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alain94040

7,803 karma · joined August 11, 2007

Author of the co-founder equity calculator http://foundrs.com

Organizer of the Startup Conference http://thestartupconference.com

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alain94040··on Understanding Frontier Artificial Intelligence
surely going to max out at slightly less good (we probably can’t get perfect data) than the best human

With that argument, the basic calculator would have been impossible.

It's pretty clear that machines can be better than the best humans at memorizing things, computing relationships between concepts quickly, etc. So while you can argue that LLM are not the path forward, I have no problem imagining that using all of humanity's knowledge with a machine could beat the best human at a field.

alain94040··on Meta VR Glasses
Yes, when the guy takes the device off to greet the person, good luck seeing any cable. It's magic!
alain94040··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
No. Silicon is on another level. Which is why the EDA verification is an industry on its own.

Sure, there are some software that have similar "can't have bugs" requirements. I imagine the computers on Moon missions also had that kind of high bar. I wouldn't use NASA requirements as a proof for how LLMs should be used.

alain94040··on Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
Not convinced by those points.

In particular, I found this very misleading or irrelevant:

a typical CPU project anecdotally has about three times as many specification and validation engineers as design engineers and a 5:1 ratio is not unheard of

The reason silicon design has such verification to design ratio is because the cost of one bug is many, many orders of magnitude higher than software. Both in dollar cost and in schedule cost (it takes months to fab a chip, and if you messed up and need to spin a fix, it costs tens of millions of dollars, not counting any design engineering cost).

I don't think you can extrapolate these very industry-specific facts to judging LLMs.

alain94040··on Jean-Pierre Serre turns 100
Happy birthday “Tonton Serre”
alain94040··on OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability
I wonder what kind of new AI law would be useful right now. Maybe this one:

  if an AI agent does something, you (the prompter) are responsible by default, unless you can show that your the agent itself behaved in an unexpected way and that you in no way prompted or hinted at the bad behavior, in which case the model provider is liable
The idea is that by making it clear who is responsible, corporations and others start paying more attention because they become financially liable.

On the other hand, I wonder if we'll end up with another variation of the cookie law, where every AI user or vendor just adds "don't do anything illegal" as part of their prompt to defend against that law. Thoughts?

alain94040··on Navier-Stokes Announcement
Why is it a threat and not an opportunity? Imagine if in ancient times there was their Oracle that could produce mathematical proofs of any question you asked it, would you burn it or try to understand how it works and use it to ask questions you are stuck on?
alain94040··on The Last 24 Hours Are the Opening Scene in a Horror Movie
Currently a state of the art AI has nowhere to hide: the amount of GPU compute it requires to stay on is huge. And therefore easy to terminate.

Unlike biological viruses, AI can't replicate GPUs for free and grow.

alain94040··on Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra
Apple is not "just using arm chips". They have been designing their own 100% custom cores for more than a decade.
alain94040··on I'm becoming AI-blind
Agreed, what I call "have your AI talk to my AI" [1]

I think that's where the future is going. It presents interesting challenges, but also some opportunities to make life better for everyone.

[1*] https://foundrs.com/have_your_ai_talk_to_my_ai.html

(*) I dislike the HN trend of starting citations at 0, I find it snobbish.

alain94040··on Finding zombies in our systems: A real-world story of CPU bottlenecks
Interesting story.

I don't know anything about the Linux scheduler, but if one core out of 96 is busy chasing after those ghost allocations, why would a network thread not use one of the other 95 cores, and instead be stuck for seconds? Unless that one core is blocking the entire kernel, but then that would be a lot more visible instantly.

alain94040··on The Art of 64-bit Assembly
> Yes. Its "simplicity" is exactly why we pick and assemble piece by hand - we imagine the leanest way

Professionally, assembly is the last thing I would let an LLM generate for me. That's because if you need to write something in assembly, it's because it's critical: operating system context switch, interrupt handler, that kind of thing. You don't want to be 99% correct, you need that code to be 100% good.

I can imagine some other professional scenarios that I'm less familiar with, where you want to write a tight numeric loop of NEON64 assembly and let the LLM do it, because it's frankly a pain to do by hand, and you can test it to some degree of confidence.

alain94040··on Why I am not going to buy a computer
Neither the original 1987 story nor the blog post make any sense to me. I feel the authors are focused on a niche aspect: exchanging deep human thoughts with other humans. For that use case, sure, don’t use a computer, don’t use AI.

But there’s nothing wrong with a car made by a robot factory. The car is useful, regardless of how it was made. AI lets some people create new products, those may be useful.

alain94040··on Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence
Use price per page (standard English text)? That would also help make the metric easier to visualize.

If you think a page is too vague, use a famous known writer's work as a reference.

alain94040··on Algorithmic Monocultures in Hiring
The European Union passed The Artificial Intelligence Act, which classifies:

High-risk – AI applications that are expected to pose significant threats to health, safety, or the fundamental rights of persons. Notably, AI systems used in health, education, recruitment, critical infrastructure management, law enforcement or justice. They are subject to quality, transparency, human oversight and safety obligations

That's a pretty common sense legislation to me.

alain94040··on AI Doesn't Have ROI
Neither coding nor internal prototypes were the slow part

That is not my experience mentoring 100+ startup founders. Building a prototype, the gateway to serious customer engagement, used to take months and many startups would die before finishing their first one.

alain94040··on AI Doesn't Have ROI
Not my experience at all. One slow part was coding. AI takes care of that. But more importantly, the slow part was iterating through concepts, ideas, and prototypes. I thought people on this site embraced lean startups and agile development. AI really helps make that feedback loop 10X faster. I can do an experiment, show it to coworkers and get feedback in a morning, for something that would have taken me almost a week in the past. So now we can try a lot more options, whereas before, we kept getting hit by the sunk cost fallacy: I spent a week on this, I really don't want to start again from scratch with this other approach that may or may not be better.
alain94040··on The Last Technical Interview
That discussion triggered a memory from a comment I made a long time ago here (2020, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24841235).

There is a way to make the campfire approach a little bit less utopian: California could pass a law that makes it legal to have a second temporary job. So that FAANG engineers for instance, would be allowed to campfire/interview at another company with legal protections. Put a bit of grease in the interview system is good for candidates.

alain94040··on Orchestrating AI code review at scale
the labour cost of having an intern/entry level engineer spend ~30-60s looking through these is likely close to $0.20

Did you do the math? Your estimate feels way off. First, I doubt an intern would process one PR in 30s. Maybe 2-3 minutes, to read 10 lines carefully looking for typos and indentation mistakes. We pay interns close to $100K these days (in a company like CloudFlare), so that's ~80c/minute. My estimate is therefore closer to $1.6 per PR. About 10X.

You are correct that there is a residual value with the intern, over time they would start learning (a little bit) about the code base.

alain94040··on The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
We all have had the client from hell: they don't know what they want, they change their requirements all the time. Whenever they have a new half-baked idea, I need to scramble and re-design the architecture. They have no clue that a small change request has a big impact on the code.

Well... Now I can be that client. And let AI deal with my incomplete, always changing requirements. And get it done anyway.

alain94040··on Enough with the AI FOMO, go slow-mo, says Domo CDO
That matches my experience. At least on the solo front, there were so many topics I wasn't an expert on, that limited what I could build. Now with AI assistance, the sky is the limit. I don't need to be an expert in frontend, backend, I can just build on my personal expertise in a functional domain, and leverage AI to fill in the gaps. I believe many people will benefit from being to build exactly what they want, without gatekeepers or investment.
alain94040··on Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce
This paragraph from September 2025 didn't age well:

Like you, we have seen numerous reports that more and more firms are capping their total headcount in favor of leaning on more AI tools, leading to downsizing their intern and new-graduate hiring. [...] But we think this misreads the moment completely, so we’re heading in the opposite direction.

alain94040··on Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)
Correct (well, maybe not half a century, maybe 30 years or so). I was just about to reply that I'd love a version of this that shows instructions going in and out of a re-order buffer. That would be enlightening.
alain94040··on VHDL's Crown Jewel
You're not wrong, but blocking assignments (and their equivalent in VHDL, variables), are useful as local variables to a process/always block. For instance to factor common sub-expressions and not repeat them. So using only non-blocking assignments everywhere would lead to more ugly code.
alain94040··on LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs
Good question. For a long time I think the justification was location: Microsoft is in Seattle, and it’s only the Bay Area that is getting inflated salaries.
alain94040··on Arm releases first in-house chip, with Meta as debut customer
It's not misleading for people in the industry. ARM so far was selling IP (Verilog source code) that other chip makers would include in a full chip design.

Now ARM for the first time (this century) is making its own chip [design], which like most of its customers, is manufactured by a fab like TSMC.

The title is clear.

alain94040··on Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)
Agreed, in my experience, rule 5 should be rule 1. I think I also heard it said (paraphrased) as "show we your code and I'll be forever confused, show me your database schema and everything will become obvious".

Having implemented my shared of highly complex high-performance algorithms in the past, the key was always to figure out how to massage the raw data into structures that allow the algorithm to fly. It requires both a decent knowledge of the various algorithm options you have, as well as being flexible to see that the data could be presented a different way to get to the same result orders of magnitude faster.

alain94040··on First Website (1992)
In 1993, you could refresh the home page of Netscape (Mosaic) every day and it would mention new sites that had been added. That became unmanageable quickly, which is when two dudes from Stanford started a directory.
alain94040··on A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs
We're in early February 2025 [edit:2026] and the article was written on Dec 23, 2025, which makes it less than two months old. I think it's ok not to include a year in the submission title in that case.

I personally understand a year in the submission as a warning that the article may not be up to date.

alain94040··on GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers
When I was reviewing such papers, I didn't bother checking that 30+ citations were correctly indexed. I focused on the article itself, and maybe 1 or 2 citations that are important. That's it. For most citations, they are next to an argument that I know is correct, so why would I bother checking. What else do you expect? My job was to figure out if the article ideas are novel and interesting, not if they got all their citations right.
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