Hacker News: bsenftner

New comment by bsenftner in "Openrouter Fusion API"

bsenftner — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:55:43 +0000

I'm sure many have made something like this, I've done a few. I've found simply submitting one's prompt to multiple models to be kind of pointless. You're just going to get statistical noise from the variances in their training methods, as they are all training on pretty much the same data.

I get significantly better results by pre-prompting each LLM (they can be the same LLM too, just another instance), I pre-prompt them to approach from a different perspective. Basically, I create expert personas that each believe they are someone of a different career, different intellectual perspectives, and then that generates a real debate between experts.

New comment by bsenftner in "I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA"

bsenftner — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 11:30:01 +0000

Eric,

Serious question: I find that the core issue in corruption, and the corruptibility of an individual and then the groups they are a member relies on plain spoken communication skills, and the ability or inability of an individual to protect themselves from self deception.

A "uncorrupt person" does not choose to be corrupt, they lie to themselves with little corruptions until "it is too late" and then with no (self assessed) alternative they commit to their situation.

As well as a group of people knowingly engaged in less than ethically honest activities must impress their ethical failures on all their peers, to insure their safety if the corruption is exposed, and they then bully their uncomprehending peers into corruption.

All of this is caused to the educational hole that is effective communications: people are not taught how to identify honest and dishonest self conversation, people are not taught how to communicate without information mistakes they refuse are mistakes, omissions of critical information, and then deferment of blame when half considered strategies are met by complex reality.

I've been working in tech, at all levels, since the 70's. The #1 characteristic of every single organization I have been a member and interacted with is poor communications, weak documentation, and nobody able to discuss the topics at hand without technical pretension, omissions, misdirections, and misinformation.

This nonsense is all due to no real emphasis on communicating to mutual understanding anywhere in the verticals of technical and science educations. And that includes the communications in people's heads that drive them to comforting non-solutions they attempt and fail.

New comment by bsenftner in "Siri AI"

bsenftner — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 11:13:40 +0000

The issue is anything that is of value requires some level of detail, of complexity, and that is only of interest to people that know that specific complexity, and it is a pain point for them. Now they'll care. Everyone else? Lost them. So, the marketing challenge is to find some aspirational complexity that people wish they knew, and how that can be solved with AI, and without turning that thing into a trivial nuisance, but a valued skill. That logical series right there is, well, too much for far too many.

New comment by bsenftner in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

bsenftner — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:52:17 +0000

When LLMs and ChatGPT first came out, it struck me as obvious and dangerous to a deep thinker or a knowledge worker the answering capacity. So, from my initial use I did not ask them questions, I have always "done my own work" and then asked the LLMs to criticize that work. This has been an exponential ladder of learning, and my cognitive growth is personally noticeable. I'm not hesitating to scribble out calculus and work it out, as I need for my work, where in the past I'd have found some other way because I felt uncomfortable with my tip-of-my-tongue calc skills. Don't ask AI, do your own work and ask for criticism, and them improve your own work yourself. This creates a learning ladder that you will climb.

New comment by bsenftner in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

bsenftner — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 11:35:36 +0000

It was never safe, he's exposed the system's design was never intended to be safe for anyone but those in charge.

New comment by bsenftner in "The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History"

bsenftner — Sat, 30 May 2026 11:26:26 +0000

Na, all it will take is a shift in perspective. As humanity becomes more and more Asian, those names will trigger a "who?"

New comment by bsenftner in "Claude Code – Everything You Can Configure That the Docs Don't Tell You"

bsenftner — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:08:01 +0000

The blog post this discussion is for is one of the first in depth discussions I've seen of how these coding agents work. Most posts cover how to use them, not their internals and how they operate.

New comment by bsenftner in "Expertise in the age of AI"

bsenftner — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:02:41 +0000

There needs to be a realization of how important communication skills are to develop and possess. The act of disagreement has skill levels that do not trigger emotional responses, and cause cross understanding to occur. Learning how to convey understanding and gain understanding from others becomes more and more important in a landscape of rapid change. Which we are collectively terrible at, with most companies being miscommunication circuses, with all the stress that generates, needlessly.

New comment by bsenftner in "Claude Code – Everything you can configure that the docs don't tell you"

bsenftner — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:16:02 +0000

Is there an AI Coding Agent application structure emerging that is more or less universal across llm models? Is anyone collecting and writing on how to understand this architectural style?

New comment by bsenftner in "What Gets Kept"

bsenftner — Wed, 27 May 2026 11:44:10 +0000

Around the same time I first read On The Road, my wiser than should be possible mother said "Oh, you need to read this too" and it was "Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg", written by Carolyn Cassady. Rips the band aid right off of those sexist abuser of innocents, those utter assholes. They write great literature, and the fact that they expose their own terrible ethics bare, but surrounded by non-condemning language is the trick. They never hid their nature, but America never realized what they were praising, not really. Which is all so American!

New comment by bsenftner in "Show HN: The Hanging Sculptures of the Xiaoxitian"

bsenftner — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:59:20 +0000

Tried both Firefox latest and google chrome's latest desktop browser and does not run in either.

New comment by bsenftner in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

bsenftner — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:22:58 +0000

Never used this? https://vcpkg.io/en/

New comment by bsenftner in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

bsenftner — Wed, 20 May 2026 18:22:01 +0000

I worked at a shop where we used Boost in a C++ code base that the only use of C++ was the harness to use Boost. After that, it was all C, object-styled C, as that code base started before C++ compilers were not a template overlay on C.

New comment by bsenftner in "No way to parse integers in C (2022)"

bsenftner — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:58:56 +0000

One of the first homework assignments when I learned C back in '83 was after a long lecture on how the string functions are fundamentally broken, and the class introduction to writing C was fixing all of them.

New comment by bsenftner in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

bsenftner — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:29:54 +0000

Any reports from people using their coding agent(s)?

New comment by bsenftner in "Google changes its search box"

bsenftner — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:20:36 +0000

We have a distinct poverty when it comes to secondary considerations and long term ramifications - which used to be manageable when progress was slower. Now, we're on a very steep acceleration/progress curve, and any shortsighted mistakes cause extremely large ramifications. Which are then compounded by both more short sighted non-fixes and our rapid acceleration/progress curve layering in additional confusion, misunderstandings, omissions of critical information.

New comment by bsenftner in "We've made the world too complicated"

bsenftner — Sun, 17 May 2026 12:51:59 +0000

Trying to watch, I have never had a youTube video with such a poor experience. Every 20 seconds there is a 2-5 second buffering. extremely painful.

New comment by bsenftner in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

bsenftner — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:29:33 +0000

This is a critical communications issue that is becoming what I believe the defining characteristic of "This Age": nobody knows how to discuss disagreement, and because it cannot even be discussed communication ends, followed by blind obedience, forced bullying, retreat and abandonment. This is going to be a hell of a ride, because nobody can really discuss the situation with a rational tone.

New comment by bsenftner in "Claude Account Suspended Seconds After Purchase?"

bsenftner — Thu, 14 May 2026 17:25:56 +0000

Nope, I gave up. Sent multiple emails, used their support contacts. No replies, I gave up and moved on.

New comment by bsenftner in "Claude Account Suspended Seconds After Purchase?"

bsenftner — Thu, 14 May 2026 14:02:51 +0000

The same thing happened to me. It's a fucking joke. Located in Denver.