Hacker News: joshuahedlund

New comment by joshuahedlund in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

joshuahedlund — Fri, 29 May 2026 11:16:50 +0000

Why haven’t I heard of this? Is it available in IDEs like Cursor?

New comment by joshuahedlund in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

joshuahedlund — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:47:30 +0000

> For equal capability tokens, there has been about a 10x drop in cost every 6 months

Is this still happening? Opus 4.5 was six months ago, can you get its capabilities for 1/10 cost now? Are we on track to get the same for 4.6 in a couple months?

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy"

joshuahedlund — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:43:32 +0000

For someone who purports not to care about the film, you seem very familiar with the discourse about it. (I have seen zero experts, or anyone really, discussing boat design.)

New comment by joshuahedlund in "We see something that works, and then we understand it"

joshuahedlund — Sun, 10 May 2026 11:17:40 +0000

> thinkism

Thank you for this term. In my view, the belief that AGI singularly will rapidly destroy us because it will think 10,000 times faster than us is a form of thinkism.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Eka’s robotic claw feels like we're approaching a ChatGPT moment"

joshuahedlund — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:22:47 +0000

> Last mile is already “solved” with the little robots that drive around cities, no need for hands.

And yet we haven’t seen widespread adoption because they can’t handle stairs, steep slopes, streets without sidewalks, sidewalks with mud, or a hundred other real world challenges

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution"

joshuahedlund — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:15:40 +0000

Sometimes it’s hard to objectively tell whether two animals don’t appear to reproduce because they are unable genetically, or technically able still but behaviorally unwilling in normal natural circumstances, or we don’t know but we just haven’t observed it for that particular combo, etc

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Bitcoin tumbles below $70K, heavy losses in cryptocurrencies in last three weeks"

joshuahedlund — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:17:48 +0000

It has, tho the rate of new record highs have been reducing from peak to peak: 10x > 3x > 1.5x

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Claude Opus 4.6"

joshuahedlund — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 18:30:36 +0000

Any ideas why verified has stagnated? It was increasing rapidly and then basically stopped.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again"

joshuahedlund — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:32:00 +0000

Scott Alexander blogged about it today: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/best-of-moltbook

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Travel agents took 10 years to collapse. Developers are 3 years in"

joshuahedlund — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 01:29:16 +0000

> If your job is to translate requirements into code manually - and that's it - you're the generalist travel agent.

I’ve been a full-stack web programmer at five different companies over the last fifteen years, big and small, e-commerce and B2B, junior to senior to staff, and that has never fully described my responsibilities.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "GPT-5.2"

joshuahedlund — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 20:33:55 +0000

I would love for SWE Verified to put out a set of fresh but comparable problems and see how the top performing models do, to test against overfitting.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Leak confirms OpenAI is preparing ads on ChatGPT for public roll out"

joshuahedlund — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 03:25:35 +0000

> most normal people don't know what Claude or Gemini are

“Google Gemini” is the No 2 ranked app in the Apple App Store (behind ChatGTP) and has been for some time

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Claude Haiku 4.5"

joshuahedlund — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 20:58:32 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

I'm also curious what results we would get if SWE came up with a new set of 500 problems to run all these models against, to guard against overfitting.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "After the AI boom: what might we be left with?"

joshuahedlund — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:20:46 +0000

Won’t those models gradually become outdated (for anything related to events that happen after the model was trained, new code languages or framework versions, etc) if no one is around to continually re-train them?

New comment by joshuahedlund in "ICE bought vehicles equipped with fake cell towers to spy on phones"

joshuahedlund — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 21:31:08 +0000

How about denying the Fourth Amendment rights of US citizens to be secure in their homes in the recent Chicago apartment raid? https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-sufferable-evil

How about detaining US citizens without warrants for days at a time and then releasing with no charges? https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/george-...

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Earth was born dry until a cosmic collision made it a blue planet"

joshuahedlund — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:37:44 +0000

There is a hard limit on the number of atomic elements, and an even smaller limit on the number of soluble compounds that facilitate chemical reactions, and water is demonstrably both the best and the most common in the universe.

So while it may be possible for life to exist without water, any alternatives should be reasonably expected to be even more rare than water-based life

New comment by joshuahedlund in "What birdsong and back ends can teach us about magic"

joshuahedlund — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 02:13:28 +0000

I have stared at a Blue Jay mimicking while Merlin repeatedly labeled it Red-Shouldered Hawk. I’ve seen it pop up a bunch of suspicious one-offs around a mockingbird as well (same with Gray Catbird, another mimic).

But I agree with you that it gets those things correct most of the time and it also seems to be improving over time.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "What birdsong and back ends can teach us about magic"

joshuahedlund — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 02:02:29 +0000

As a heavy user of Merlin, it definitely isn’t perfect - especially with all the mimic birds - to the point that there are complaints about beginners polluting the citizen science database with erroneous IDs from Merlin.

But it’s very very good.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

joshuahedlund — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 17:45:00 +0000

Doesn't "average" = "middle class" by definition?

US median individual income in 2022 was $48k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

> The “average person” doesn’t make enough money to pay rent or afford groceries

<1% of the US population is homeless, and ~10% receive food stamps. The average person makes enough money to pay rent and buy groceries.

New comment by joshuahedlund in "Andrej Karpathy: Software in the era of AI [video]"

joshuahedlund — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 13:40:22 +0000

> You have to be extremely verbose in describing all of your requirements. There is seemingly no such thing as too much detail

I understand YMMV, but I have yet to find a use case where this takes me less time than writing the code myself.