Hacker News: ooloncoloophid

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview's cyber capabilities"

ooloncoloophid — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:33:18 +0000

The point about confidence intervals is a good one and I'd like to see it more often. My neighbour Alan is a good farmer, but I am not.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

ooloncoloophid — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 11:10:37 +0000

His book 'On Liberty' is the subject of a recent In Our Time episode (BBC Radio Four series on the history of ideas) [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002pqnc]. They discuss his childhood and his (apparently very warm) relationship with his father. (Sidenote: first proper In Our Time episode with the new host; he seems fine, but I miss Melvyn Bragg.)

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Signs of introspection in large language models"

ooloncoloophid — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 08:40:23 +0000

I'm half way through this article. The word 'introspection' might be better replaced with 'prior internal state'. However, it's made me think about the qualities that human introspection might have; it seems ours might be more grounded in lived experience (thus autobiographical memory is activated), identity, and so on. We might need to wait for embodied AIs before these become a component of AI 'introspection'. Also: this reminds me of Penfield's work back in the day, where live human brains were electrically stimulated to produce intense reliving/recollection experiences. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilder_Penfield]

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "The end of the rip-off economy: consumers use LLMs against information asymmetry"

ooloncoloophid — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:33:44 +0000

Beyond consumer-producer relationships, there are many instances where an individual is required to deal with a baroque interface, as I just did when starting to look after an ill parent and figure out what care they could get from the local and state governments; there are forms, definitions to get one's head around, high stakes (get it wrong and you could be breaking the law), and so on. An AI in this case was incredibly helpful, particularly when I was overloaded cognitively and emotionally. There is no particular incentive on the other end of the citizen-government relationship for the government to obfuscate things, but things are sometimes very complicated and provided in verbose language. For those interactions, for that asymmetry, an AI will be very useful.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "A mechanic offered a reason why no one wants to work in the industry"

ooloncoloophid — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 12:11:56 +0000

A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time"

ooloncoloophid — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:04:17 +0000

The one about Victorian sewers is fantastic.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)"

ooloncoloophid — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 09:03:14 +0000

My summer project for my comp sci MSc was an open source natural deduction helper tool for the Mac, called Baker Street. I let it lapse simply because I didn't have time to look after it, but now it's available for download once more: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/baker-street/id1528304157

I've been working with Claude to bring some new features, like printing a proof - unsuccessfully! https://github.com/OolonColoophid/bakerStreet/issues/9

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?"

ooloncoloophid — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:32:18 +0000

My codebase contains a lot of Objective-C but I'm slowly replacing it with Swift. I rarely write Objective-C (largely because it's so easy to introduce bugs with release/retain shenanigans) unless I really have to. Interoperability between the languages does work but is fragile, with Xcode often getting into a chicken-and-egg state where a compilation error in Swift prevents the Objective-C from compiling, and vice versa, stuffing the interface with errors that can make it hard to discover where the problem is.

(edit: typo)

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Interview: Sam Altman on Being Fired and Rehired by OpenAI"

ooloncoloophid — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 12:58:11 +0000

> Q: The reports about the Q* model breakthrough that you all recently made, what’s going on there?

> A: Altman: No particular comment on that unfortunate leak.

Interesting that he calls it an unfortunate leak.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Show HN: Kali – Scheduling Assistant for iOS"

ooloncoloophid — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 14:06:11 +0000

:-) Thanks. And for the lunch I believe it was the correct time but then it added a later event to book it (i.e. after the lunch), maybe at 5pm.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Show HN: Kali – Scheduling Assistant for iOS"

ooloncoloophid — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 20:19:28 +0000

I like the idea but I’d prefer the flirting off by default. Also, I asked for a simple lunch appointment tomorrow and it suggested the lunch but added a reservation for later in the afternoon.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six"

ooloncoloophid — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:13:25 +0000

I see what you mean - five will fit with more room left over. But much like a hand that has a capacity to hold 7 or so marbles, if you grasp only five at a time, your overall productivity will (almost certainly) slow.

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Want cleaner code? Use the rule of six"

ooloncoloophid — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 08:11:16 +0000

An overview of the model and its history: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207727/

The Wikipedia entry for WM is also very good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory

It's a bit tricky to tell what you're doing exactly - perhaps drop me an email if you have any queries (using this account; my original parent post was on a throwaway account because I had login problems).

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Scapple"

ooloncoloophid — Sun, 22 May 2022 07:59:25 +0000

Not sure what you mean by this, Amelius. Could you put this on our forum as a feature request?

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Scapple"

ooloncoloophid — Sun, 22 May 2022 07:57:30 +0000

New(ish) coder here. Yes, Scapple is still under active development and we have some exciting things lined up for iOS (no time frame as yet).

And in the End (2010)

ooloncoloophid — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 15:26:49 +0000

Article URL: https://ianhocking.com/twl/2010/08/20/and-in-the-end/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107566

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)"

ooloncoloophid — Tue, 02 Jul 2019 08:03:58 +0000

Location: UK

Remote: Preferred

Willing to relocate: Possibly

Technologies: (solid knowledge of) Python, R, (stronger knowledge of) SPSS, SQL, PhP, HTML, CSS. Excellent Bash/Unix skills.

Résumé: Psycholinguistics PhD graduate (computational modelling of parsing; embodied cognition; creativity) from Russell Group UK Uni; strong investigative scientist/researcher in quant and qual; excellent communicator (particularly writing; am award-winning SF novelist); experience of building full-stack solutions, and of successively leading a 20-strong academic psychology team. Looking to develop my tech experience with interesting projects, particularly involving ML/data science.

Email: ihocking AT gmail.com

New comment by ooloncoloophid in "Confessions of a former Mac lawyer"

ooloncoloophid — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 01:46:01 +0000

FWIW, I’ve been using various MacBook Pros over the years and never had issues like these (also using lots of MS software). It could well be that the author had a lemon—-still no good thing, of course.

Show HN: Octavo: Go from Markdown to PDF etc. via Pandoc

ooloncoloophid — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 17:02:07 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/OolonColoophid/octavo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14981723

Points: 1

# Comments: 0