Hacker News: Jeff_Brown

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board"

Jeff_Brown — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 18:46:44 +0000

The HF hack was a felony.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces (2025)"

Jeff_Brown — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:43:54 +0000

By itself, "aha" carries no insight, but the insight is probably stated immediately after it. In that case the aha is semantically useful, by identifying the insight it is near.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:06:51 +0000

A question not addressed here is whether there exists any solution to the EU requirement that doesn't suck.

If the same red/green algorithm described in the article is applied to generated code, I cannot imagine how that does not degrade code quality (probabilistically, not at every point).

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Show HN: Eigendrum - Draw any shape and hear what it sounds like as a drum"

Jeff_Brown — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 00:58:32 +0000

I love it. I wish I could select materials.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Grok 4.6"

Jeff_Brown — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:00:15 +0000

Yes -- power without trust is of no use.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "First atmosphere found on Earth-like planet in habitable zone of distant star"

Jeff_Brown — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:17:22 +0000

One of the Voyager probes measured the density of the interstellar vacuum at 80,000 protons (and the same number of electrons) per cubic meter. A proton going through a piece of aluminum foil delivers a roughly constant amount of energy regardless of speed; a relativistic proton will pinch through and carry most of its energy with it.

(No punchline; I just think that's cool. I understand that the real problem is the rare dust grain, not the ubiquitous gas.)

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

Jeff_Brown — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:09:35 +0000

I suspect load-bearing is a euphemism for 'not garbage'. Ad in 'most of what you said I can mostly ignore'.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Show HN: Earth Game – An offline CLI for turning life goals into quests"

Jeff_Brown — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 19:03:13 +0000

This reminds me of when a friend saw that someone had Liked something he had posted online, and he wanted to Like the Like. There was no interface to do that, so he was "reduced" to merely liking it in reality.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:28:32 +0000

The idea that a producer is at fault and not also the consumer paying them to do that is strange to me.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

Jeff_Brown — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:28:24 +0000

Can anyone find (or draw) a picture of the construction?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "GPT-5.5"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:09:30 +0000

It's really not clear. We might all become unemployable. But as coders become more powerful, they can do more, which makes them more valuable, if they or the businesses empluying them can invent work to do.

If all we can do is compete for the same fixed amount of work, though, it does look bleak.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "AI Resistance: some recent anti-AI stuff that’s worth discussing"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:14:21 +0000

What an alien preference ordering.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Claude Opus 4.7"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:22:42 +0000

It might be a bad idea to put that in all caps, because in the training data, angry conversations are less productive. (I do the same thing, just in lowercase.)

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:57:32 +0000

As a consequentialist who shares the author's concerns, I feel fine (ethically) using AI without advancing it. Foregoing opportunities meaningful to yourself for deontological reasons when it won't have any impact on society is pointless.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic coding power, now open to all"

Jeff_Brown — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:44:25 +0000

This might sound snarky but in all earnestness, try talking to an AI about your experience using it.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Hungary Is a Laboratory for Illiberal Nationalism. The Results Are In"

Jeff_Brown — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:00:49 +0000

They're not saying the election results are in. They're saying Orban's style of rule has been a disaster for Hungary.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "How and why to take a logarithm of an image [video]"

Jeff_Brown — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:38:41 +0000

I love 3B1B but generally don't have time to watch long videos. Can anyone sum up the punchline?

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Turns out your coffee addiction may be doing your brain a favor"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:47:16 +0000

Yes, without a good experiment (maybe a natural one [1]) we can't know. Even if the study controls for everything observable, there may be unobserved differences that lead to the caffeination difference. For instance, even though two people might have the same job, education, etc. the one who is more ambitious, or creative, or hopeful, or simply healthy enough to feel like working more, might drink more coffee.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment?wprov=sfla1

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts"

Jeff_Brown — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:32:34 +0000

Dogfoodung usefully connotes getting off your high horse, getting dirty, getting your face in it. I think it's perfect.

New comment by Jeff_Brown in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

Jeff_Brown — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:45:03 +0000

As someone who has received death threats, I can tell you, the comfort from the fact that they're usually not acted on, while real, is not huge.