worse per-hour than a textbook, you're now teaching 6x as many students _something_ instead of teaching a small minority everything.

So really it just becomes an optimization problem at that point because most students are at least in the funnel/in the running to learn something.

The paper kind of proves this itself ... they tweaked the quize formats mid-semester and where able to iterate which you can't do on a textbook that nobody opens in the first place

Rperry2174··on GPT-5.3-Codex
yeah I'm mostly just talking about how they're framing it: "Claude Opus 4.6 is designed for longer-running, agentic work — planning complex tasks more carefully and executing them with less back-and-forth from the user"

I guess its also quite interesting that how they are framing these projects are opposite from how people currently perceive them and I guess that may be a conscious choice...

Rperry2174··on GPT-5.3-Codex
Fair I agree that was true of early codex and my perception too.. but today there are two announcements that came out and thats what im referring to.

specifically, the GPT-5.3 post explicitly leans into "interactive collaborator" langauge and steering mid execution

OpenAI post: "Much like a colleague, you can steer and interact with GPT-5.3-Codex while it’s working, without losing context."

OpenAI post: "Instead of waiting for a final output, you can interact in real time—ask questions, discuss approaches, and steer toward the solution"

Claude post: "Claude Opus 4.6 is designed for longer-running, agentic work — planning complex tasks more carefully and executing them with less back-and-forth from the user."

Rperry2174··on GPT-5.3-Codex
Whats interesting to me is that these gpt-5.3 and opus-4.6 are diverging philosophically and really in the same way that actual engineers and orgs have diverged philosophically

With Codex (5.3), the framing is an interactive collaborator: you steer it mid-execution, stay in the loop, course-correct as it works.

With Opus 4.6, the emphasis is the opposite: a more autonomous, agentic, thoughtful system that plans deeply, runs longer, and asks less of the human.

that feels like a reflection of a real split in how people think llm-based coding should work...

some want tight human-in-the-loop control and others want to delegate whole chunks of work and review the result

Interested to see if we eventually see models optimize for those two philosophies and 3rd, 4th, 5th philosophies that will emerge in the coming years.

Maybe it will be less about benchmarks and more about different ideas of what working-with-ai means

Rperry2174··on Prism
This keeps repeating in different domains: we lower the cost of producing artifacts and the real bottleneck is evaluating them.

For developers, academics, editors, etc... in any review driven system the scarcity is around good human judgement not text volume. Ai doesn't remove that constraint and arguably puts more of a spotlight on the ability to separate the shit from the quality.

Unless review itself becomes cheaper or better, this just shifts work further downstream and disguising the change as "efficiency"

Rperry2174··on Nonviolence
Let's say you live in an apartment building and your landlord locks you out and keeps you belongings. Police say its not their problem. Courts decide that they don't aare either. So now you have no recourse or body to complain to.

In that situation saying "i resolve problems non-violently every day" stops being relevenat. The mechanisms that allow you to do so (enforcement, law, etc) have been removed as they were for those fighting for civil rights.

You may still personally choose non-violence in this case, but I'd bet you would understand/sympathize/maybe-even-join those who decided to break into their apartments by force and grab the things that are rightfully theirs.

nobody is secretly violent ... just normal peaceful channels stoped working.

Recognizing that distinction isn't justifying violence its just explaining why nonviolence provides leverage in the first place

Rperry2174··on Nonviolence
yeah the crazy part about that is one uncomfortable point many through history (and in threads today) have made is that nonviolence implicitly assumes a moral audience. And that injustice, once clearly exposed will provoke people's conscience.

History obviously shows that that "moral audience" was certainly the minority then.

MLK was already forcing that confrontation and by most accounts was succeeding slowly-but-surely. But it wasn't until his assassination that people were forced to confront the contrast he had been trying to illuminate all along.

Even his disciplined non-violence he was met with brutal force (as were the peaceful protesters) and this forced some sort of moral reckoning for those who had deferred or were complicit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKnJL2jfA5A&feature=youtu.be

Rperry2174··on Nonviolence
This is a good articulation of mlkjr's theology and dicipline around nonviolence, but I think its incomplete if you read it in isolation.

His strategy worked because it existed alongside MANY other voices, IMO the most underrated of which is Malcolm X, that rejected this "gradualism" outright and refused endless delay.

They weren't organizing violence but they were instead making it credible that there is a world where those "peaceful" people do not accept complicity or "no" for an answer.

This shifted the baseline of what a "compromise" could look like (as we today see baselines shift very frequently often in a less just direction)

Seen that way, nonviolence wasn't just a moral stance, it was one side of a coin and once piece of a broader ecosystem of pressure from different directions. King's approach was powerful because there were alternatives he was NOT choosing.

You cannot have nonviolence unless violence is a credible threat from a game-theory perspective. And that contrast made his path viable without endorsing the alternatives as a model

Rperry2174··on Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
I think the underappreciated part isn't "violence vs non-violence", but the role that malcolm x and black pathners actually played.

They weren't primarily organizing armed revolt.. it was more about the idea that they were articulating moral clarity. They were, in the most credible way, refusing to accept endless delay.

This allowed them to shift the baseline of what was politically tolerable.

In that sense, the movements worked collectively because of a kind of good-cop/bad-cop dynamic. MLK JR offered a path to reform that felt (to some) constructive and legitimate _because_ there was a visible alternative that many people udnerstood as worse.

I think violence is already far to prominent today, but I think successful movements do need both moral persuasion (if morality is still a thing that persuades) and _also_ a credible way of making inaction feel unsafe.

Rperry2174··on Codex vs. Claude Code (today)
what kinds of tasks do you find this to be true for? For a while I was using claude code inside of the cursor terminal, but I found it to be basically the same as just using the same claude model in there.

Presumably the harness cant be doing THAT much differently right? Or rather what tasks are responsibilities of the harness could differentiate one harness from another harness

Rperry2174··on Codex vs. Claude Code (today)
I've noticed a lot of these posts tend to go codex vs claude, but as author is someone who does AI workshops curious why Cursor is left out of this post (and more generally posts like this).

From my personal experience I find cursor to be much more robust because rather than "either / or" its both and can switch depending on the time or the task or whatever the newest model is.

It feels like the same way people often try to avoid "vendor lock in" in software world that Cursor allows freedom for that, but maybe I'm on my own here as I don't see it naturally come up in posts like these as much.

Rperry2174··on Show HN: Gaming Couch – a local multiplayer party game platform for 8 players
Agreed... also fwiw I don't think that langauge-dependent games are as much of a barrier as it used to be. I've built a game recently that I easily localized first with real-time AI translations and then later with more static language translations.

Anyway I think this would be an amazing thing to let other people contribute to as this is an entire industry of hypercasual games which could easily be ported to this minus the annoying ads

Rperry2174··on Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work
Im not fully convinced by "a computer can never be held accountable"

We already delegate accountability to non-humans all the time: - CI systems block merges - monitoring systems page people - test suites gate different things

In practice accountability is enforced by systems, not humans.. humans are defintiely "blamed" after the fact, but the day-to-day control loop is automated.

As agents get better at running code, inspecting ui state, correlating logs, screenshots, etc they're starting to operationally be "accountable" and preventing bad changes from shipping and producing evidence when something goes wrong .

At some point humans role shifts from "i personally verify this works" to "i trust this verification system and am accountable for configuring it correctly".

Thats still responsibility, but kind of different from whats described here. Taken to a logical extreme, the arguement here would suggest that CI shouldn't replace manual release checklists

Rperry2174··on The State of AI Coding Report 2025
LOC is a bad quality metric, but its a reasonable proxy in practice..

Teams generally don't keep merging code that "doesn't work" for long... prod will brake, users will push back fast. So unless the "wrongness" of the AI-generated code is buried so deeply that it only shows up way later, higher merged LOC probably does mean more real output.

Its just not directly correlated there is some bloat associated too.

So that caveat applies to human-written code too, which we tend to forget. There's bloat and noise in the metric, but its not meaningless

Rperry2174··on Vibe coding creates fatigue?
I think both experience are true.

AI removes boredome AND removes the natural pauses where understanding used to form..

energy goes up, but so does the kind of "compression" of cognitive things.

I think its less a quesiton of "faster" or "slower" but rather who controls the tempo

Rperry2174··on This is not the future
nothing is inevitable IN THEORY... but in practice, systems that minimize effort beat systems that maximize agency.

People want things to be simpler, easier, frictionless.

Resistance to these things has a cost and generally the ROI is not worth it for most people as whole

Rperry2174··on “Are you the one?” is free money
Most hilarious part of this is that if you've ever watched "The Challenge" then you know that these people, truly, often cannot add 3 digit numbers together let alone understand information theory
Rperry2174··on Daily Chess Blitz – A 60-second daily chess puzzle
I generally like the daily habit puzzle games and I play a ton of daily chess, but this one doesn't give me much time to think and reflect on my moves (either pre or post moving on to the next puzzle)

Would be nice to add something like that... i think review mode is a huge reason why chess.com puzzles / chess.com is so popular because you leave a little smarter than you came

Rperry2174··on Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
One thing this really highlights to me is how often the "boring" takes end up being the most accurate. The provocative, high-energy threads are usually the ones that age the worst.

If an LLM were acting as a kind of historian revisiting today’s debates with future context, I’d bet it would see the same pattern again and again: the sober, incremental claims quietly hold up, while the hyperconfident ones collapse.

Something like "Lithium-ion battery pack prices fall to $108/kWh" is classic cost-curve progress. Boring, steady, and historically extremely reliable over long horizons. Probably one of the most likely headlines today to age correctly, even if it gets little attention.

On the flip side, stuff like "New benchmark shows top LLMs struggle in real mental health care" feels like high-risk framing. Benchmarks rotate constantly, and “struggle” headlines almost always age badly as models jump whole generations.

I bet theres many "boring but right" takes we overlook today and I wondr if there's a practical way to surface them before hindsight does

Rperry2174··on Everything You Need to Know About Grok 4
I keep seeing these Grok 4 intelligence claims, so I tried something very simple: "Animate a round robin tournament for 10 people."

Results: Claude: ~10s, perfect working demo ChatGPT: ~20s, solid solution Grok 4: ~1000s, failed completely, gave me a truncated base64 blob

This wasn't some obscure edge case... it was basic data visualization that any decent model should handle. Yet somehow Grok 4 is "competing with humans" and has "99% tool accuracy"...

I don't buy it..

links: Claude: https://claude.ai/share/7a413a6a-5c01-44a1-aaed-8b237e5e9e94 Chatgpt: https://chatgpt.com/canvas/shared/687a9f9d4304819187ac7d98d3... Grok 4: https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMw%3D%3D_20b61291-e1bb-45e5-a...

These benchmarks are either just wrong or measuring something completely divorced from practical utility imo...

Rperry2174··on Endgame Open Chess Platform
"For too long, chess has been controlled by insiders. That changes now. Endgame is breaking down barriers"

What insiders are controlling chess?

Rperry2174··on Test
This is actually a HN hiring post / the worlds most secure CAPTCHA: if you can decode this Elon’s D.O.G.E will be reaching out
Rperry2174··on Gifski: Optimized GIF Encoder
I've tried an absurd amount of video-to-gif tools and Gifski somehow is orders of magnitude better quality than all of them
Rperry2174··on Pyroscope and Grafana Phlare join together
Ryan here from Pyroscope -- Awesome to hear you're interested in migrating over. Would love for you to try out our Ruby integration and let us know what you think: https://pyroscope.io/docs/ruby/.

We've added a lot of features like tags/labels, integration with tracing: https://github.com/pyroscope-io/otel-profiling-ruby, integration with CI/CD (in rails), etc.

Feedback very welcome!

Rperry2174··on Phlare: open-source database for continuous profiling at scale
I suspect this is partially because internal efforts and agendas take priority over open source community at this point.

For example, I created an issue requesting a flamegraph visualization in grafana[1] and now it makes sense that they didn't initially respond because they were building it internally in secret and didn't want to spoil the big reveal (when they did respond they did mention that it was a secret).

They're also less incentivized now to tend to issues and PRs that help others outside of their ecosystem (i.e. competing logs, metrics, tracing, profiling, etc products).

[1] https://github.com/grafana/grafana/issues/53723

Rperry2174··on Ask HN: Would issue “bounties” make contributing to open source more appealing?
Lots of people have done statistically unlikely things :) thats where the funs at! High risk high reward
Rperry2174··on Ask HN: Would issue “bounties” make contributing to open source more appealing?
Yeah I guess I'm picturing it being more for "mechanical" tasks. For example, in our case we have a tag called "new profilers" (https://github.com/pyroscope-io/pyroscope/issues?q=is%3Aissu...)

Which TLDR is they are reporting agents for each respective language that send profiling data to our server.

I'd picture the bounty as us just giving an input and an output in the form of a set of unit tests and just saying: "if you create a java agent that passes these tests we will pay you $X"

Seems "mechanical" enough right?

Rperry2174··on Ask HN: Would issue “bounties” make contributing to open source more appealing?
Interesting... Yeah I didn't realize so many of these sites exist. Something seems to be preventing them (or especially one) to really gain prominence and name recognition.

My suspicion is that people contributing to open source don't really just contribute randomly. It is most likely that they use a library or repo and then they end up on the "issues" page because they had a problem themselves.

It's at this point where I would imagine one is most likely to convert into actually picking up an issue and when notice of a "bounty" might push someone over the fence (?)

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