Hacker News: philomath_mn

New comment by philomath_mn in "Arabic document from 17th-cent. rubbish heap confirms semi-legendary Nubian king"

philomath_mn — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:58:56 +0000

Reminds me of this quote from Tonya Riley's _The Staff Engineer's Path_:

> In The Art of Travel (Vintage), Alain de Botton talks about the frustration of learning new information that doesn’t connect to anything you already know—like the sorts of facts you might pick up while visiting a historic building in a foreign land. He writes about visiting Madrid’s Iglesia de San Francisco el Grande and learning that “the sixteenth-century stalls in the sacristy and chapter house come from the Cartuja de El Paular, the Carthusian monastery near Segovia.” Without a connection back to something he was already familiar with, the description couldn’t spark his excitement or curiosity. The new facts, he wrote, were “as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

New comment by philomath_mn in "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code"

philomath_mn — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 02:23:53 +0000

Why is that?

New comment by philomath_mn in "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code"

philomath_mn — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 02:23:38 +0000

AI bills are already trivial compared to human time. I pay for claude max, all I need to do is save an hour a month and I will be breaking even.

New comment by philomath_mn in "LLM Inevitabilism"

philomath_mn — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 17:03:26 +0000

> most people agree that the output is trite and unpleasant to consume

This is likely a selection bias: you only notice the obviously bad outputs. I have created plenty of outputs myself that are good/passable -- you are likely surrounded by these types of outputs without noticing.

Not a panacea, but can be useful.

New comment by philomath_mn in "Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me"

philomath_mn — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 14:39:43 +0000

Anywhere I can follow your takes on LLM-assisted coding?

New comment by philomath_mn in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

philomath_mn — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 04:39:19 +0000

ChatGPT is $20 / month?

New comment by philomath_mn in "A Research Preview of Codex"

philomath_mn — Fri, 16 May 2025 22:24:46 +0000

Under what circumstances would that cost be high? Is OpenAI going to rip off your app? Why would they waste a second on that when there are better models to be built?

New comment by philomath_mn in "My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth"

philomath_mn — Thu, 08 May 2025 15:14:26 +0000

The exact same logic applies to any deductible expense, and yet people think they can buy a business vehicle "for free" because it is deductible.

IDK why this is so hard to understand.

New comment by philomath_mn in "Ask HN: How do you obtain software development contracts?"

philomath_mn — Thu, 08 May 2025 00:57:20 +0000

By building a good reputation and contact list doing salaried work. Usually you do a good job there, make a bunch of stakeholders happy, and then you have a chance at spinning off on your own.

New comment by philomath_mn in "New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer"

philomath_mn — Thu, 01 May 2025 19:47:21 +0000

Best part is that they probably have data to show that all that patience costs the typical passenger mere seconds to a minute on 99% of rides.

This has always bothered me about aggressive or impatient human drivers: they are probably shaving like 30 seconds off of their daily commute while greatly increasing the odds of an incident.

New comment by philomath_mn in "When ChatGPT broke the field of NLP: An oral history"

philomath_mn — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:03:24 +0000

Curious what you are expecting when you say "bottom falls out". Are you expecting significant failures of large-scale systems? Or more a point where people recognize some flaw that you see in LLMs?

New comment by philomath_mn in "A single line of code cost $8000"

philomath_mn — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 16:15:53 +0000

While this unfortunate, I am sure I also have single lines in production with greater cost and equivalent value (close to none) -- and I've only worked at small companies. I am sure some of y'all can beat this by ~2 orders of magnitude.

Databricks is happy to have us as a customer.

New comment by philomath_mn in "Ask HN: Which LLM to consult about LLM's?"

philomath_mn — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 19:54:49 +0000

Any of the leading LLMs could answer this, they just need the right context. So paste in the model cards for the various models you care about, or ask a model with search or "deep research" capability.

That being said, there probably isn't too much alpha in chasing down model tradeoffs outside the top few players (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini).

New comment by philomath_mn in "Supabase raises $200M Series D at $2B valuation"

philomath_mn — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 17:15:08 +0000

That definitely seems to be the play. Keep funneling in users from Lovable/bolt.new and keep building revenue or hope to be acquired if one of those vibe coding tools gets huge.

New comment by philomath_mn in "OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf"

philomath_mn — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 19:30:57 +0000

I agree: the incentives to use more and more AI are too strong. We're all stuck in some form of the prisoner's dilemma and the odds that nobody will defect are much too low.

So it seems the most rational position is to embrace the tools and try to ride the wave before the gravy-train is over.

New comment by philomath_mn in "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit"

philomath_mn — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:59:40 +0000

This is a bit of a strawman. There are certainly people who claim that you can ask AIs anything but I don't think the parent commenter ever made that claim.

"AI is making incredible progress but still struggles with certain subsets of tasks" is self-consistent position.

New comment by philomath_mn in "Tracing the thoughts of a large language model"

philomath_mn — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 20:41:18 +0000

That is a sub-token task, something I'd expect current models to struggle with given how they view the world in word / word fragment tokens rather than single characters.

New comment by philomath_mn in "OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK"

philomath_mn — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 04:39:22 +0000

Great breakdown, appreciate it.

I think most of the hype around MCP is just excitement that tool use can actually work and seeing lots of little examples where it does.

Watching Claude build something in Blender was pure magic, even if it is rough around the edges.

New comment by philomath_mn in "My stupid noise journey (2023)"

philomath_mn — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:13:16 +0000

Not trying to be smug or blithe, but this is one of the main things I love about living in the suburbs or the country: neighbors can only bother me outside (and they rarely do).

New comment by philomath_mn in "Zinc, a systems programming language prototype"

philomath_mn — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 22:07:34 +0000

It seems like the possible outcomes are:

(a) nobody uses the language, so a package manager doesn't matter OR

(b) people use the language, they will want to share packages, then a package manager will be bolted on (or many will, see python)

Seems like first-class package manager support (a la Rust) makes the most sense to me.