Hacker News: mbil

New comment by mbil in "Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity"

mbil — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:50:26 +0000

Before you get scooping, see also "Caffeine and progression of Parkinson’s disease: A deleterious interaction with creatine" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4573899/

New comment by mbil in "How often do you think about the 1893 World's Fair?"

mbil — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:07:01 +0000

The Devil in the White City stands out as one of my favorite books. And I live near the location of the prison in Philadelphia where HH Holmes was hanged, though it’s now the site of a grocery store. So I’m regularly reminded by the historical marker sign.

New comment by mbil in "Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters"

mbil — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:57:17 +0000

See also The AI Superforecasters Are Here https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ai-superforecasters-are... and discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806296

New comment by mbil in "Show HN: TERMy – A fast terminal assistant that does not use LLMs"

mbil — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:57:34 +0000

It's kind of antithetical to the tool's deterministic positioning, but have you considered making TERMy leverage an LLM for unseen or low-confidence queries, and then generate the config and update itself to make future similar queries deterministic?

New comment by mbil in "Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives"

mbil — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:01:54 +0000

If you don't eat your biomass compound goo, you can't have any PlastiYum bacterial sludge

New comment by mbil in "Scientists release biggest 2D map of the universe"

mbil — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 14:41:59 +0000

Bringing it down a dimension:

> The earth may be round, in which case we’re on the “surface” of a three-dimensional sphere. One much larger than what we’ve seen (since the ground around us is approximately flat), but nevertheless finite.

Of course maybe the 4D sphere of the universe is itself hung in a vast field of other 4D universes, that field is the surface of a 5D sphere, etc.

New comment by mbil in "The weekend is 100 years old"

mbil — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:01:47 +0000

What year do you think it is

New comment by mbil in "GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities"

mbil — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:18:54 +0000

Yes it seems like the thread is discounting that frontier providers are likely already baking new, stronger models. I agree that GLM and its ilk are quite good, but having used them I’m not convinced they’re on par with eg Opus in terms of things like tool calling. And they’re fast but less capable so I spend about the same amount of time with them, just with more hand holding. Maybe this is a harness limitation. I know on paper they seem comparable but anecdotally and qualitatively they’re not as useful as the frontiers’, so maybe there’s some truth to benchmaxing claims. For some workloads the distilled models may be good enough, and I suspect at some point there will be diminishing returns to spending a premium on frontier models, but I don’t think we’re there yet. That said I’m continuing to try them.

The question is whether this steals enough marketshare from frontier providers that they don’t have the capital to train the next model iteration. The open models are going to push down the unit price of an intelligence-token, but there will still be a market for a smarter bot. And as intelligence gets cheaper, the demand for it will rise (see Hank Green’s Jevons Paradox video). Not to mention there’s all kinds of other directions to go at the frontier (world models, robotics, video gen, etc).

Another thing, and this is pure speculation, but if the Chinese model providers already discovered the decrypting COT trick and leveraged it to do RL training, and assuming frontiers plug that hole, then maybe future distillation will be harder.

New comment by mbil in "Interviewing Engineers in the AI Era: Lessons from a Year of Rebuilding"

mbil — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:07:17 +0000

I’ve been conducting AI Coding interviews at my job. Candidate will screen share and use AI-assisted coding environment and tools of their choice.

I ask them to implement xyz thing. What I’m looking for is how they interact with the AI agent. Do they ask the agent to plan first? Do they review the plan? Etc. It’s pretty typical stuff that you might expect an experienced engineer to do if they effectively use such tools daily.

There are a series of follow-up questions about how to productionize the toy system, which gives some additional signal about how well they understand what they’re making. I sprinkle these in when there’s dead air waiting for the bot to think.

I think we’ll need to evolve and refine this problem and process as the models continue to improve.

New comment by mbil in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

mbil — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 16:07:34 +0000

Leasing seems like it could make sense given rapid upgrades in the technology. Why spend $15k on a home robot that will be obsoleted in the next few years?

New comment by mbil in "Claude Opus 5"

mbil — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:25:26 +0000

Maybe it's akin to the Ballmer peak: improved performance at a specific level of relaxation

Soon We Won't Program Computers. We'll Train Them Like Dogs (2016)

mbil — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 18:14:48 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/the-end-of-code/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48960621

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mbil in "Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray"

mbil — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:53:50 +0000

Some mixed cancer associations in animal models

New comment by mbil in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

mbil — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 01:53:24 +0000

Contact?

New comment by mbil in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

mbil — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:21:21 +0000

You might like Blindsight by Peter Watts

New comment by mbil in "Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I'm Daily Driving"

mbil — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:48:45 +0000

Agree, I put off using org-roam a few times in the past because I couldn’t be bothered to keep my notes in such order. But now I have an agent that set it up and it’s also recording, organizing, and referencing everything.

New comment by mbil in "Waymo Premier"

mbil — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:38:34 +0000

On a recent trip to SF I found Waymo to be cheaper than Uber about half the time. I wondered if I was seeing artificially discounted prices as a new rider.

New comment by mbil in "Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition"

mbil — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:13:41 +0000

It depends of course but typically it’s more like 3% the caffeine of regular coffee

New comment by mbil in "System Card: Claude Mythos Preview [pdf]"

mbil — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:03:20 +0000

Agree. I think they're intentionally sitting on the fence between "These models are the most useful" and "These models are the most dangerous".

They want the public and, in turn, regulators to fear the potential of AI so that those regulators will write laws limiting AI development. The laws would be crafted with input from the incumbents to enshrine/protect their moat. I believe they're angling for regulatory capture.

On the other hand, the models have to seem amazingly useful so that they're made out to be worth those risks and the fantastic investment they require.

New comment by mbil in "Nashville library launches Memory Lab for digitizing home movies"

mbil — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:10:19 +0000

At the end of last year I took the old VCR and VHS home movies from the 90s out of my mom's basement and digitized them using this cheap converter[0]. I also had to get some rubbing alcohol and foam swabs to clean the VCR heads, which only took a few minutes[1] (some of the older tapes would play normally for a moment before the quality degraded into poor tracking and static). My family enjoyed watching them.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB6BW6X4

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ClXrffkN3M