Hacker News: jmatthews

New comment by jmatthews in "Show HN: Run TRELLIS.2 Image-to-3D generation natively on Apple Silicon"

jmatthews — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 03:15:11 +0000

Well done

New comment by jmatthews in "Do your own writing"

jmatthews — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:38:45 +0000

I learned some of this the hard way. I did the thinking and the distillation, but I had AI write the prose and that's all a lot of people saw, the AI tell-tales.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:05:00 +0000

it's a worthwhile lesson. thank you. There was a great deal of effort on my part, but not in the prose. You've taught me something and I appreciate it.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:15:04 +0000

it's not that you're teaching the AI, it's that you're framing the conversation on a reference material and having a conversation around it. Exploring a problem with referential framing, like a white paper or a dense blog post is a useful cognitive hack. You just have to be careful to pin extraordinary claims to extraordinary evidence.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:11:32 +0000

I'm trying to untangle the "this content isn't valuable" signal from the luddite "Anything with AI is low effort slop"

I appreciate the former and am trying to filter the latter.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:04:30 +0000

I'll give a software example because I'm just better at it, but if you describe Trello and tell me to decompose it on a white board I start thinking in terms of queues and write|edit|save tuples. I don't have to invent queues in my head and I have to wonder if it is possible to proactively assign a series of tranforms or schedules on an fresh input.

I know how to do it and it's all internalized. Even if I've never needed to do it.

that's the toolbox I'm trying to develop in ML. For example. I've studies LSTM and implemented one. What I didn't know was if gating was turing complete and essentially unbound. I didn't know if gates could be arbitrarily complex. Importantly I had no idea how to translate "I need a switch here" to a gate, or if a switch was even possible given the need to be differentiable for backprop.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:45:25 +0000

It's not a trick bud. The github page shows my user name and Claude. The content is intended to be read by an AI agent and explored through a text interface. That is explicit in the readme and the primer itself.

If you think you can generate this artifact with a prompt then show me. This was 2 days of exploration and research.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:42:03 +0000

my apologies it wasn't up to your standards. In fairness to me, that line is exactly what my effort was. I wasn't trying to "learn ML" I am trying to build a mental model that let's me decompose real problem into ML primitives.

It's unclear to me if you think the resource has no value or if it bother you that I wrote it using a coding agent.

I wrote the syllabus and worked through each section. Where my understanding was weak I explored the space, pulled in research, referred the model to other sources, and just generally tried to ground the topic in something I understood.

What resulted was something that helped a lot of subjects click together for me. Especially when to reach for a particular activation function and the section on gating.

This enter survey was motivated by an ML expirent I ran with assosicative memories that just failed horribly. So rather than post mortem that I set about understanding why it failed.

Anyhow, thank you for the feedback. I submitted this in good faith that it may help others.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:54:21 +0000

I've bounced off of many good textbooks. Even Karpathy's YouTube series was too dense for me. I'm trying to come in at a more palatable level.

This was a two day exploration where I provided the syllabus and ran through it with Claude Code, asking questions, trying to anchor it to stuff I understand well. I feel like the artifact has value.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is No Spoon. A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:46:14 +0000

I tried to tackle that under Topology for the problem but it may not be well named https://github.com/dreddnafious/thereisnospoon/blob/main/ml-...

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:41:08 +0000

I'm just trying to develop the lens where I can see a problem and know what properties of it are meaningful from an ML standpoint.

Coming from a specific domain where I have a sharpened instinct for how things are haven't really given me the ability to decompose the problem using ML primitives. That's what I'm working on.

New comment by jmatthews in "There is No Spoon. A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:30:23 +0000

thanks Oleg

New comment by jmatthews in "There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML"

jmatthews — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:28:11 +0000

This is my weekend project. I am building up my pattern recognition in machine learning. By that I mean see X problem, instantly think of Y solution. The primer markdown file is the artifact of that exploration.

read it from top to bottom or better have your favorite language model read it and then explore the space with a strong guided syllabus.

There is no spoon – A software engineers primer for demystified ML

jmatthews — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:28:11 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/dreddnafious/thereisnospoon

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568080

Points: 98

# Comments: 32

New comment by jmatthews in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"

jmatthews — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:57:29 +0000

For me getting the AI harness to solve the puzzle has become the puzzle. Just one more level of abstraction. Just like I don't code in assembly language anymore, now I don't name every variable.

AI coding is just a non-deterministic programming language and compiler duo

New comment by jmatthews in "How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills"

jmatthews — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:53:43 +0000

I find this so hard to get my head around. I am wildly more prolific with agentic coding. It's at minimum a 10x for the first several iterations and when you get into the heavy detail part I am still the choke point.

New comment by jmatthews in "The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management"

jmatthews — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 14:51:32 +0000

How many hours do you have mastering git or your IDE or your library of choice for UX?

New comment by jmatthews in "How renewables are saving Texans billions"

jmatthews — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 22:52:49 +0000

Even if the round trip efficiency is 25%?

Seasonal storage at competitive prices per megawatt hour is somewhat of a solved problem it just doesn't seem to be getting investment.

New comment by jmatthews in "DeepSeek’s founder is threatening US dominance in AI race"

jmatthews — Wed, 14 May 2025 05:03:25 +0000

In the same way that black hats will always be advantaged versus white hats, frontier models will always be advantaged versus derivatives.

New comment by jmatthews in "US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]"

jmatthews — Sun, 11 May 2025 04:02:08 +0000

You essentially outline why it should be broken up.

I'm not convinced making the ad tech sector more competitive would prompt that outcome but, "It would disrupt mature products" isn't a compelling argument to allow the existence of a monopoly.

Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing.

I think the more likely outcome would be more dynamic products under smaller bannerheads.