Hacker News: disconcision

New comment by disconcision in "Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold"

disconcision — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:47:38 +0000

not exactly the same, but worth noting that in a spectacular display of being too early, microsoft shipped this 30 years ago (active desktop in 1997 merged the windows explorer with internet explorer, turning folders into web pages).

New comment by disconcision in "Epoch confirms GPT5.4 Pro solved a frontier math open problem"

disconcision — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:38:45 +0000

i assert that by your evidentiary standards humans don't reason.

presumably one of us is wrong.

therefore, humans don't reason.

New comment by disconcision in "A case against currying"

disconcision — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:03:14 +0000

all three are isomorphic. but in some languages if you define a function via something like `function myFun(x: Int, y: Bool) = ...` and also have some value `let a: (Int, Bool) = (1, true)` it doesn't mean you can call `myFun(a)`. because a parameter list is treated by the language as a different kind of construct than a tuple.

New comment by disconcision in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"

disconcision — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 01:27:38 +0000

speed of plane is about 3% speed of satellite so i wouldn't expect handoffs to be much more frequent than with stationary receivers?

New comment by disconcision in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

disconcision — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:00:54 +0000

i can't speak for everyone, but in the above assertion am using 'roughly exponential' to mean that world population between say 1880 and 1960 followed a curve that is, roughly, exponential, in the technical sense. much of the discourse 50 years ago, e.g. the population bomb, was predicated on this observation.

New comment by disconcision in "Obsession with growth is destroying nature, 150 countries warn"

disconcision — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:52:41 +0000

we had nearly 2 centuries of roughly exponential growth. ended in the 60s but not everyone got the memo

New comment by disconcision in "Show HN: The Mog Programming Language"

disconcision — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:34:44 +0000

> so no operator precedence seems like a massive foot-gun

how do you mean? given that spec, ambiguous code just won't compile. that could potentially be inefficient, but not a foot gun.

New comment by disconcision in "Cosmologically Unique IDs"

disconcision — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 01:02:45 +0000

not obvious to me this makes things better as opposed to worse? sure, the time bound helps but in the runup to a crunch won't we get vastly more devices in causal range at an asymptotically increasing rate?

New comment by disconcision in "Resizing windows on macOS Tahoe – the saga continues"

disconcision — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 16:59:33 +0000

never thought about it before but after playing with it a while i notice i tend to approach from the right, which means moving out if i'm inside on the right side. i think this is because my positioning accuracy seems to be higher moving leftwards than rightwards...

New comment by disconcision in "Prism"

disconcision — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 02:31:05 +0000

for better or for worse, most specific scientific jargon is already going to be in english

New comment by disconcision in "Claude is good at assembling blocks, but still falls apart at creating them"

disconcision — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:09:24 +0000

I've yet to be convinced by any article, including this one, that attempts to draw boxes around what coding agents are and aren't good at in a way that is robust on a 6 to 12 month horizon.

I agree that the examples listed here are relatable, and I've seen similar in my uses of various coding harnesses, including, to some degree, ones driven by opus 4.5. But my general experience with using LLMs for development over the last few years has been that:

1. Initially models could at best assemble a simple procedural or compositional sequences of commands or functions to accomplish a basic goal, perhaps meeting tests or type checking, but with no overall coherence,

2. To being able to structure small functions reasonably,

3. To being able to structure large functions reasonably,

4. To being able to structure medium-sized files reasonably,

5. To being able to structure large files, and small multi-file subsystems, somewhat reasonably.

So the idea that they are now falling down on the multi-module or multi-file or multi-microservice level is both not particularly surprising to me and also both not particularly indicative of future performance. There is a hierarchy of scales at which abstraction can be applied, and it seems plausible to me that the march of capability improvement is a continuous push upwards in the scale at which agents can reasonably abstract code.

Alternatively, there could be that there is a legitimate discontinuity here, at which anything resembling current approaches will max out, but I don't see strong evidence for it here.

New comment by disconcision in "Show HN: Vibe coding a bookshelf with Claude Code"

disconcision — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:58:25 +0000

I actually did something similar recently for my website* and it was actually a Claude failure case; helped a little but ultimately cost me more time than doing it entirely myself. For my version I wanted the actual book spine images; since there's no database for these, I took pictures of my shelves (milkcrates) and wanted clickable regions. I also wanted the spines to link to a reasonable webpage for the book, falling back to goodreads if nothing else was available.

It was very surprising to me that claude wasn't very good at even the latter. It took several rounds of prompt refinement, including very detailed instructions, to get even 75% non-broken links, from ~30% on first attempt. It really liked to hallucinate goodreads URLs with the book title in them but an invalid ID (the title part of URLs is ignored by goodreads).

The former was less surprising... It attempted a very rough manual strategy for generating superimposed SVG outlines on the books, which often started okay but by the right side of the the image often didn't even intersect the actual spines. I tried to verbally coax it into using a third party segmenter, but with no luck. We eventually found a binary search style iterative cropping strategy that worked well but was taking 6 minutes and nearly a couple dollars per spine so I killed that and just did the SVG outlines in figma myself.

* https://andrewblinn.com scroll down to find the bookcase and drag down on it to zoom and unlock the books

New comment by disconcision in "We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months"

disconcision — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:55:25 +0000

with the exception that it doesn't seem possible to fully disable this for grok 4

New comment by disconcision in "We gave 5 LLMs $100K to trade stocks for 8 months"

disconcision — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 23:44:53 +0000

you can (via the api, or to a lesser degree through the setting in the web client) determine what tools if any a model can use

New comment by disconcision in "Don't Use Booleans"

disconcision — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:04:29 +0000

in defense of my upvote i copy-pasted the title into google in a new tab and then forgot that i had done so

New comment by disconcision in "Unix philosophy and filesystem access makes Claude Code amazing"

disconcision — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:17:42 +0000

wait until you find out about human programmers...

New comment by disconcision in "Updates to Consumer Terms and Privacy Policy"

disconcision — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 14:49:05 +0000

this is somewhat true but i'm not sure how load bearing it is. for one, i think it's going to be a while until 'we asked the model what bob said' is as admissible as the result of a database query

New comment by disconcision in "What are OKLCH colors?"

disconcision — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:51:19 +0000

OKLCH plus relative colors let me seriously reduce the amount of hardcoded colors from my style sheet:

https://github.com/hazelgrove/hazel/blob/dev/src/web/www/sty...

New comment by disconcision in "Left to Right Programming"

disconcision — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 14:07:28 +0000

interesting!! is BABLR yours? is there a page that talks about your error-correcting/embedding-gaps approach? couldn't immediate find one in the docs. btw new version of tylr (hazel's core editing engine) is multi-language from the ground up, with a javascript grammar underway; new version is not yet online though

New comment by disconcision in "Left to Right Programming"

disconcision — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 21:58:21 +0000

there are approaches to ensure you always or almost always have syntactic validity, e.g. structured editing or error correcting parsing, though of course it's true that the more permissive the system is the more tortured some of the syntactic 'corrections' must be in extreme cases. the approach we're taking with http://hazel.org (which we approximate but don't fully succeed at yet) is: allow normal-ish typing, always correct the code enough to be ran/typechecked, but insert placeholders/decorations to telegraph the parse structure that we're using in case of errors or incompleteness.