HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

CollinEMac

223 karma · joined September 30, 2019

submissionscomments
CollinEMac··on A week of using Codex more than Claude
Fewer comments is generally a bad thing.

Fewer AI-generated comments is generally a good thing.

CollinEMac··on YC startups are abandoning .com
I thought .dev and .app would be more popular actually. The rapid increase in .ai makes sense though.
CollinEMac··on When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation
The seahorse emoji thing appears to be fixed actually. (Sonnet 5)
CollinEMac··on It's getting harder to focus every day
Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.

And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.

CollinEMac··on Em dashes are amazing
At some point in middle/high school I realized that teachers were very impressed by em dashes and semicolons; I started using both constantly.
CollinEMac··on I Think You Might Be Fooling Yourself with AI
It's pre-Fable 5 but they did site a real study.
CollinEMac··on The Unity CLI: manage Unity from your terminal
I don't think Godot's cli is exactly the same thing as this. Godot's cli allows you to start Godot, do some command, and exit. This allows you to do operations on a running instance of Unity and get structured text output back. It's explicitly made with LLMs in mind.

They're both cli's and Godot was there first, but this isn't really an apples to apples comparison.

CollinEMac··on The Unsung Hero of the Lord of the Rings
This article claims that Tom Bombadil is under-appreciated and then promptly gives no reasons to appreciate him more. We just get a brief description of who he is and what he does in Lord of the Rings.
CollinEMac··on Coding after coders: The end of computer programming as we know it?
>but like most of their peers now, they only rarely write code.

Citation needed. Are most developers "rarely" writing code?

CollinEMac··on Does that use a lot of energy?
You can select gas heating vs electric heat pump. The heat pump looks to be about a third the cost of gas.
CollinEMac··on Weave – A language aware merge algorithm based on entities
>I feel git is done for good

I'm either not understanding your comment or not understanding the project. Isn't this built on top of git?

CollinEMac··on Show HN: Jemini – Gemini for the Epstein Files
I'm curious what your operational costs are and how we can help. I don't see a donation link anywhere.
CollinEMac··on Discord Alternatives, Ranked
Best for: anything but real-time chat, really.

Maybe the best way to think of Discourse is as an anti-Discord. It's everything Discord isn't: asynchronous, open source, and self-hostable.

Then why is it the highest rated "Discord alternative"?

CollinEMac··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.

Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).

The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.

Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.

CollinEMac··on “Are you the one?” is free money
> This post is my first foray into content like this. I wanted to scratch the itch of an interesting maths problem, with a light-hearted spin that I hope you enjoyed as much as I did making it.

Really impressive imo. I don't remember the last time I was this engaged reading an article on HN.

CollinEMac··on The Math of Why You Can't Focus at Work
This is my first time ever even seeing these words. Any recommendations on how to get started?
CollinEMac··on US Passport Power Falls to Historic Low
Puerto Rico, for example, counts as a destination but Puerto Ricans have US passports.
CollinEMac··on Beliefs that are true for regular software but false when applied to AI
> It’s entirely possible that some dangerous capability is hidden in ChatGPT, but nobody’s figured out the right prompt just yet.

This sounds a little dramatic. The capabilities of ChatGPT are known. It generates text and images. The qualities of the content of the generated text and images is not fully known.

CollinEMac··on Suno Studio, a Generative AI DAW
> I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.

We're already here with human created content.

CollinEMac··on Neovim Pack
I'm a Neovim user but I have to agree with the recommendation. If you've wanted to check out vim/emacs but were nervous Helix is a good place to start.

I do wish there was at least the option to use vim keybindings in Helix though. The Helix keybindings are mostly the same but just different enough to be annoying if you're already used to vim.

Edit: typo

CollinEMac··on Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome
No one is writing 10,000 lines of code every day nor should they be.
CollinEMac··on Nova: A New Web Framework for Erlang
This seems like a tough sell when Phoenix is already so good. I'm struggling to see why I'd use this over that.
CollinEMac··on The vibe coder's career path is doomed
This sounds like an absolute nightmare
CollinEMac··on HDMI 2.2 will support 16K video at 60Hz
I've never actually looked into this so maybe this is a dumb question but how hard would it be to make a symmetrical HDMI cable with no "up" or "down"? USB-C was rightfully lauded for this but I personally have a much more frustrating history reaching around the back of tvs with an upside down HDMI cable.
CollinEMac··on Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
I haven't really used much other than Claude.

I guess I should also note that I haven't really used LiveView much.

CollinEMac··on Phoenix.new – Remote AI Runtime for Phoenix
I'm a little surprised by the sentiment here that LLMs don't do well with Elixir. I've had a pretty good experience using AI tools on Phoenix/Elixir side projects.
CollinEMac··on I failed a take-home assignment from Kagi Search
Man this sounds rough. I had a somewhat similar experience a while back but instead of going back and forth trying to nail down requirements, I went down this spiral of wondering if the lack of clarity wwas part of some kind of meta-test.

"Do they want to see if I can build something with as little guidance as possible?"

"Do they want me to push for more requirements like I would on a real project?"

"If I build something cool but totally off from what they expected will that make me look better or worse?"

"Or are they just trying to weed out the people that can't code at all?"

In the end I didn't get a follow-up interview and they refused to give me any feedback on how I could have done better on the take-home assessment.

Back to the OP: One such example would be to do a live code review. This could be done asynchronously or synchronously. It could allow actually talking through topics and issues that relate to the challenges in a real software project. This would allow to surface much more of the knowledge in an experienced software engineer.

I like this idea a lot.

CollinEMac··on Reflecting on a Year of Gamedev in Zig
2. Zig has good builtin support for vectors, but not for matrices.

Oh boy do I have the language for you.

https://odin-lang.org/docs/overview/#matrix-type

CollinEMac··on 108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
I agree that Tim definitely comes off as a bit of a jerk. However...

> First, if his art is so great, then why is it not displayed all over the place? He has a few alleged experts giving praise without criticism, and in the end, it is on the wall in his bedroom. Surely, if the art were that easy to recreate, galleries would be demanding his piece?

I could be wrong but I don't think there's much demand for replicas of classic paintings even if they are incredibly high quality. A lot of the value of a Vermeer painting is that it was actually painted by Vermeer in the 17th century -- not necessarily the quality of the piece itself.

Regarding your second point, who knows?

CollinEMac··on I just want to code (2023)
As I get older I find myself embracing the angel more and more. I've met a lot of programmers that got what the devil was offering by only listening to the angel.
Page 1 of 4Next →