Hacker News: cafebeen

New comment by cafebeen in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

cafebeen — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:17:14 +0000

For sure, I find many of the LLM-isms to be useful writing techniques and terms (although there's something uncanny-valley about the repetition and density of them).

But what I was more thinking about are truly unique jargon terms / phrases that get generated when deep in a problem. As an example of both of such a term and the phenomenon itself, Claude calls this "fluent compound coinage." They usually make sense in the original context, but get confusing when thrown around otherwise.

New comment by cafebeen in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

cafebeen — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:45:16 +0000

One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Saggar, a Mac terminal that keeps sessions and your attention organized"

cafebeen — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:08:11 +0000

Yes, and also possible they've gone too heavy on verifiable rewards (RLVR) for agentic coding work, and too light on human feedback (RLHF)

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

cafebeen — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:00:29 +0000

Thank you, just what I was imagining! I would prefer a bigger wireless box as well.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

cafebeen — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:47:50 +0000

Yes, agreed. Beautiful keyboard, but when I heard "magic" I hoped to find a touch ID. That sensor so useful that even though I use a mechanical keyboard, I keep an apple magic keyboard off to the side of my desk just for the touch ID sensor.

What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked by Apple's IP on the device, so I've considered just hacking one together by deconstructing and extracting an Apple keyboard...

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 02:10:07 +0000

It's a known issue now! I have have all notifications silenced, so I haven't seen this behavior. Will reproduce and try look into a fix, thanks

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

cafebeen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:10:33 +0000

Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:53:35 +0000

Indeed, if only Apple still made an 11-inch macbook air...

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:19:41 +0000

I agree this should be built-in. Many apps have their own "focus mode", but I wanted something that works uniformly across all apps. There is a full-screen mode in macOS, but it stretches the widow and context to full width, which doesn't pan out too well in some apps (lots of empty space or lines that are too long to read comfortably). So this preserves the window width but extends the height when focused, which works well for my daily drivers. The "fade" is somewhat unusual too, which means everything else is darkened close to black, which I find visually suppressing things and reduces distraction.

By the way, repo has an animated demo in case you want to see how it works.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:38:17 +0000

Would be great, and it's technically possible to spotlight multiple windows in this setup. But I wonder about the mechanics of picking the right apps. One way is to use named sets, e.g. dev=(iTerm2, Safari), each with their own shortcut. Another is to to focus one window and then use Cmd+Tab as an picker to choose which app to add next. I guess it depends on whether the arrangement is changing or relatively stable.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:53:23 +0000

Author here, I made this macOS tool "Zen Mode" to provide a global focus mode that works across apps. There are plenty of things approaching this (HazeOver, Stage Manager, built-in full-screen mode, etc.) but nothing quite like I imagined. The basic idea is to have a shortcut to bring the current window front and center and fade everything else to black like a spotlight, and when you're done, the window returns home, and the lights come back up. A simple solution with about 250 lines of Hammerspoon Lua, built with Fable, though with many iterations to get the UX right. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback.

Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:52:04 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/cabeen/zen-mode

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884663

Points: 30

# Comments: 12

Is Math Art? Werner Herzog Says Yes

cafebeen — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:39:11 +0000

Article URL: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/werner-herzog-brooklyn-public-library-pi-day-2754957

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47436101

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cafebeen in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

cafebeen — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:13:20 +0000

Yes, and one of my favorite anecdotes like this: at one of the greatest jazz concert ever recorded, Charlie Parker played a cheap plastic saxophone because he hadn't brought his own.

https://jazzfuel.com/charlie-parker-the-plastic-saxophone-th...

New comment by cafebeen in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

cafebeen — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 18:26:43 +0000

While not a cure, there are many known modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer’s, so to some extent we know enough to deflect / mitigate dementia: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Introducing Merge Labs

cafebeen — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 18:28:12 +0000

Article URL: https://merge.io/blog

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46636905

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by cafebeen in "CLI agents make self-hosting on a home server easier and fun"

cafebeen — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 22:24:52 +0000

This is great and echoes my experience. Although I would add a caveat that this mostly applies to solo work. Once you need to collaborate or operate on a team, many of limits of self-hosting return.

New comment by cafebeen in "The creator of Claude Code's Claude setup"

cafebeen — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 05:03:34 +0000

I believe slash commands are all loaded into the initial context and executed when invoked by the user. Skills on the other hand only load the name and description into initial context, and the agent (not user) determines when to invoke them, and only then is the whole skill loaded into context. So skills shift decision making to the agent and use progressive disclosure for context efficiency.

New comment by cafebeen in "40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"

cafebeen — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:56:44 +0000

Thank you for publishing that paper, which I think greatly helped address this problem at the time, which you accurately describe. I guess things have to be taken in their historical context, and science is a community project which may not uniformly follow best practices, but work like this can help get everyone in line! It's unfortunate, and no fault of the authors, that the general public has run wild with referencing this work to reject fMRI as a experimental technique. There's plenty of different ways to criticize it today, for sure.

New comment by cafebeen in "40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"

cafebeen — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:03:15 +0000

This study was really highlighting a statistical issue which would occur with any imaging technique with noise (which is unavoidable). If you measure enough things, you'll inevitably find some false positives. The solution is to use procedures such as Bonferroni and FDR to correct for the multiple tests, now a standard part of such imaging experiments. It's a valid critique, but it's worth highlighting that it's not specific to fMRI or evidence of shaky science unless you skip those steps (other separate factors may indicate shakiness though).