meken

The music reminds me of Mappy Land (one of my favorite childhood games).

You sound like a cigarette company rep.

"I've seen an uptick in vague ominous attacks on Marlboro saying that our products kill people.

Then don’t vaguepost.

Trust me when I say you don't want to live in a world where they win the AI race (if that wasn't already blatantly obvious).

They’re not perfect, but they’re the best organization in the running (with the second best person at the helm after Demis). The rest of the field isn’t close.

Nice FUD.

I’ve seen an uptick in these types of comment on HN - vague ominous sounding attacks on Anthropic.

It honestly seems like a coordinated PR effort from OpenAI folks to “both sides” the companies.

Which would, if true, be a further indictment of the culture at OpenAI.

I love the timer. It’s the closest game to ThruLine I’ve come across (that’s a compliment).

I’m an American and I just had the thought - if I was working in Japan at a Japanese company and I had the opportunity to hire, would I have a bias to hire other Americans?

Honestly probably, since I understand them the best.

Early on in my ChatGPT usage, one of my messages got interrupted/cut off (as happens occasionally).

My first thought was "oh they're going to need to add a UI feature to allow me to click and tell them to continue the conversation".

Then I realized I can just ask the model to continue, obviating the need for a button.

That was a pretty mind blowing moment.

I see.

Have you ever tried paredit? It’s pretty much a lifesaver for this kind of thing.

Ah I see. That makes sense.

That’s making me really thankful to be a paredit user.

I do wish there were an easier way to move in the ]}]})))}-ness of block ends though.

I’m not quite sure what this means. How is it different/worse than all parens..?

fyi I use paredit and just hit ) and it moves me past any kind of paren/bracket. But even without that you can just hit left and right..?

I have fond memories of cs224d [1] taught by richardsocher. It’s a bit dated at this point as it was created in the pre-transformer era, but it was a very cool introduction to applying deep learning to nlp at the time.

[1] https://cs224d.stanford.edu

I’m thankful for Racket - it got me regularly programming in lisp by virtue of LeetCode accepting it as one of its languages.

I did start to feel Racket’s “wordiness” towards the end - it started to feel a bit like COBOL. I’ve since moved onto Clojure and really appreciate the shorter keywords/function names/fewer parenthesis.

I still miss for/fold though - that thing is an absolute machine.

They are published on the leetcode website. Here's a screenshot showing where to click [1].

LeetCode does have an "unofficial" API to get the problem of the day. Should work for previous days as well. This code worked last I tried [2].

[1] https://github.com/ebanner/daily-coding-challenges#leetcode

[2] https://github.com/ebanner/get-daily-leetcode-problem/blob/m...

Nice to meet someone else that does the daily leetcode! It is really a nice feature - I wish every online judge website would add it.

Bonus - Racket is an accepted language on leetcode ;-)

I had a little excursion into Dyalog APL recently and wound up writing an emacs mode to evaluate Dyalog APL [1]. It was a pretty nice experience using Claude to extract the small subset of features I wanted from gnu-apl-mode [2] to work with Dyalog APL.

I’d really like to properly get into APL though. My plan is to solve a bunch of problems on Kattis [3].

I'm really enjoying this way of learning a new language in the age of LLMs - starting with easy problems on an online code judge website and work with an LLM to come up with/explain simple solutions. It gives me dopamine hits, lots of reps, allows me to start coding right away, and is a nice way to slowly ramp up difficulty and get practice with different features of the language.

[1] https://github.com/ebanner/dyalog-mode

[2] https://github.com/lokedhs/gnu-apl-mode

[3] https://open.kattis.com

Love the story and the article. The only nit I have with it:

“His answers are… understandable, and maybe in some ways more digestible than we would get from an expert,” he said.

This does not reflect his actual responses? The interviewer keys off his most emphatic sounding words to keep the conversation flowing, but his answers are generally inscrutable.

He did a great job given the cards he was dealt though.

I was curious to get a sense for the overall "success rate" at a glance, so I uploaded the author's data as a spreadsheet and color-coded the conversations based on length (short=red, medium=yellow, long=green) with the help of Claude:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1VqMF0xWzJMXWNndeY4P1...

It's particularly nice if you zoom out so you can see all the rows at once.

I hope the author doesn't mind - if you do please tell me and I will take it down!

but part of me wonders if a lot of their success is attributable to the place just being well run in general

That was my sense reading the article - that the author would be running a successful engineering org using any language really.

I’m not sure how that was your takeaway..?

We retired the “Nerdy” personality in March after launching GPT‑5.4. In training, we removed the goblin-affine reward signal and filtered training data containing creature-words, making goblins less likely to over-appear or show up in inappropriate contexts. Unfortunately, GPT‑5.5 started training before we found the root cause of the goblins.

The prompt is just a short term hotfix/hack because they couldn’t get the proper fix in in time.

There’s a difference between a relationship with a person and an organization. I think the difference is large enough that the analogy doesn’t really hold.

Just some feedback - I would love to see some screenshots in your GitHub READMEs!*

*I saw the second project has a partial screenshot, but not a full one.

“What’s beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expected, and it was like there was some kind of mental block.”

Even if AI never progresses past this point, it still seems like a huge win for math research to “clear the deck” of these.

I love Kernighan’s Law:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it"

Wow that's a really good point. The style of the videos did become quite repetitive.

I had so much fun making videos with my mom when it came out. During the first two weeks, we made over 100 cameo videos together - we were constantly running up against the upload limit. It unleashed tons of genuine creativity, joy, and laughter from us.

After those first two weeks though, we just… didn’t use it again. The novelty wore off and there wasn’t anything really to bring us back. That was the real downfall of Sora.

Fascinating. Thanks for the explanation.

After all, that's how I tend to treat SQL databases early on.

Ah, that’s a very helpful analogy/parallel that didn’t occur to me. Thank you!

I understood it as the latter.

Current Common Lisp implementations can usually support both image-oriented and source-oriented development. Image-oriented environments (for example, Squeak Smalltalk) have as their interchange format an image file or memory dump containing all the objects present in the system, which can be later restarted on the same or distinct hardware. By contrast, a source-oriented environment uses individual, human-readable files for recording information for reconstructing the project under development; these files are processed by the environment to convert their contents into material which can be executed.

Am I reading this right that people can (and do??) use images as a complete replacement for source code files?

what is this actually used for

If you're interested in LeetCode, Racket is one of their accepted languages.