Hacker News: iamwil

New comment by iamwil in "The Third Hard Problem"

iamwil — Sun, 17 May 2026 04:05:44 +0000

I think I've always called this "Ontology is hard". It's genuinely useful when it's used as a tool for clarification. It's constraining when it's used as a tool for modeling.

New comment by iamwil in "I caught the car"

iamwil — Sun, 10 May 2026 03:09:35 +0000

You didn't need to say anything. Plenty of people would have stepped up to defend you. Now, the sarcasm looks defensive. This could be another blog post in a couple months.

New comment by iamwil in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

iamwil — Fri, 01 May 2026 03:23:32 +0000

If this works with writing, it should also work with code. `git blame` should be enough training data to de-anonymize open source programmers. Maybe that'd be addition information to point out who Satoshi is.

Mahjong: A Visual Guide

iamwil — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 03:41:09 +0000

Article URL: https://themahjong.guide/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47885239

Points: 247

# Comments: 68

New comment by iamwil in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

iamwil — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:44:41 +0000

Blow originally did Order of Sinking Star as a quick side project. He thought that by using these pre-existing games as a starting point, he'd get it done quicker. But then he decided to experiment with the combinatorics of these mechanics that the game blew up so much in scope that the original starting point didn't help at all.

New comment by iamwil in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

iamwil — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:41:42 +0000

It's a puzzle maker's puzzle game. The reason why it's so lauded is because the design is so tight. Kinda like how there's certain buildings the public thinks is ugly, but architects all like it because it tickles that part of the architect brain. It's a game that gives you that ah-ha moment. Kinda that moment where you walk from the forest into a clearing, but for your brain.

The game is hard. I only kinda got the hang of it, and I didn't quite get to that ah-ha moment. You have to be willing to sit with it and think. I think with sokoban games, you can often just almost random walk your way to a solution, because the state space and its transitions is easy enough to wander into. But I didn't find that to be the case with SSR. You have to be able to reason about the state space changes, I think because the state space isn't exactly euclidean, so it's harder to wander into the solution.

New comment by iamwil in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

iamwil — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:33:55 +0000

LMGTFY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban

New comment by iamwil in "Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games"

iamwil — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:32:23 +0000

Sokoban is a common word within puzzle game fans and devs. That article wasn't written for people that didn't like those kinds of puzzles in the first place.

New comment by iamwil in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

iamwil — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:08:48 +0000

This is great. You might be interested in Matt Keeter's work on Implicit surfaces, and using interval math for its optimization:

https://youtu.be/UxGxsGnbyJ4?si=Oo6Lmc4ACaSr5Dk6&t=1006

If not LLMs, what should I work on?

iamwil — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:03:23 +0000

Article URL: https://kindxiaoming.github.io/blog/2026/everything-is-language/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47731246

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by iamwil in "FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self"

iamwil — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:36:52 +0000

The bug is in the software in our heads, if anything. We learned a little too much, that we're thinking further ahead than we would have when we first started out. So you need to purposefully shut off that part of your eval, so that you get started on anything at all.

If you design with the LLM, then it can make this easier by prompting it to help you not talk yourself out of things.

I found that gstack's /office_hours to be good about encouraging, while being firm. I've only done one of the modes, but it didn't dismiss my pushback when it was just based on my intuition. It took it as a baseline, and tried to evaluate it by taking it seriously. If that's any indication, the other modes for side projects should be just as supportive.

I think LLMs can make it easier to be more ambitious. Non-techies are blown away by being able to build web pages? I'm blown away that I was able to root my 1st gen Kindle Fire to repurpose it as a remote terminal to ssh into my laptop to talk to claude code. I've been trying to root the thing for years and could never find the right instructions to make it work.

New comment by iamwil in "FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self"

iamwil — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:47:42 +0000

It's easy to talk yourself out of doing things when you know a little too much. Sometimes, it's good to get back into the mode where you knew nothing and do things for their own sake, just to get the engine started again.

Polish Rocks and Cans with Shaders

iamwil — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:30 +0000

Article URL: https://rocks.benhylak.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514169

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Departure Mono Font

iamwil — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:19:57 +0000

Article URL: https://departuremono.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47463949

Points: 86

# Comments: 4

New comment by iamwil in "Having Kids (2019)"

iamwil — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:37:43 +0000

The quip I keep going back to is: "All joy, no fun."

New comment by iamwil in "Optimizing Content for Agents"

iamwil — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 03:37:16 +0000

I didn't find llms.txt useless at all. I was able to download all the library docs and check it into my repo and point my coding agent to it all the time.

New comment by iamwil in "The Brand Age"

iamwil — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 22:15:24 +0000

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

It's Time for LLM Connection Strings

iamwil — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 21:05:24 +0000

Article URL: https://danlevy.net/llm-connection-strings/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47185594

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by iamwil in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

iamwil — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:19:29 +0000

Isn't that what happens when they post their projects on HN?

Slide rule simulator teaches you how to calculate the old-fashioned way

iamwil — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:17:39 +0000

Article URL: https://hackaday.com/2026/02/18/sliderule-simulator-teaches-you-how-to-do-calculations-the-old-fashioned-way/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102111

Points: 3

# Comments: 0