Hacker News: nicholast

Show HN: ChatFlavors, agentic nudges prompt injection template

nicholast — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:59:40 +0000

A template default prompt injections for LLM chat services. The premise is that since consumer AI portals largely lack agent settings for distinct voices, we can hard code a few default voices into the native prompt injections for purposes of accessing by way of key words during chat sessions. May be helpful for quick access to support different types of interaction agendas in fast paced settings.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46837771

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nicholast in "TikTok settles just before social media addiction trial to begin"

nicholast — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:47:18 +0000

I am less concerned about addiction than i am about introducing micro targeted foreign agendas into our nation’s cultural landscape.

New comment by nicholast in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

nicholast — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 10:10:08 +0000

Frederick Brooks in his essay "No Silver Bullet" (included in the collection Mythical Man Month) talked about the conventions of software development and I recall had called for taking an iterative approach to software development similar to what I had followed for the Automunge project, I went into a little more detail about that in my 2019 essay of the same name: https://medium.com/automunge/no-silver-bullet-95c77bc4bde1

New comment by nicholast in "A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size"

nicholast — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:37:12 +0000

A few comments: - It has long been known in other settings that a small number of points can impact performance of different conventions, this could perhaps be considered a validation of relevance towards the largest scales - I wonder if the reverse could be considered true, if such a small scale of data included in a training corpus can impact the model performance in a negative direction, could that same amount of data impact a model in the positive direction? - I think this is suggestive that there remains benefit to more authoritative sources of data aggregators, like respected publishers, journals, libraries, whereby inclusion of data in such more respected repositories can be considered validation of reliability for training.

New comment by nicholast in "From the Diaries of John Henry, Book 7 – Inevitable"

nicholast — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 01:50:27 +0000

I hereby present Book 7 of the essay series from the Diaries of John Henry, "Inevitable". I used to publish these every year, took a little more time on this book featuring a self-authored collection of essays published over last three years around subjects like AI, technology policy, investing, and entrepreneurship. One of inspirations for the journey arose from essays of Paul Graham so sharing to the Y-Combinator community as a courtesy. No language models were used or harmed in the making of these essays (unless otherwise disclosed). Cheers! - Nicholas Teague, 9/17/2025

From the Diaries of John Henry, Book 7 – Inevitable

nicholast — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 01:50:27 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/book-7-inevitable-fef0091f42c8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45284010

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by nicholast in "Writing is thinking"

nicholast — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 15:42:04 +0000

The best way to learn a subject is to teach it.

New comment by nicholast in "Ukrainian hackers destroyed the IT infrastructure of Russian drone manufacturer"

nicholast — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:13:59 +0000

The only tech that scales cheaper than drones are digital interventions. This is a better way to intercept.

New comment by nicholast in "Quantum computing full page ad in WSJ"

nicholast — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:25:24 +0000

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal featured a full page ad directed to any remaining skeptics of quantum computing from the CEO of D-Wave Quantum.

Quantum computing full page ad in WSJ

nicholast — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 18:25:24 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/dwavequantum/status/1886414495129522379

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42936525

Points: 1

# Comments: 3

New comment by nicholast in "AlphaQubit: AI to identify errors in Quantum Computers"

nicholast — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 14:32:19 +0000

Part of the problem of this form of benchmarking is that in some domains we wouldn't only be interested in the percent of times that an error channel is successfully mitigated, we would also be interested in the distribution of types of errors for cases where an error channel isn't successfully mitigated. The paper appears to be silent on that matter.

New comment by nicholast in "What You Shouldn't Know About Quantum Computers"

nicholast — Tue, 28 May 2024 14:44:21 +0000

Thank God someone other than Scott Aaronson is publishing this kind of content. Shetl Optimized is too much of a vanity project to serve as a mainstream resource.

New comment by nicholast in "Retrospective for a Ragtime King"

nicholast — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 12:14:31 +0000

Joplin really laid the stage for the emergence of jazz music. The ragtime conventions are deceptively simple, they carry a kind of counter balance between the cleffs almost resembling polka at times, but the rhythmic styles often are more subtle with off beat progressions. The song structures progressing through chapters of themes are particularly interesting and lacking from most modern popular music.

New comment by nicholast in "Gödel, Escher, Bach: an in-depth explainer"

nicholast — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 23:14:19 +0000

The book is not just about the ideas, it is about the tapestry of how it was presented. It was a new form of literature. The whole document was its own strange loop.

The Fundamentals of Rust

nicholast — Mon, 12 Sep 2022 09:42:47 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/the-fundamentals-of-rust-ccd01275e35e

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32807835

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nicholast in "Book 6 of “From the Diaries of John Henry”"

nicholast — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 20:09:52 +0000

Hi there, author here, this collection marks the sixth year of writing essays on themes like machine learning, entrepreneurship, and quantum computing. Through the project we've published a python library, had workshop papers at research conferences like ICLR and NeurIPS, and yeah just had a lot of fun. Some thanks owed to the Hacker News feed for fueling us with diversions over the years. Never quite made it into YC but you know what I think the essays may have turned out better as a result. Cheers.

Book 6 of “From the Diaries of John Henry”

nicholast — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 20:07:00 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/from-the-diaries-of-john-henry/book-6-endurance-192471c6a66

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32006105

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by nicholast in "Persist or let it go: a study of entrepreneurial decision making"

nicholast — Sat, 28 May 2022 20:25:25 +0000

You can't evaluate rationality in context of small number of samples of a fat tailed distribution with wide uncertainty bands. Besides, startups can be a kind of success even in failure based on opportunities that arise as a result.

New comment by nicholast in "How to Be Successful (2019)"

nicholast — Sat, 21 May 2022 11:07:16 +0000

The funny thing is that entrepreneurship doesn't even have to require dropping out of school. A three month summer break is easily enough time to start digging into a niche and validating the market. It probably won't get to sustainability, but by the end of a summer of focus you may at least know if there is something there worth pursuing. A better investment of time than backpacking across Europe.

Feature Encodings for Gradient Boosting with Automunge

nicholast — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 19:02:25 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/automunge/feature-encodings-for-gradient-boosting-with-automunge-973d3eb6228f

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30689593

Points: 1

# Comments: 0