Hacker News: CognitiveLens

New comment by CognitiveLens in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:14:17 +0000

As a project that started with a lot of idealism about how software _should_ be built, I would totally expect Bun to have an llms.txt file even if Claude wasn't using it. It's a project that is motivated in part by leading by example.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Claude's new constitution"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 23:03:45 +0000

To be fair, history also demonstrates the deadly consequences of groups claiming moral absolutes that drive moral imperatives to destroy others. You can adopt moral absolutes, but they will likely conflict with someone else's.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 23:06:43 +0000

but as mlinsey suggests, what if it's influenced in small, indirect ways by 1000 different people, kind of like the way every 'original' idea from trained professionals is? There's a spectrum, and it's inaccurate to claim that Claude's responses are comparable to adapting one individual's work for another use case - that's not how LLMs operate on open-ended tasks, although they can be instructed to do that and produce reasonable-looking output.

Programmers are not expected to add an addendum to every file listing all the books, articles, and conversations they've had that have influenced the particular code solution. LLMs are trained on far more sources that influence their code suggestions, but it seems like we actually want a higher standard of attribution because they (arguably) are incapable of original thought.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Nielsen Norman Group on iOS 26 usability"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:15:18 +0000

Actual Nielsen Norman Group article here https://www.nngroup.com/articles/liquid-glass/

Can mods change the linked article away from the thin blog post?

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Liquid Glass in the Browser: Refraction with CSS and SVG"

CognitiveLens — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 02:21:26 +0000

Most browsers will engage the GPU for compositing layers if they think the layers can be separated - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/12/gpu-animation-doing...

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Spacing Over Cards"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 21:49:10 +0000

I start all my UI projects with this principle, but it's extremely difficult to maintain as screens evolve. I want typography-driven interfaces with structure communicated through headings and spatial grouping, but I usually end up with far more borders and nested padding than I think is "right" as I run into the limits of whitespace as an organizing structure, particularly when the audience has a limited attention span or time to engage.

From experience, borders/cards help communicate conceptual boundaries, while whitespace helps communicate information hierarchy - Gestalt principles don't really address that distinction. For product or data-driven UI where a lot of loosely-related information/topics are shown in discrete parts of the page, cards are effective at high-level grouping. For content-driven UI, whitespace can be sufficient, and I think the article makes this clear.

Other than 'The Ultimate Developer Toolkit' (where type size is more of an issue than the card layout), I actually think the card-based version of each example layout is more compelling - easier to scan, and easier to 'chunk' - despite wanting the typography-and-whitespace alternative to be sufficient.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Carved stone mask – Pre-pottery, Neolithic B period"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:42:42 +0000

There are definitely projects designed with the specific intent of doing that, e.g. https://longnow.org/clock/

But there are other things, including awesome-and-dangerous nuclear waste sites, with warning messages/symbols designed to last beyond the collapse of modern civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warnin...

New comment by CognitiveLens in "We shouldn't have needed lockfiles"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:32:14 +0000

The automatic ci/cd suggestion sounds appealing, but at least in the NPM ecosystem, the depth of those dependencies would mean the top-level dependencies would constantly be incrementing. On the app developer side, it would take a lot of attention to figure when it's important to update top-level dependencies and when it's not.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "An image of the Australian desert illuminates satellite pollution"

CognitiveLens — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 02:01:39 +0000

I realize it's a nit-pick, but that is not at all the common definition of light pollution as it relates to night skies.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Wasting Inferences with Aider"

CognitiveLens — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 20:20:53 +0000

I'm skeptical that we would need determinism in a supervisor in order for it to be useful. I realize it's not exactly analogous, but the current human parallel, with senior/principal/architect-level SWEs reviewing code from less experienced devs (or even similarly-/more-experienced devs) is far from deterministic, but certainly improves quality

Think about how differently a current agent behaves when you say "here is the spec, implement a solution" vs "here is the spec, here is my solution, make refinements" - you get very different output, and I would argue that the 'check my work' approach tends to have better results.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Wasting Inferences with Aider"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 22:03:31 +0000

The linked article from Steve Yegge (https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer) provides a 'solution', which he thinks is also imminent - supervisor AI agents, where you might have 100+ coding agents creating PRs, but then a layer of supervisors that are specialized on evaluating quality, and the only PRs that a human being would see would be the 'best', as determined by the supervisor agent layer.

From my experience with AI agents, this feels intuitively possible - current agents seem to be ok (thought not yet 'great') at critiquing solutions, and such supervisor agents could help keep the broader system in alignment.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "The average college student today"

CognitiveLens — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 19:39:17 +0000

You're kind of making his point - the second and third paragraphs are explicitly about the fact that he is not an Ivy League professor. Be the change you want to see in the world by doing the reading first.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "The Frontend Treadmill"

CognitiveLens — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:38:39 +0000

To be fair, "30 years of experience" likely opens more doors than any particular skill listed on your CV - that doesn't reflect the way that a majority of junior/mid-level devs need to present their abilities, where pattern-matching is an unfortunate norm, particularly when there are orders of magnitude more applicants than open roles.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Vision of a New World – Design Issues (2024)"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 04:06:43 +0000

I'm sure I could dig into the details, but the Solid protocol seems to have similar high-level objects to AT Protocol, but a quick search doesn't reveal many sources that refer to both - are these communities ignoring each other, competing with each other, or just too new to find common ground?

New comment by CognitiveLens in "The tragedy of running an old Node project"

CognitiveLens — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 20:03:24 +0000

Was that kind of control well-received by your teams? Out of context, it sounds like it would be pretty rough to be an engineer on a team where your manager had sole control over what tools you could use - I suppose it might make sense for junior devs or a very small codebase, but I would caution against taking that stance in a team where you want to facilitate mutual trust

New comment by CognitiveLens in "FFT-based ocean-wave rendering, implemented in Godot"

CognitiveLens — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 21:40:57 +0000

This not a criticism, but the comment you are replying to is a critique, not a criticism.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Copying is the way design works (2020)"

CognitiveLens — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 20:19:28 +0000

But that take is too narrow - many of the 'great' painters had extensive training in the work of previous masters, frequently copying their works repeatedly in order to develop technique and more deeply engage with what came before. After developing that base skill and understanding, they had a better toolset to express their own originality.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 21:10:53 +0000

That is a good sign, for sure. Maybe revise to 'Facebook will eat 20% of your lunch - your business model will need to account for that'. Products like this don't have a big moat other than their network.

New comment by CognitiveLens in "An AI bot is (sort of) running for mayor in Wyoming"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 20:29:11 +0000

I'm probably too cynical, but a strong "personality and fixed opinions" doesn't really give me a lot of confidence in a human being's competency (I also wouldn't use the word "competency" to describe an AI). The person writing the prompts can absolutely bend an AI's output toward their preferences, which is a real danger.

It would be interesting to be able to have a public record of both the input and the output for stuff like this - maybe a future where we have votes for "County Prompt Engineer", and candidates get to show off the prompts that best demonstrate their ability to get 'competent' responses that have resulted in life improvements for their constituency!

At the very least, ChatGPT will admit a mistake when someone points it out. "I'm sorry for the error, you are indeed correct that corruption is unacceptable, here is my revised proposal:"

New comment by CognitiveLens in "Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com alternative"

CognitiveLens — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 20:18:00 +0000

Meeting up in real life is all about network effects - people make friends through networks, organize events through networks, and discover new opportunities through networks. If you're talking about small events that you found out about through sites like Meetup, those are typically successful when you have a large-enough network of people who _might_ be interested.