Hacker News: afc

New comment by afc in "Don't trust large context windows"

afc — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 07:22:15 +0000

The approach we're taking to deal with this very real context rot is using a bunch of related techniques which we call transposing the agent loop: https://alejo.ch/3jt

In essence, we run many short agent loops, generating their prompts dynamically from structured data. Each loop advances the state in a small step towards the final goal.

Fail loudly: a plea to stop hiding bugs

afc — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:14:10 +0000

Article URL: https://alejo.ch/3gk

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507484

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by afc in "AI juries"

afc — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:05:56 +0000

Oops, you're right, I put the wrong url (Android auto complete fail, oops, suggested a link and I assumed it was the right one). I meant to link to https://alejo.ch/3gk

I guess I'll hide this submission and do another one with the right url.

Sorry for that and thanks for pointing it out.

AI juries

afc — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:42:10 +0000

Article URL: https://alejo.ch/3he

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507129

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by afc in "Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs"

afc — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 10:14:38 +0000

Good luck!

In case you find it useful, I wrote what I learned in my first year of fatherhood (the little guy is now 17 months): https://alejo.ch/3hj

As you can see, I never found anything as scary as the possibility, however remote, of my baby being unhealthy. So, yeah, best of luck!

New comment by afc in "Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study"

afc — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:11:42 +0000

But filtered coffee is the most flavorful! No other method extracts the subtle nuances as well! P.s. I know it's subjective, just cringe on this claim of "the most flavorful" starting with espresso. :)

New comment by afc in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

afc — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:23:47 +0000

You're literally saying "an airline, booking a flight 6 months out, 6 days out, or 6 hours out" is not "charging two people for the same route differently", completely missing the point of alex43578's excellent question.

New comment by afc in "1-Bit Hokusai's "The Great Wave" (2023)"

afc — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:13:42 +0000

You're probably thinking of Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school.

New comment by afc in "War on Raze"

afc — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:41:00 +0000

> by someone who maybe isn't so great at clear communications

I don't think that's fair. If you're familiar with the programming language, his writing is fairly clear. If you're not, maybe you're just not in his target audience.

IOW, optimizing his text for people familiar with the language is probably a better choice than teaching the language, which would distract him from his goal.

New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

afc — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:33 +0000

She has a cool blog, I liked her articles!

How does she keep track of what row she's on, as she knits? I wonder if she'd be interested in specifying her patterns in a format my knitting software (visualization) could consume.

Anyhow, cool stuff!

New comment by afc in "Tree Calculus"

afc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:08:13 +0000

This is indeed much better. I couldn't really follow the original, but this one made it click. Pretty cool!

New comment by afc in "Claude mixes up who said what"

afc — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:50:00 +0000

That's exactly my understanding as well. This is, essentially, the LLM hallucinating user messages nested inside its outputs. FWIWI I've seen Gemini do this frequently (especially on long agent loops).

New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

afc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:39:25 +0000

I don't know if it's niche, but I like making granola for my friends and family. I give them a big jar and tell them free refills are included ("just bring me the empty jar"). I get pretty good nuts and tend to make largish batches (around 2 kg), and, because of the refills, I get a good sense of who appreciates it — always happy to make more for them. My recipe is here: https://alejo.ch/365

New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

afc — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:01:25 +0000

I got into designing my own knitting patterns. I enjoy that I can customize everything — the yarn material, color (including marling, helix knitting, double knitting), yarn weight, needle size (e.g., resulting in "airy" vs "packed" textures), knit textures (e.g., stockinette, linen, miss, etc.), construction process (e.g., can I figure out a way to knit in the round vs flat?), cables, gradual increases/decreases, selvedge/cord, desired ease, etc..

I wrote software to generate patterns given configurations and keep track of which row I'm on. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40307089

I am sharing some of my patterns here: https://alejo.ch/2s0

I'm currently working on my second ruana.

New comment by afc in "Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI"

afc — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:23 +0000

I was also baffled. "No formal specification"? Two minutes of browsing is enough to find it: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/master/src%2Fparse.y

New comment by afc in "I use Excalidraw to manage my diagrams for my blog"

afc — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:09:10 +0000

Looks pretty cool. I think it's great that you support light/dark mode. FWIWI, I'm also a huge fan of Excalidraw.

I wanted to ask you: is there's a reason you use a separate svg file for each (light/dark) mode?

A single SVG file using CSS can change it's own colors based on the user's preference. I have an example here: http://alejo.ch/3jj - the 3 plots should honor your mode (I put the generator code here: https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg)

Just figure I'd ask. If you have a good reason for using separate files, I'd love to hear it (because it probably would also apply to what I'm doing). :)

Show HN: Minimalist library to generate SVG views of scientific data

afc — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:54:51 +0000

Just wanted to share with HN a simple/minimal open source Python library that generates SVG files visualizing two dimensional data and distributions, in case others find it useful or interesting.

I wrote it as a fun project, mostly because I found that the standard libraries in Python generated unnecessarily large SVG files. One nice property is that I can configure the visuals through CSS, which allows me to support dark/light mode browser settings. The graphs are specified as JSON files (the repository includes a few examples).

It supports scatterplots, line plots, histograms, and box plots, and I collected examples here: https://github.com/alefore/mini_svg/blob/main/examples/READM...

I did this mostly for the graphs in an article in my blog (https://alejo.ch/3jj).

Would love to hear opinions. :-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492871

Points: 47

# Comments: 4

New comment by afc in "Every layer of review makes you 10x slower"

afc — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 08:55:10 +0000

Waiting for a few days of design review is a pain that is easy to avoid: all we need is to be ready to spend a few months building a potentially useless system.

New comment by afc in "I put my whole life into a single database"

afc — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 13:38:49 +0000

How long have you been tracking? Can you share an insight you've had from your data?

I've been weight lighting for ten years and initially tried to track things (down to how many reps I did of which exercise, with how much weight) and quickly came to the conclusion that is want worth it for me.

New comment by afc in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

afc — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:11:48 +0000

https://alejo.ch/