Hacker News: crabl

New comment by crabl in "AI may be making us think and write more alike"

crabl — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:34:54 +0000

this is why it's so critical (IMO) to find ways to tune the models to produce more out-of-distribution outputs. it's incredibly easy to generate "in-distribution" text and the major labs are optimizing for this because of "safety", but the only way to generate truly creative outputs is to step in and out of the fringe.

New comment by crabl in "Product and design are the new bottlenecks"

crabl — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:53:43 +0000

i'm betting on the "personal pan pizza team" -> won't be long until we have a 1-person $1B company

New comment by crabl in "Tell HN: The way I do simple data management for new prototypes"

crabl — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 22:56:29 +0000

you can also chuck a json blob into LocalStorage

New comment by crabl in "Date is out, Temporal is in"

crabl — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 15:56:52 +0000

we've been using this Temporal polyfill and it's been awesome so far: https://github.com/js-temporal/temporal-polyfill

New comment by crabl in "Bose has released API docs and opened the API for its EoL SoundTouch speakers"

crabl — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:38:51 +0000

i'm curious to see whether this creates a large secondary market for EoL'd devices!

New comment by crabl in "Diff Algorithms"

crabl — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 23:29:42 +0000

We diff construction schedules! These tend to be massive Gantt charts (400-700 pages is common).

New comment by crabl in "Slow social media"

crabl — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 16:40:40 +0000

We have a shared iCloud photo album which works pretty well, and a group chat in iMessage

New comment by crabl in "Airbus B612 Cockpit Font"

crabl — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:15:20 +0000

It's interesting to me that those fonts seem to include ink traps: curious if this has anything to do with the display tech that's used in the cockpit

New comment by crabl in "Mountain of Ink"

crabl — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:21:50 +0000

the Zebra disposable fountain pens are EXCELLENT for how cheap they are, it's honestly a shame they're not refillable

New comment by crabl in "Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer"

crabl — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 15:31:32 +0000

Bozeman tech scene is popping off recently!

New comment by crabl in "Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027"

crabl — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:31:58 +0000

Interesting! My first thought looking at the scribble chart was "isn't this Monte Carlo simulation?" but reading further it seems more aligned with the "third way" that William Briggs describes in his book Uncertainty[1]. He argues we should focus on direct probability statements about observables over getting lost in parameter estimation or hypothesis testing.

^[1]: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-39756-6

New comment by crabl in "Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death"

crabl — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 14:19:53 +0000

Ian Penman wrote a fantastic biography of Satie, published earlier this year. Worth a read! He was a profoundly strange and fascinating person: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902532/erik-satie-three-piec...

New comment by crabl in "Texting myself the weather every day"

crabl — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 17:37:52 +0000

Sole prop registrations (for individuals/non-corporations) are not _too_ onerous anymore and generally have a faster time to approval, provided you submit the right docs. Totally agree it's a money grab though. Twilio et al. have so much power to keep bad actors at bay but keep pushing responsibility to the consumers of their API. I feel like setting up push notifications is easier though, which is saying something.

New comment by crabl in "Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993)"

crabl — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 05:11:34 +0000

Everything old is new again: I came across a demo for Telescript [1] the other day that would not look out of place in a pitch deck today, save the references to AT&T. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtrs3jtY96k

[1] http://www.datarover.com/Telescript/Documentation/TRM/chapte...

New comment by crabl in "The rise of judgement over technical skill"

crabl — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 05:08:32 +0000

As the marginal cost of writing code decreases, the opportunity cost associated with writing the "right" code increases dramatically

New comment by crabl in "At Amazon, some coders say their jobs have begun to resemble warehouse work"

crabl — Sun, 25 May 2025 19:15:24 +0000

As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".

New comment by crabl in "LLM function calls don't scale; code orchestration is simpler, more effective"

crabl — Thu, 22 May 2025 01:24:37 +0000

We've been using Markdown tables to return data to the LLM with some success

New comment by crabl in "I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days"

crabl — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 12:51:49 +0000

What I've noticed from my extensive use over the past couple weeks has been Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing. That said, it's easy enough to work around its deficiencies by using a model with extended thinking (Grok, GPT4.5, Sonnet 3.7 in thinking mode) to write prompts for it and use Claude Code as basically a dumb code-spewing minion. My workflow has been: give Grok enough context on the problem with specific code examples, ask it to develop an implementation plan that a junior developer can follow, and paste the result into Claude Code, asking it to diligently follow the implementation plan and nothing else.

New comment by crabl in "iText PDF Library turns 25"

crabl — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 17:20:36 +0000

Libraries like iText would be SO good with LLM/vision model integration and vice-versa. Huge opportunity to use these tools to generate more training data based from siloed PDFs.

New comment by crabl in "CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don't Like Making Music"

crabl — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 21:16:42 +0000

ChordChord (https://chordchord.com) is close to this idea: it has an "AI suggestions" panel that recommends chords based on a progression