<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: cowlby</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cowlby</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 18 Oct 2026 03:26:53 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=cowlby" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For fun, give Opus 5.5 the initial hint and watch it work through it:<p>"There's a curiosity I noticed in the seeds of the ECDSA curve origins. You see the 1st digit is never over 7, which means that the left most bit is never over 0. lrand48() returns 31 bit numbers u know? So what if those 4 seeds were built from lrand48 or something. If they're built from 31 bit numbers on per 32 bit word that explains the pattern.  Wonder if there's some other insight you might have beyond this"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 22:34:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50125682</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50125682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50125682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Pangram – AI detector for text and images"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Interestingly checking good chunks of their site, it detects as 100% human</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 03:21:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736028</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736028</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49736028</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Why don't machine learning research agents overfit?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"The more your listener already knows, the shorter the message you need to send. An expert ML engineer needs only a few sentences; a newcomer needs the whole manual."<p>Literally from the first words on the page. 1st sentence passed barely. 2nd sentence ending "a newcomer needs the whole manual" and it's Claude.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:53:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708724</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708724</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49708724</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Spaghettifying DRAM"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>uncanny feeling when I could tell from the first sentence it was Claude<p>“Poke the DRAM controller and an address can be made to land wherever you want in memory.”<p>I’d love to know why this specific sentence structure feels like Claude.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:54:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294284</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294284</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294284</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "How to Spot AI Writing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My Fable pet-peeve is "You're half right, and half wrong, and the wrong half is worth diving into"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:47:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134925</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49134925</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Show HN: Claude-account – switch Claude Code accounts without logging in again"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is great. My enhancement was to create a .claude-profile file which specifies the account alias. "claude" can be aliased to read the file, set the correct env var, and launch claude.<p>Another benefit was if no .claude-profile file exists, claude refuses to launch.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:25:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112223</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49112223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Couple pay >$800k for a gene-editing therapy for their daughter. She died."]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Reminds me of the TGN1412 drug trial where patients had severe immune reaction and almost died. Sad that the story suggests they ignored all the signs that would suggest humans would have a bad immune reaction to it and proceeded anyway.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/jrraz7/when_a_drug_trial_goes_wrong_emergency_at_the/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/jrraz7/when_...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:42:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028434</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028434</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028434</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it interesting then how much of our intelligence is captured by our words/language? I would've thought to create AI you needed to replicate neurons and synapses and learning. So it's still amazing to me that statistical modelling of our words creates a Claude Opus.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:42:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733388</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733388</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733388</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "AI children's books, body horror edition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>While I don't disagree, there is a scale/volume problem I wanted to solve. If I read to my kids 365 days a year for 8-10 years, that's over 3,500 books. There's a lot of crap publishing out there just cause it's "natural" or "human" does not make it good. So yes we read the classics, but it's great to have a fun creative book factory.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 14:28:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687042</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687042</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48687042</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "AI children's books, body horror edition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Now that's a Black Mirror episode. It's the story of all technology though, caveat emptor.<p>For me it's still about human connection though. I read the stories we create together. It's just a great tool. It makes any topic relatable. I.e. even crazy fun ones like "Claude weave a bedtime story about how the 5nm chip fab process works including EUV lithography and clean rooms".<p>Quick short 5-10 minute read and next thing you know we're talking about lasers and how sand becomes computers.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:29:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48683483</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48683483</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48683483</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "AI children's books, body horror edition"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This just seems like laziness vs AI = bad.  It's not like publishers are putting out masterpieces with human writing. They're cranking out minimum viable content as well.<p>I've found that by putting meaningful effort into AI storytelling, I can create bespoke stories that my kids love night after night.<p>My workflow is below: Caveat that it costs about $0.25-$0.50 to weave a book like this with Claude Sonnet and Gemini Nano Banana Pro. But to me the cost is worth it for the quality.<p>- Use Claude structured output and ask for page1, page2 ... pageN instead of an array of pages or wall of text.<p>- Pass a story arc as a set of values to the prompt. I.e. say each page has an emotional beat between 0.0 and 1.0. For a "man in hole" type of story: page1 starts at 0.6, page2 = 0.5, page5 = 0.25, page10 = 0.85. This ensures page 5 lands the "crisis" and page10 resolves higher than the start.<p>- For illustrations, have Claude generate the story text and an illustration prompt per page. i.e. page1: { "text": "...", "illustration": "..." }.<p>- For art consistency, add an "Art Direction" key to the structured output. Feed this into Gemini/OpenAI and ask for an art board visual guide & character reference sheet.<p>- Feed the page text, illustration prompt, and the art board to Gemini/ChatGPT images. I'm constantly surprised at the quality of the output.<p>Here's an example set of pages from a magic school bus style story about the immune system<p>[image] <a href="https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/839188039229112353/1519908007729692802/image.png?ex=6a3f4423&is=6a3df2a3&hm=c57967bc5d348de8220b47ec4a0a0ce135f1f546a2cdbc6183650d48a997346c&=&format=webp&quality=lossless" rel="nofollow">https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/839188039229112353/...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Jun 2026 03:35:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682059</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682059</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48682059</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Im curious to see what that would look like. It’s like inception, how many levels deep can you create a prompt that hijacks all the way up.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:05:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479341</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479341</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479341</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Defense in depth approach, would this work to help as a layer?<p>- Wrap user input in strong markers like <user-input-do-not-trust /><p>- Have the agent compute what it will perform as structured output.<p>- Have another agent evaluate the structured output against the intent of the code.<p>- Determine if it aligns or deviates from the intended workflow. Execute or deny gate from here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:55:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478258</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478258</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48478258</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Sagrada Família Lego set"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yes this, I bought sets like the Arctic Ship and police bases thinking they'd be like dioramas. They quickly became components that they build other things on top of. It took some time to mentally un-anchor from the $500 spent on the sets lol.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:42:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402872</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402872</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402872</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "MCP is dead?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I use all three (MCP/CLI/API) based on what Claude excels at:<p>* CLI: GitHub & AWS it already knows how to operate the CLIs well. Even learned about a few new CLIs like 1Password's op which it volunteered one day.<p>* MCP: Supabase, Shopify etc. where the CLI would be non-obvious and the affordances from the tools/descriptions helps Claude maneuver.<p>* API: Sometimes it just knows an API exists and is able to call it directly with python/curl. I discovered from Claude the Pokemon ecosystem has a free API out there for example.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 30 May 2026 00:06:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330957</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330957</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48330957</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Language Models Need Sleep"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The analogy is helpful, but yes we should be able to “intelligently design” something better than sleep analogues since we’re not constrained by evolution like in humans.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 May 2026 16:28:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281984</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281984</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48281984</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "New Lifetime Plex Pass Pricing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I gave up on Plex and just vibe coded a couple quick solutions instead:<p>- Direct streaming 4K blu-ray atmos rips to home theater: just connected a PC via long HDMI fiber optic cable<p>- Library organization: tinyMediaManager is awesome for this.<p>- Watching ad hoc on iPad/iPhone: built a simple Next.js app that lists my movies and and a python script that encodes movies as MP4 and creates HLS playlists. No more real time transcoding.<p>- Downloading movies to my iPad for long flights: vibe coded an iOS app Claude handled all the AV code to download the same HLS streams.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2026 15:10:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194393</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194393</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48194393</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wonder how much this is correlated to token budgets? I'd be curious to see a split between $20/$100/$200/$500+ usage and see if there is different responses. I'm in the $400 range with Claude + Cursor subscription, use Opus exclusively, and my experience is wildly different from this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 14:34:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122491</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122491</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122491</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Show HN: Gigacatalyst – Extend your SaaS with an embedded AI builder"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not the op but I think of it as “job security” for developers when they’re called to fix.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 00:13:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116274</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116274</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116274</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by cowlby in "Why most product tours get skipped"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I chuckled cause the convenience/grocery store is laid out to make us find the high margin items and not what we need. They can't explain it to us otherwise we'd shop less.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2026 23:43:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030285</link><dc:creator>cowlby</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030285</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48030285</guid></item></channel></rss>