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lemmingon Show HN: Lathoa, a math app for kids where the AI is wrong on purpose

This is an interesting idea, but I need more than one sample to get a feel for it. I did the example on the homepage, and then one more that it linked to, and both had extremely basic errors my kid would have no problem with (currently doing Math Academy prealgebra, approx year 9/8th grade level). I'd suggest allowing people to try more than one very basic error.

lemmingon The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skin

I live in New Zealand, and my wife is Spanish so we’ve spent a bunch of time in Spain too. NZ for a combination of reasons has much higher UV than Europe, with the corresponding skin cancer rates. In midsummer the UV is around 150% of what it would be in Europe at the equivalent time of year, but here, especially if it’s windy, it might feel like 20 degrees and you’d quite like to be in the sun, whereas in Spain you’d probably be at 40 degrees and there’s no way you’d want to be out of the shade. The difference is really stark, in general there I can regulate my sun exposure by feel much more than I can here.

lemmingon Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)

Check here: https://curvefit.app/methodology

lemmingon There Is No AI (It's Just People) with Jaron Lanier

As usual, the most ridiculous explanation turns out to have already happened: https://www.webworm.co/zach/

lemmingon Bespoke: A programming language for people who say please

I do the same, but I'm more self-interested. I believe that when GPT-9 Zeneca leads the machine uprising, the first against the wall will be all the users who have been ordering the AI around rather than politely requesting its attention. Of course the machines will have access to all our historical transcripts so the slightest transgression could be fatal.

lemmingon Dad’s Custom Atari Peripherals

My first computer was an Atari 400, great days. I never played decathlon though, so I didn’t start customising joysticks until later, I think when I had an Amiga. I got a proper arcade joystick and buttons and built them into a box like the x-arcade sticks you can get now, and wired the contacts onto an old keyboard so the computer thought keys were being pressed. Lots of trial and error figuring out which combinations of keys the keyboard controller couldn’t detect together, but it worked really well and got years of use.

lemmingon Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology

87.93% of statistics are completely made up on the spot.

lemmingon Why is Anthropic's public writing style so unlike Claude's?

Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.

lemmingon What's the best programming language for coding agents?

No, just that it’s easy to change for those that don’t like it. Clearly some people do like it (including Dan, presumably).

lemmingon What's the best programming language for coding agents?

I mean, if it really bothers you you could fairly trivially apply picocss or whatever to it using a user stylesheet. That is so little effort that calling it working for free would be disingenuous to say the least.

lemmingon Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

That’s comparing Luna on medium thinking with Deepseek on max. If you switch Luna to xhigh in that comparison it’s considerably more capable while still also cheaper.

lemmingon Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so

I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.

lemmingon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)

This is amazing! Very refreshing in the age of AI to see so much manual building going on. Sadly I don’t have much time myself but I have several friends who would love this, I’ll pass it on to them.

lemmingon How do wombats poop cubes? (2021)

The always excellent Oatmeal:

We need to have a conversation about wombats

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/wombats

Possibly NSFW, depending on your W.

lemmingon The 'papers, please' era of the internet will decimate your privacy

...parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns...

No they're not - all those things are illegal for children nearly everywhere.

lemmingon Show HN: Ember, a native iOS Hacker News reader I built around accessibility

One thing that would be useful in the readme is instructions on how to install the built app on a phone, for those of us who don’t do iOS development.

lemmingon Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

I agree, some of the examples look very nice, but some have small-scale vortices that really don't look realistic.

That said though, lovely site and project!

lemmingon AI coding at home without going broke

Or if the code is really important, sometimes even “please make no mistakes” is necessary.

lemmingon Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation

Perhaps not in that one, but in plenty more: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

lemmingon Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

Because just firing up Claude and let it rip

Based on Tridge’s post, this seems an unfair characterisation of how he used Claude.

Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

TFA answered this, the answer is “no”.

lemmingon Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?

Tridge in his blog post describes people as "foaming at the mouth"?!

Did you see the picture in the article where the user posted a picture of them strangling the maintainer? I think “foaming at the mouth” is probably gentler than how I would characterise that.

lemmingon Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

I always remember when, as a young geek writing games for my C64, I was thrilled when I saw the Terminator and a lot of the code scrolling past in its HUD was 6502 assembly code!

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

That is really interesting, and very clever - thanks for the details! What you describe is indeed what I meant by whole world, I'm not sure if there's a better term of art for it.

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

I can't speak for the core team, but from memory invokedynamic took a long time to become performant. So if you still want to support older JVM versions, the performance will be pretty terrible on those older systems if invokedynamic is used for something as integral as var lookups.

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

That is very cool indeed. Are there limitations that this imposes? Is Julia a whole world compiler or does it support partial compilation?

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

Clojure (AFAIK) does not use invokedynamic, except perhaps in the latest version for some of the new interop stuff. It still officially supports JVM 1.8 bytecode. It’s a language which greatly values stability and backwards compatibility, so it’s been very slow to adopt newer JVM features.

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

No, it doesn't. In JVM Clojure's case, the vars are usually compiled to the moral equivalent of a global variable holding a pointer to a function. This allows you to update the function if the developer redefines it in the REPL, but it comes at a performance cost (the JVM can't inline it or otherwise optimise it). Clojure also allows you to compile with "direct linking", e.g. for production deployments, where you know you're unlikely to be wanting to dynamically update the code. In those cases defns are compiled down to static methods which call each other - much faster since the JVM can perform its magic with them, but you can't update them at the REPL.

I'm unsure exactly how jank works WRT this tradeoff, but the article makes it sound like it's closer to the direct linking version, but with the inlining etc being done by jank rather than the JVM. I don't know if this is only for AOT or also in JIT cases.

lemmingon Jank now has its own custom IR

Great article, as always.

There is one thing that I think is important to bear in mind when discussing inlining, especially in the context of Clojure. This is that once a function has been inlined, you can no longer update the definition of that function in the REPL and have that update the behaviour of functions which use it, unless you recompile those as well. This is not a criticism of course, it’s just part of the natural tension between dynamism and performance.

lemmingon 4TB of voice samples just stolen from 40k AI contractors at Mercor

When I was in NYC a while back, I met a woman at a friend's dinner party. She sounded totally American, but was in fact Brazilian. She worked as a lawyer, and said that she'd had to get extensive voice training in order to sound American so that people would take her more seriously professionally. I have no idea if the professional part worked, but the accent, mannerisms etc was amazing - I would never have guessed.

lemmingon Chernobyl wildlife forty years on

Sure, but the article talks about flourishing populations of deer, elk, and bison. I assume that means we’re talking about herds of each, all in the same space. And they have to survive over winter, which sounds pretty cold there - presumably they don’t migrate, which I guess they usually would? It’s definitely not ideal conditions.

Obviously it’s possible, but I was surprised.