Hacker News: benleejamin

New comment by benleejamin in "Haskell Foundation 2026 Update"

benleejamin — Thu, 21 May 2026 03:33:32 +0000

How is the Haskell Foundation doing these days? Are we worried about its future?

New comment by benleejamin in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

benleejamin — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:48:07 +0000

I'd always thought that ChatGPT ads would be indistinguishable from actual content.

New comment by benleejamin in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

benleejamin — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:35:06 +0000

I think there's an anchoring effect in play here. If you select blue -> blue -> green -> blue -> green -> blue -> green…, you land at the population median.

(The point being that, once you get to a somewhat ambiguous point (after two blue selections), you can say "oh, well, compared to the last one this is {opposite color}!", and it seems most people do that.)

New comment by benleejamin in "Claude Opus 4.7"

benleejamin — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 14:36:48 +0000

For anyone who was wondering about Mythos release plans:

> What we learn from the real-world deployment of these safeguards will help us work towards our eventual goal of a broad release of Mythos-class models.

New comment by benleejamin in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

benleejamin — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:32:50 +0000

I'm not too familiar with the hardware world, but does EML look like the kind of computation that's hardware-friendly? Would love for someone with more expertise to chime in here.

New comment by benleejamin in "1D Chess"

benleejamin — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:34:14 +0000

And if you like Mind Chess, you might enjoy Mornington Crescent, which has a similar flavor to it! [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lziCsPmlbZI

New comment by benleejamin in "Seoul World Model: Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis"

benleejamin — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:07:21 +0000

Paper linked from the top of the page: https://seoul-world-model.github.io/SWM_paper.pdf

Seoul World Model: Grounding World Simulation Models in a Real-World Metropolis

benleejamin — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:06:00 +0000

Article URL: https://seoul-world-model.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47415428

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by benleejamin in "The Brand Age"

benleejamin — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:43:30 +0000

I don't think the Brand Age is as bleak as this essay suggests.

Branding is not inherently unproductive, nor is it guaranteed to produce worse watches. They may be larger and less accurate, but consumers still (evidently) find value in the brand. A Grand Seiko or a Nomos or a Patek is perhaps now even more interesting & identity-productive than a watch was in the 60s.

As technologists I think we're prone to dismissing improvements that aren't engineering-backed. But all life is storytelling, and labeling that work as "button-pushing" is… dismissive, to say the least.

New comment by benleejamin in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

benleejamin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:41:04 +0000

To further elaborate — NYC subway routing is not effective for some kinds of trips (notoriously: moving north-south through brooklyn/queens, east-west across much of manhattan, etc)

New comment by benleejamin in "Bus stop balancing is fast, cheap, and effective"

benleejamin — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 17:06:22 +0000

(Anecdotally) reliability is a huge factor for me — living in NYC, there are a few neighborhoods that would be much easier to reach by bus, but arrival times can vary by more than the length of the entire trip. Easier to just take a subway, even if it means an extra ten minutes of walking on each end.

New comment by benleejamin in "Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?"

benleejamin — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:33:07 +0000

I maintain a list of interesting personal websites. There's some link rot, but a good number of young people maintain personal sites, and some of them have blogs! (college CS/design grads, mostly.)

I don't think anyone's really optimizing for SEO. (it's not even really clear to me that that's very important any more.)

Submissions welcome ofc :) https://arc.net/folder/4A220E67-674A-456D-AEDB-796B5BE82034