Hacker News: npilk

New comment by npilk in "Discovery Loop"

npilk — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 18:05:02 +0000

If their goal is to automate scientific discovery, why would they not automate building their website?

(Though, I do wish people would use just a few extra prompts to break out of the 'vibe-coded' look.)

New comment by npilk in "Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days"

npilk — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 20:49:21 +0000

Huh. I used to think that was a Keynes quote but now I've changed my mind.

New comment by npilk in "Seedance 2.5"

npilk — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:47:15 +0000

To play devil's advocate: couldn't people generating AI image/video take the time to consider what they want to generate, decide how to prompt it, ask for edits to have subjects pose certain ways, and specify lighting and color grading (or tweak it afterwards with the same tools digital photographers use)? Wouldn't that give them an 'essence' in the same way?

New comment by npilk in "Show HN: I mapped every US golf course"

npilk — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:58:29 +0000

It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/

Ten Thousand Agents (2025)

npilk — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 14:50:03 +0000

Article URL: https://notes.npilk.com/ten-thousand-agents

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49036534

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by npilk in "What happened to TheNumbers.com"

npilk — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 21:17:09 +0000

What if you aren't motivated solely by making money? There will still be new free content created by hobbyists, passionate creators, altruists, etc.

(Agree with you more generally.)

New comment by npilk in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

npilk — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:12:14 +0000

It's cute they think 'retail investors' are reading balance sheets in the first place.

New comment by npilk in "Does creatine make you smarter?"

npilk — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:00:40 +0000

Interesting. I had heard that chess players burn a crazy amount of calories during tournament matches, but when I looked it up just now it seems like that isn't true: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/30/its-sapols...

New comment by npilk in "Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day"

npilk — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:06:58 +0000

I appreciate the sentiment but can't quite tell who the author is targeting. Is it people who don't even know what HTML is, or those who are technical enough to have considered tradeoffs between web hosting options?

For complete beginners, I made https://weejur.com , which is designed to make it easy for even a complete beginner to paste in HTML and get it hosted on GitHub Pages for free. (And is also hosted itself on GitHub for free!)

New comment by npilk in "Silent speech with ultrasound"

npilk — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:00:14 +0000

I'm very eager for subvocalization tech to take off - this, AlterEgo, etc.

I have never liked talking aloud to Siri or similar, but I could see using "voice" as an interface for so much more if I could speak silently to my device.

New comment by npilk in "Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other"

npilk — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:58:54 +0000

Haha, I guess having a troll posting nonstop racial slurs is just part of that old web feel...

New comment by npilk in "GPT-5.5 hallucinates 3x more than MIT-licensed GLM-5.2"

npilk — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:52:00 +0000

I think it implies they are more likely to hallucinate if they don't know the answer. So a big model will return the correct answer more often than a small one, but in the cases where it doesn't, it will be more likely to make something up instead of saying "I don't know".

New comment by npilk in "The AirPods Effect"

npilk — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:49:31 +0000

This will be even more interesting when AR glasses finally go mainstream in a few years, further increasing this effect.

New comment by npilk in "The 2-Year Apartment Rule"

npilk — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 13:33:34 +0000

IMO people in this thread have missed the point. I, too have moved about every two years as an adult (even though I've never had mold problems). Or when I haven't moved, I've made a job change.

Perhaps there is something in my nature that gets complacent after a couple of years and looks to make a change. It seems like that's what the author was trying to grasp towards.

I expect this tendency might go away as I get older, have a family, etc.

New comment by npilk in "macOS needs its grid back"

npilk — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:03:17 +0000

I feel like Arc nailed this perfectly with the vertical tabs and multiple "spaces", and since almost everything happens in-browser these days, this was 99% good enough. I can't understand why more power users don't find this setup ideal. I'm hoping Zen Browser can become a solid replacement.

New comment by npilk in "Chipotlai Max"

npilk — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:00:57 +0000

They make custom chips with a model's weights and parameters "hard-coded" which allows for much, much faster inference.

Profile of Tilly Norwood, an AI 'Actress' (Gift Link)

npilk — Sun, 31 May 2026 14:33:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/31/magazine/ai-actress-tilly-norwood.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48345981

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by npilk in "The dead economy theory"

npilk — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:03:24 +0000

Human-slop is a new one for me. How would you define it? Low quality work written by a human? Human writing that sounds like an LLM? Something else?

New comment by npilk in "Launch HN: Chert (YC P26) – Twilio for iMessage"

npilk — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:01:01 +0000

Love chatting with an agent via iMessage for the right use case - it feels very natural and human. I hacked my own together with an old laptop and BlueBubbles.

How would you compare your offering with Spectrum (https://photon.codes/)?