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RobinL commented on The new geography of stolen goods   economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/tlb
RobinL · 6 days ago
130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low!

You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!

RobinL commented on Does OLAP Need an ORM   clickhouse.com/blog/moose... · Posted by u/craneca0
RobinL · 8 days ago
When I read the title my brain immediately jumped to a slightly different idea. With olap, I often find it annoying to figure out the joins from the fk/pk relationships, so I was imagining a tool that kind of automatically followed the links for you. A bit like how a orm gives you auto complete, but without the user having to manually enter the schema.

And I wanted it to emit the raw SQL because that's generally what I want for olap.

So I had to go at building it. If anyone's interested a very rough demo/prototype is here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/vite_live_pg_orm/

Load in the demo Northwind schema and click some tables/columns to see the generated joins

RobinL commented on Hillary Clinton says she'd nominate Trump for Nobel Prize if he brokers peace   foxnews.com/media/hillary... · Posted by u/Bender
RobinL · 10 days ago
Misleading headline:

> she would nominate Trump for the award if he was successful in getting Putin to end his war and give back all the territory his forces took from Ukraine in the conflict

So the meaning of the comment is actually the opposite of headline. It's really a criticism of the basis of the negotiation

RobinL commented on GPT-5   openai.com/gpt-5/... · Posted by u/rd
RobinL · 17 days ago
Hypothesis: to the average user this will feel like a much greater jump in capability then to the average HNer, because most users were not using the model selector. So it'll be more successful than the benchmarks suggest.
RobinL commented on GPT-5 for Developers   openai.com/index/introduc... · Posted by u/6thbit
aliljet · 18 days ago
Between Opus aand GPT-5, it's not clear there's a substantial difference in software development expertise. The metric that I can't seem to get past in my attempts to use the systems is context awareness over long-running tasks. Producing a very complex, context-exceeding objective is a daily (maybe hourly) ocurrence for me. All I care about is how these systems manage context and stay on track over extended periods of time.

What eval is tracking that? It seems like it's potentially the most imporatnt metric for real-world software engineering and not one-shot vibe prayers.

RobinL · 18 days ago
Totally agree. At the moment I find that frontier LLMs are able to solve most of the problems I throw at them given enough context. Most of my time is spent working out what context they're missing when they fail. So the thing that would help me most is much a much more focussed ability to gather context.

For my use cases, this is mostly needing to be really home in on relevant code files, issues, discussions, PRs. I'm hopeful that GPT5 will be a step forward in this regard that isn't fully captured in the benchmark results. It's certainly promising that it can achieve similar results more cheaply than e.g. Opus.

RobinL commented on “No tax on tips” is an industry plant   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee
ghiculescu · 24 days ago
So employees earn more, and restaurants spend less. And this is bad because?
RobinL · 24 days ago
Because you're artificially favouring one specific industry, at a cost to all other industries.

And because the implication of your argument is we should never tax anything because that's a benefit to both the consumer and the business

RobinL commented on “No tax on tips” is an industry plant   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/littlexsparkee
ghiculescu · 24 days ago
That’s not how income tax works, particularly for minimum wage workers.
RobinL · 24 days ago
It's just supply and demand. It makes working in these industries relatively more attractive, increasing supply of labour and therefore reducing price of labour. So restaurant owners capture some of the benefits
RobinL commented on Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview   observablehq.com/notebook... · Posted by u/mbostock
RobinL · a month ago
This looks great. I love the idea behind notebooks and for a long time it was my favourite environment to program in. But slowly I stopped using them because it never quite felt like the code was entirely mine, and alternatives became easier due to llms. This looks like exactly the remedy I was hoping for. I'm excited to start using them again.
RobinL commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)    · Posted by u/david927
RobinL · a month ago
A fuzzy matching community extension for duckdb: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/splink_udfs

And I've been vibe coding some maths educational tools and games for (my) 6yo: https://rupertlinacre.com/

u/RobinL

KarmaCake day1737February 9, 2013
About
Data scientist/engineer. Blog: robinlinacre.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/RobinLinacre Lead author of Splink, for record linkage at scale: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/splink
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