HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

billylo

263 karma · joined October 17, 2014

maker at evergreen-labs.org
submissionscomments
billylo··on Tell HN: Firebase service causing iOS crashes across many apps
I am seeing crashes too.
billylo··on Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?
Thank you, mathematicians: for thinking deeply about this and sharing your thoughts!
billylo··on Show HN: FrontierHarness Eval – 9 harness, same model, cost per pass varies 17x
I am looking forward to your findings on home-field advantage. It's natural that Claude Code will work better with Anthropic models. If we know by how much, it will inform many of us.
billylo··on Ask HN: AI writes better code than me. How to keep my identity?
The shift of a craftsman from making products by hand to designing machines that make products is a transition from manual maker to system architect. It happened before.
billylo··on Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?
Different kinds of logic puzzles. They are also good stimulus to our brain and valuable skills.
billylo··on Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?
I use this primarily to exercise my brain. https://cs336.stanford.edu/
billylo··on Coding Agents killed my identity. How do you feel?
I switched gear to learn how to train AI, design evals and explore neuroscience so we can further apply how our brains better in the new world. I enjoy coding, but it's time to adapt.

I came to this realization after I used Cursor to rewrite a 10-year old codebase (I knew every bit of the details.) and it was done in 2 days. Better, fewer technical debt and I was happy to archive the old repo.

billylo··on NeoBrowser: An MCP server that drives real Chrome with your logged-in sessions
This pattern of using original source code and rewrite to improve them (and get rid of technical debt) is very real. I did one for an old app in Objective C, move it to Flutter and said goodbye to my old //TODOs. And get an Android build as a bonus. :-)
billylo··on Ask HN: What browser do you use?
I made my own to prioritize these 4 things:

1. Fact-checking built-in 2. Declutter the page 3. Lightweight 4. Ability to listen to the saved articles when I want to

https://hopper.evergreen-labs.org

billylo··on Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
There are very few apps on app stores that don't need network these days. Feel free to check out the details on the settings page on the app.
billylo··on Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
This is unusual. It does have libraries from MLKit for selfie segmentation. So, maybe missing access to Play Services.
billylo··on Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo
Somewhat related... I made an indie app called TwinCam which combines front-and-back camera images to create a combined selfie. Free. No strings attached. Cheers!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/twincam/id6448645623 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.evergreenl...

billylo··on Ask HN: How to enforce engineers to understand the code they are shipping
Add them to the on-call schedule.
billylo··on OpenAI Privacy Filter
I ran a comparison using this OPF with what I have in clarity.evergreen-labs.org (it's a Tauri app with local PII redaction.)

A few things jump out:

1) Dates are aggressively redacted, creating false positives. 2) Non-English names are not working yet.

billylo··on Show HN: Waffle – Native macOS terminal that auto-tiles sessions into a grid
love this. thanks for sharing!
billylo··on Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
Thank you. The learning aspect of reading how AI tackles something is rewarding.

It also reduces my hesitation to get started with something I don't know the answer well enough yet. Time 'wasted' on vibe-coding felt less painful than time 'wasted' on heads-down manual coding down a rabbit hole.

billylo··on Ask HN: M5 MacBook Pro buyers, worth spending the $$$ to maybe run LLMs local?
I upgraded from M3 Air to M5 Pro 14". Not for LLM, but for faster build times. The disk access time is much faster on M5 Pro. My build time (iOS/Android) was reduced by more than 50%. So, that alone is worth the upgrade.
billylo··on Overview of AppFunctions – agentic interfaces for apps
This will foster multi-app collaboration.

Google devs: Please consider doing this on Firebase to make it work on iOS and web too.

billylo··on [dead]
Great idea. Addresses a real need. Best of luck with your launch!
billylo··on Show HN: I built Chronoscope, because Google Maps won't let you visit 3400 BCE
Thank you! This is brilliant. I have it bookmarked.
billylo··on Block the “Upgrade to Tahoe” alerts
Thank you for your service.
billylo··on The happiest I've ever been
I use my spare time helping kids at a FIRST robotics team. It's fun.
billylo··on Mobile-MCP: Letting LLMs autonomously discover Android app capabilities
The technical strategy is sound. However, I anticipate major mobile apps will add MCP capabilities to their app very soon too, making less use of intents going forward.

Hope this helps.

billylo··on The Future of Software Engineering Isn't What You Think
Thanks for a great write-up!

Production-quality software can now be made in weeks (instead of months and quarters.) I anticipate an exciting period of fast innovation in all industries, supported by lots of good product-engineers with different levels of experience. The areas I am the most excited about is healthcare (as we live longer) and sustainability. It will be fun to be a part of.

billylo··on AI Is a Lethal Threat This Year
It's real struggle. Nations will not likely put the brakes on because of its need for self defence. I ponder your question too.
billylo··on My smart sleep mask broadcasts users' brainwaves to an open MQTT broker
Inception
billylo··on Show HN: Terminalcore – The Rhythm Game for PC
This is fun. Thank you!
billylo··on Tell HN: AI is not a slippery slope, it's a waterslide
Time it takes to go from 100m users to 5 billions: Internet (25 years), Smartphone (13), AI? (tracking to achieve that in ~6 years!)

https://evergreen-labs.org/assets/Acceleration.jpg

billylo··on Tell HN: AI is not a slippery slope, it's a waterslide
We learned computer languages so we can ask computers to do work for us. It was out of necessity because there are no other ways.

If we can instruct computers with natural language 50% of the time, that's 50% less translation work for our human brains. I have no problem with not needing to write instructions in computer languages (no regex, no sed/awk, no python even) for day-to-day stuff.

Critical thinking, reasoning are another story. We can't let those skills atropied.

billylo··on AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it
We should ask how the traders manage this. It's essentially 24/7 markets in the world. For them, the FOMO effects are even stronger... actual money earning opportunity.
Page 1 of 6Next →