Hacker News: troymc

New comment by troymc in "Show HN: Lathe – Use LLMs to learn a new domain, not skip past it"

troymc — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:53:36 +0000

In my opinion, the coolest thing in NotebookLM is the podcast-episode-generator. Each one sounds like two people having a conversation. It's fun to listen to a podcast episode about some niche topic (e.g. nuclear isomers, or the Weyl curvature tensor) while I'm cooking or driving.

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:17:53 +0000

Fuchsia ended up in some Google products, such as Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, and Google's smart speakers, thermostats and displays.

But Fuchsia won't be in the Googlebook because there's no Chrome browser for Fuchsia. (In early 2024, Google officially stopped trying to port the full, desktop version of Chrome to Fuchsia.)

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:14:06 +0000

On second thought, I think it's not for K12 after all.

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:13:22 +0000

Yes, you are probably right.

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:12:52 +0000

Now that I look closer at the Googlebook, I think you are right.

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:10:20 +0000

I think it's a successor to the Chromebook. In the vast majority of modern K-12 public schools, the school district owns the hardware, not the students.

New comment by troymc in "Googlebook"

troymc — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:03:29 +0000

I guess it will be running Google's new operating system (a "modern OS designed for Intelligence") that combines elements of Android and ChromeOS.

Edit: Probably Android at the core, and then a desktop-grade Chrome browser on top.

New comment by troymc in "Google Flow Music"

troymc — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 01:35:05 +0000

Aw, c'mon man, they're just doin their job, ya know? Chill out.

New comment by troymc in "Ask HN: Easiest UX for Seniors"

troymc — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:48:34 +0000

I can relate because my dad is 84 and he really struggles with simple things like entering a password to sign in to Gmail. He forgets what he did last time and so I'm back to explaining how moving his mouse causes the pointy-arrow thing move around on the screen, to get it pointed at the wide rectangle near the middle of the screen, etc. No UI library is going to solve his struggles.

I solved most of the sign-in problem for my dad by picking a simpler browser than Google Chrome, and by tweaking his browser settings to be just-so. That's not going to be much help for you, the website creator...

Maybe allow passkeys for login? These days, passkeys usually get stored/supplied by the underlying OS. (By usually, I mean that's the statistically most common source of the passkey today. They can also come from a browser plugin or a hardware key.)

New comment by troymc in "[dead]"

troymc — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 21:23:04 +0000

Even the article in Science is based, mostly, on an article by Branch et al. published in the journal Earth System Dynamics:

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-15-109-2024

New comment by troymc in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

troymc — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:01:36 +0000

Maybe bring a (printed) book, brochure, flyer, or treatise on the nocturnal behaviours of silkworms?

New comment by troymc in "OpenCode – Open source AI coding agent"

troymc — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 03:04:54 +0000

"OpenCode Go" (a subscription) lets you use lots of hosted open-weights frontier AI models, such as GLM-5 (currently right up there in the frontier model leaderboards) for $10 per month.

New comment by troymc in "FCC Chair Threatens to Revoke Broadcasters' Licenses over War Coverage"

troymc — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 03:22:52 +0000

And no doubt on next week's episode of everyone's favorite podcast-within-a-podcast...

New comment by troymc in "Has vibecoding produced anything of substance, or investibility yet?"

troymc — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 21:02:37 +0000

I've used it to create little one-off tools that I needed for some specific tasks, without any care whether it's "of substance" or "investable." In the past, I might have Googled around to see if there was an existing app or open-source package to do the job. Quite often, the AI agent will use some existing software packages, but I didn't have to find them and figure out how to use them.

A real example from today: I got tired of the Looney Tunes way-too-colourful screensaver options on my Mac mini, so I asked Claude how to get a screensaver that is a nearly-black uniform monochrome grey. Surprisingly, that's not actually an option in macOS System Settings. So Claude just wrote a little Python script to generate the images I need for my two displays, saving them to the right place on my Mac mini. It used the Pillow package, but I didn't have to spin up a whole Python project and install Pillow; it just used PEP 723 inline script metadata to tell uv to use Python >=3.12 and to install Pillow. Then Claude gave me the uv one-liner to run the script (uv run ~/make_screensaver.py) and instructions for how to tell my Mac mini to use the generated files. The whole process took about 15 minutes from when I started writing the first prompt to the time I had my new screensaver working.

New comment by troymc in "The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan"

troymc — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 18:56:18 +0000

The plaid trim on the official uniform definitely gives it a Scottish aesthetic.

New comment by troymc in "I'm losing the SEO battle for my own open source project"

troymc — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:23:44 +0000

For me in Canada today, Kagi is showing nanoclaw.wrongtld as the third text link, after two different GitHub repos (why two? I didn't have time to sort that out). I clicked the thing to block the link to the site with the wrong TLD; hopefully other Kagi subscribers will do the same.

New comment by troymc in "A 26-Gram Butterfly-Inspired Robot Achieving Autonomous Tailless Flight"

troymc — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:41:22 +0000

Wow, very cool video... and from 2015!

New comment by troymc in "Making Wolfram tech available as a foundation tool for LLM systems"

troymc — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 03:42:47 +0000

You wouldn't use an LLM to solve a big Linear Programming problem, because it would cost way more than using the Simplex Method, and you'd be worried that it might be wrong.

New comment by troymc in "Show HN: OpenClaw alternative written in Golang and talk with you in voice"

troymc — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 03:11:06 +0000

Is it named Coolwulf? The home page doesn't say its name anywhere.

New comment by troymc in "The Internet Is Becoming a Dark Forest – and AI Is the Hunter"

troymc — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 02:31:26 +0000

Apparently the formal specification of OpenNHP was submitted as an IETF Internet-Draft in January:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-opennhp-saag-nhp/