Hacker News: kian

New comment by kian in "The UK's Teen Social Media Ban Is Political Theater, Not Child Safety Policy"

kian — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 23:51:45 +0000

It doesn't seem like there's been a precipitous drop in resources compared to the decades of requests and warnings that have led up to this point. So what's different now, if not resourcing?

New comment by kian in "Dynamic Workflows in Claude Code"

kian — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:48:03 +0000

"In my experience, AI still drifts from what I meant it to do on anything bigger than building a widget."

I've had code bases with tens of thousands of lines of code built from scratch that I hand-reviewed every line of and worked with the AI to improve, and haven't had this issue. I feel like a significant part of this is due to an involved /plan stage -- going back and forth on building out a plan for what you want the AI to do involves surfacing the assumptions that you would have called drift if you asked them to implement it directly from your prompt.

Once the plan has been refined and is what I want it to be, getting it to implement everything in TDD style has for the most part given me 100% working code, as I wanted it to be, without issues. It definitely helps that I'm a principal-level engineer with extensive architectural experience -- but if you're able to tell the AI in detail what you want, have it ask questions for clarifications, and read through a plan before getting it implemented, and have a solid testing plus manual qa process (automated by chrome devtools mcp) in place, I've find that you can one-shot complex features, rewrites, and even not-insignificant applications that would have taken days to write by hand in a few hours.

New comment by kian in "OpenAI's o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors"

kian — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:08:11 +0000

But what was the overlap?

New comment by kian in "Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales"

kian — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 23:24:51 +0000

If you take the chromatic scale and then swap every other pair of notes on opposite sides of the circle, it yields the circle of fifths. You'll notice that on the circle of fifths notes that skip a step are a whole tone apart in the chromatic scale.

Although there have been some claims in these comments to the contrary, harmony is particularly mathematical. Symmetry and the breaking of within the integers mod 12 form the foundational principles of harmony.

New comment by kian in "Everyone is capable of, and can benefit from, mathematical thinking"

kian — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 18:38:00 +0000

Abstract Algebra, Combinatorics, and Discrete Mathematics are all definitely worth the squeeze; and incidentally something that could easily be taught to middle- and high-schoolers with the right examples.

New comment by kian in "Surveillance and the history of 19th-century wearable tech"

kian — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 22:38:52 +0000

and now we program the fabric of society ;)

New comment by kian in "OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are struggling to build more advanced AI"

kian — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 01:31:03 +0000

This is why I exclusively use the API to 'chat' with GPT -- complete control over the context presented.

New comment by kian in "Artificial Intelligence Cheapens the Artistic Imagination (2023)"

kian — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 01:24:41 +0000

Many artists in fact do exactly this -- they do not make the art themselves, but instead imagine and manage the 'art project' and delegate tasks to other artists that work for them. Leonardo (Da Vinci) in fact himself did this with much of the work required for his paintings, although the most crucial parts he left for himself.

New comment by kian in "FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't"

kian — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:53:19 +0000

They are slant rhymes of one another. B and M are phonetically nearby, as are ia and ih and ao and ou. In no way like hacker news and cake her knees -- but more like hacker news and hagger moos ;)

New comment by kian in "I rewired my brain to become fluent in math (2014)"

kian — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:17:53 +0000

I have also found that programming is the gateway drug to Math B. Thanks to Functional Programming and Type Theory I eventually found may way into Abstract Algebra, Topology, and Category Theory... Wish I had time to go back and study these with a mentor, though!

New comment by kian in "I rewired my brain to become fluent in math (2014)"

kian — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 18:13:03 +0000

>>> The Pythagorean theorem becomes intuitively true not when you have some deep insight about Euclidean space, but when, on seeing a right triangle, three proofs of it spring instantly to mind.

To be honest, this sounds like orienting one's self in the 'space of mathematics'. Is it not possible that, just like one can navigate by landmarks (proofs) or by the space itself (deep understanding), that there are in fact two roads to intuition in mathematics, of which ones is practice and fluency, and the other is deep insight and understanding?

New comment by kian in "Geoffrey Hinton: Open sourcing AI models akin to open sourcing nuclear weapons"

kian — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:05:49 +0000

perhaps he's suggesting that they seize the software, weights, and training data from every company who's engaged in this? Or maybe he's just trying to protect profits and doesn't mean a word of it...

New comment by kian in "The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)"

kian — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 20:44:11 +0000

Thanks for the pointer!

New comment by kian in "The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)"

kian — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 23:11:01 +0000

Democracy: Rule of the Mob. Pretty sure the above sentiment is why the US is a republic...

New comment by kian in "The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)"

kian — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 23:05:51 +0000

I'm stealing that parenthetical...

New comment by kian in "What Computers Cannot Do: The Consequences of Turing-Completeness"

kian — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 22:53:41 +0000

that's a good question, but the electron transport chain and photosynthesis are both postulated/(known?) to exploit quantum effects at room temperature.

New comment by kian in "A neural code for time and space in the human brain [pdf]"

kian — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 21:57:05 +0000

Were temples not themselves often used to encode [spatio-]temporal information (about the time of the year, our location within the solar system and cosmos, etc) within their construction, now that you mention it?

New comment by kian in "How to Build an Origami Computer"

kian — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 20:51:43 +0000

I love this response. On a slightly smaller scale, there are also ideas of protein interaction-network computational 'circuitry' -- I think that showing that folding can also compute is a nice addendum to this.

New comment by kian in "How to Build an Origami Computer"

kian — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 20:04:42 +0000

So, then, protein folding is likely also possible to make Turing complete, no?

New comment by kian in "Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?"

kian — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 23:46:12 +0000

I'd also call out Eternal September in 1993, when AOL made it easy for anyone with a computer to connect online. This permanently changed the composition of the internet, and paved the way for the social networks that would later come to dominance after the iPhone was released.