Hacker News: flancian

New comment by flancian in "Where the goblins came from"

flancian — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:12:41 +0000

Wait, did I get this right that the answer after all the investigation that showed they had set up a goblin-reinforcing loop during fine tuning was... to ask it to not mention goblins so much in the system prompt?!

New comment by flancian in "The Operator That Dethroned a King: Python's Walrus Operator Story"

flancian — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:20:24 +0000

"Not dead. Not retiring. Not moving on to start a blockchain company. He was quitting — because of a fight over two characters"

Time to AI tell: 20 seconds? Still, interesting account of how Guido stepped down.

Also, what happened afterwards, which I wasn't aware of:

  > Guido’s departure left Python without a governance model for the first time in its history. What followed was genuinely impressive: the core developer community proposed, debated, and voted on no fewer than seven different governance PEPs (PEP 8010 through PEP 8016).
  > In December 2018, PEP 8016 — “The Steering Council Model” — won. Authored by Nathaniel J. Smith and Donald Stufft, it established a five-person steering council elected by core developers. The design philosophy was explicit: “Be boring. We’re not experts in governance, and we don’t think Python is a good place to experiment with new and untried governance models.”

New comment by flancian in "Generating All 32-Bit Primes (Part I)"

flancian — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 19:39:28 +0000

Very cool, thank you! Both the visualization tool and the description of Miller-Rabin.

I didn't know an algorithm with these properties existed!

Furthermore, your tool gave me a more intuitive feel of the rate at which primes "thin out" than every treatment of the topic I read previously.

No one wants to read your AI slop

flancian — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:34:25 +0000

Article URL: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47216142

Points: 25

# Comments: 4

New comment by flancian in "Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok"

flancian — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:54:21 +0000

It's federated as in ActivityPub.

New comment by flancian in "The Popper Principle"

flancian — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:20:27 +0000

I was first exposed to Popper in my first year in university, in an introductory course to epistemology, and I liked him right away. I've carried Refutability and the Paradox of Tolerance with me ever since.

By the way David Deutsch could be reasonably said to be Popper's biggest fan. If you're interested in Deutsch and Popper you could do worse than picking up "The Beginning of Infinity" to get acquainted with both, it's a great book.

New comment by flancian in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

flancian — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:51:13 +0000

I'd like to buck the apparent trend of reacting to your project with shock and horror and instead say I believe it's a great idea, and I appreciate what you are doing! People have been trained to believe (very long) copyright terms are almost a natural law that can't be broken or challenged (if you are an individual; other rules might apply to corporations...) but I think we are better off continuing to challenge this assumption.

I could imagine adding support for further rules that determine when Levin actively runs -- i.e. only run if the country or connection you are in makes this 'safe' according to some crowdsourced criteria? This would also serve to communicate the relative dangers of running this tool in different jurisdictions.

Claude Code Best Practices

flancian — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 13:15:39 +0000

Article URL: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/best-practices

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47014305

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by flancian in "Leaked chats expose the daily life of a scam compound's enslaved workforce"

flancian — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:51:15 +0000

Found this archive link:

https://archive.is/2026.02.02-090119/https://www.wired.com/s...

New comment by flancian in "A Guide to Magnetizing N48 Magnets in Ansys Maxwell"

flancian — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 23:05:54 +0000

File under "unexpectedly interesting and cool". I'd never seen such good visualizations of magnetic fields before, or of the magnetization process.

LLMs and the Semantic Revolution

flancian — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 07:24:33 +0000

Article URL: https://apenwarr.ca/log/20251120

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46002046

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by flancian in "Mr TIFF"

flancian — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:23:27 +0000

  I had downloaded the final Aldus TIFF specifications document, hoping to find the author’s name. However, the name is seemingly written in white text on white paper - making it invisible. What?

Is there an explanation for this that I missed? Was it an Easter Egg left by the author?

Stories I will not write

flancian — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 20:46:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lord-enki.net/stories.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45752789

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by flancian in "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence"

flancian — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 09:29:06 +0000

I believe this is likely true and will become evident in time to most, but not all, carbon based systems.

New comment by flancian in "Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?"

flancian — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 14:07:08 +0000

Immich is supposed to solve this nowadays: https://github.com/immich-app/immich

New comment by flancian in "Chatbots Can Go into a Delusional Spiral"

flancian — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:12:52 +0000

TLDR: a user of ChatGPT and weed became convinced they had chanced upon earth shattering discoveries while interacting with the chatbot over weeks/months.

New comment by flancian in "Chatbots Can Go into a Delusional Spiral"

flancian — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:11:02 +0000

https://archive.is/UfYzq

Chatbots Can Go into a Delusional Spiral

flancian — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 09:10:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/technology/ai-chatbots-delusions-chatgpt.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44960130

Points: 5

# Comments: 5

New comment by flancian in "First celestial image unveiled from revolutionary telescope"

flancian — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 09:47:52 +0000

About the person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin

The observatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory

New comment by flancian in "El Cono: The mysterious sacred 'pyramid' hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest"

flancian — Thu, 08 May 2025 11:41:46 +0000

No cred gained here :) I was just surprised by the low quality of the article and there were no other comments by the time I got here so I thought I'd write this short critique to warn others, but I think it came across as a shallow dismissal so it didn't add much.