Hacker News: hatthew

New comment by hatthew in "What happens when the information runs out"

hatthew — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:50:35 +0000

I feel like the basics of information theory are a valuable thing for people to learn, especially as AI that makes up information starts to become more prevalent.

New comment by hatthew in "Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)"

hatthew — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:04:53 +0000

The article has a good point and is correct. But it gets too far down into the weeds. For example, the paragraph about how priest conversions don't count as empire-building seems like the sort of argument one makes when desperately clutching at straws—a position that's entirely unnecessary given how reasonable the premise of the article is. It's building a straw man for a nonexistent opponent.

New comment by hatthew in "Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)"

hatthew — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:41:25 +0000

I read that part and I still don't like the article. I have several hundred hours in AoE2. Maybe I am unique, but it has never even occurred to me to call the collection of people and buildings I control an "empire". I think "it's just a game['s name]" is still a perfectly valid argument.

I would like the article better if it took an approach such as "Age of Empires is a bit of a misnomer, let's explore the actual definition of an empire," rather than its current combative approach.

New comment by hatthew in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

hatthew — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 04:22:31 +0000

For typical social media sites, engagement will pretty much always be proportional to both revenue and cost per user. Either revenue > cost, and the site is incentivized to increase engagement, or revenue < cost and the site dies. There is no middle ground where a site gets a healthy revenue that's greater than its costs, but increasing engagement won't increase revenue. The exceptions are niche sites that do things like fixed subscriptions, or cost money to create content but not to consume it (but even in these cases, increasing engagement probably still increases the chance users start/continue to be paid customers).

New comment by hatthew in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

hatthew — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 01:46:15 +0000

Presumably significantly less. But GP's point is that reducing advertising revenue doesn't remove the incentive to maximize engagement.

New comment by hatthew in "GPT‑Live"

hatthew — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 20:46:57 +0000

If it is to be believed—which I wouldn't count on—it sounds like the intention of the prompt was to keep the model focused, but the model's interpretation of it was to keep you focused.

New comment by hatthew in "Aluminum foil (2021)"

hatthew — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:10:16 +0000

Some guesses:

- A lot more direction-dependent.

- More maintenance related to keeping the right direction, maintaining more moving parts, etc.

- Less convenient form factor, more susceptible to wind, more unsightly.

- Less space-efficient, which matters for some applications like house rooftop installations.

New comment by hatthew in "We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works"

hatthew — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 20:03:15 +0000

Simply by the fact that you say computer engineering, you already went deeper than 99% of "computer people" in 2010

New comment by hatthew in "The Exhaustion of Talking to a Tool"

hatthew — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 20:17:04 +0000

With a car, when I turn the steering wheel a quarter turn, the car immediately starts to turn at a known rate (I can't quantify it, but my muscle memory knows it). With an LLM, if I ask it to "turn the car", my "steering wheel" is natural language. I have to spend effort to figure out how to convey the rate at which I want the car to turn, and because the LLM has a noticeable delay, I also need to preemptively include some language anticipating how the expected rate should feel and what to do if it doesn't seem to feel right. And then the next time I say the same thing, the LLM decides to steer the car a bit differently anyways.

New comment by hatthew in "The Coming Loop"

hatthew — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 02:09:59 +0000

This matches my experience coding, and the expectations I (and many other) have been voicing for years about why AI is still a ways away from solving coding. The hard part of programming isn't pressing the keys to put code into a file, it's understanding the problem and coming up with a good, clean, extensible solution. AI is great at making ok solutions that technically work, but pretty bad at having a good vision for a solution. AI is still very useful for bouncing ideas off of and exploring to create a better understanding, but writing a good spec for an LLM to implement isn't much easier than just writing the code yourself.

New comment by hatthew in "Anthropic updates their terms to verify age or identity"

hatthew — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 20:48:45 +0000

I'm also curious, specifically about the cost of training vs inference, and comparing that to other industries that can have high R&D costs. My instinct says that open weights aren't feasible because of the obvious issue where there is no incentive to develop your own model rather than just taking someone else's model. However, I could see a scenario where a hardware company designs a model that is open weights but optimized strongly for their own proprietary hardware, cutting their costs of inference low enough to be competitive with a hypothetical other company that doesn't have any R&D expediture.

New comment by hatthew in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

hatthew — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:11:10 +0000

To me, hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia feels less like vocabulary and more like trivia

New comment by hatthew in "But yak shaving is fun (2019)"

hatthew — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:42:41 +0000

It's a bad aphorism if you take it literally and don't think about any nuance, but it's the correct priority. In many cases each of the three steps can take longer than the last, and each step is useless if the previous step isn't possible. The lesson is supposed to be to focus on each step at a time, not to completely ignore the other steps.

If you're making a complicated webapp, use your favorite framework to make it functional, and then if it's functional and not already fast enough, look at the slowest parts and replace them with faster alternatives. It's not going to result in the most elegant solution, but in most cases it will be good enough. Better to have something that works than to spend an extra year reinventing the wheel.

New comment by hatthew in "Why I email complete strangers"

hatthew — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:30:38 +0000

I have a similar anxiety about emailing or messaging people directly. If I'm just posting a comment on HN or reddit, there's not much commitment and if someone responds but I don't feel like continuing the thread, it's fine to completely ignore it. But if I send something directly to someone, it feels very personal, and like I'm starting a conversation. Once I'm in a conversation I'm obligated to continue it until it reaches a conclusion, and while the anxiety of trying to write things in a personal way is bad, the anxiety of trying to force a conclusion to the conversation is worse.

New comment by hatthew in "What every coder should know about Gamma Correction"

hatthew — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:29:57 +0000

This feels like less of a gamma issue and more of a color space and monitor calibration issue. Possibly affected by the fact that oklab didn't exist when this article was written and the general awareness of color spaces was lower.

New comment by hatthew in "Techno-libertarians are flocking to the Caribbean"

hatthew — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:35:12 +0000

As someone with no plans to live or vacation in the caribbean, I'm curious. Is there a specific notable reason, or is it just a combination of littler things (cost, convenience, politics, weather, etc.)?

New comment by hatthew in "Anthropic apologizes for invisible Claude Fable guardrails"

hatthew — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:21:50 +0000

Part of the premise of the article is blatantly wrong. Distillation prevention was always visible. The only invisible safeguard was against frontier model development like development of training pipelines. This doesn't change the general idea that invisible degradation is bad and has been reverted, but the article changes the framing of the original issue from "preventing accelerating AI in the future" to "preventing cheaper AI right now".

New comment by hatthew in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

hatthew — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:42:22 +0000

Our logic at the time was that the relatively fixed cost of figuring out the hardware and developing device-specific software was less than the variable cost-per-board delta of like $20.

New comment by hatthew in "Raspberry Pi 5 – 16GB RAM"

hatthew — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:46:55 +0000

Huh. I had a work project a decade ago where we were evaluating SBCs as drivers for kiosks. At that time, the prevailing wisdom was that the Pi was specifically not for industry, as its main advantage was the strong community to provide support for DIYers. Competitors like PINE64 and Orange Pi were the same/better specs at half the price.

New comment by hatthew in "πFS"

hatthew — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:40:19 +0000

genius