Hacker News Reader

jacobedawsonon Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

JavaScript: Good Enough for Terry Tao

jacobedawsonon Working With AI: A concrete example

I feel as though that world model strongly correlates with memory - the experience of having jumped to a conclusion early and full-steaming ahead, only to be bitten by constraints and problems later down the track.

Part of that is critical thinking and projecting forward / simulating potential issues, and part of that is that memory which in humans we probably would see as "wisdom".

I don't know if that's a fundamental limitation of LLMs, or, rather, that this can be solved moving forward with better memory systems, harnesses, and context windows.

jacobedawsonon No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

At no point are the words emotion, moral or conscious used in the article, that last part is purely your own addition.

Also consider: if "AI can do all cognitive and physical work, at human level or better", doesn't that simply entail the AI being able to run 'autonomously, indefinitely' and 'independently of instructions' in the same way as the current state of being run by human overseers?

If we take the initial premise as plausible, for the sake of this argument his thesis seems to hold together very well.

jacobedawsonon Two Ways to Draw Infinite Jest's Sierpinski Gasket

Erdedy's vignette is one of my favourite passages! The Wardine section was the one that had me second guessing, but after two full read throughs I'll be approaching a third next year with the Sierpinksi Gasket in mind :)

jacobedawsonon SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

Best I can do is CurXr

jacobedawsonon Simple screw counter

Soon to be banned in the UK no doubt

jacobedawsonon The age of Pump and Dump software

FWIW the creator of Clawd (now Molt) is staunchly anti-crypto and has been from the start.

Accusing him of a pump & dump or being in on the scam is really unfair imo, he's been working very hard (and publicly) on Clawd, and has visibly had to deal with a massive influx of attention / hype and a wave of crypto grifters trying to force unofficial tokens down his throat. It must be hugely stressful.

The Ralph & Gastown devs embraced (but did not create) associated crypto projects (Yegge later distanced himself after criticism). They made their software, it gained in popularity and crypto bros latched on of their own accord. It would be interesting to see how many highly principled hners here would turn down mid six figures being offered to them for a tweet or a post acknowledging a token..

As an aside: meme tokens are an attention economy mmog - you may not like the game, but I can assure you those who play it know the rules.

jacobedawsonon The microstructure of wealth transfer in prediction markets

Of course the next step beyond that is "leaking" false information as a decoy by placing large bets on certain events. If that happens enough times it seems like it should wash away the value for agencies hoping to act on "privileged" information.

jacobedawsonon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://www.jacobedawson.com/

Just started blogging again, starting the cadence with a weekly '5 quick links for devs' post just to make sure I'm building the habit.

jacobedawsonon The optimal public transit price is near zero [pdf]

Thread discussing the paper here: https://x.com/captgouda24/status/2000826607934824847

jacobedawsonon GPT-5.2

This mirrors my experience, the non-technical people in my life either shrugged and said 'oh yeah that's cool' or started pointing out gnarly edge cases where it didn't work perfectly. Meanwhile as a techie my mind was (and still is) spinning with the shock and joy of using natural human language to converse with a super-humanly adept machine.

jacobedawsonon Australia's teen social media ban has unofficially begun

From 10 December 2025, anyone under 16 in Australia won’t be able to keep or make accounts on social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, X, Facebook and more. The rule doesn’t punish young people or their families, instead, social media companies have to stop under-16s from having accounts or risk serious fines (up to about $50 million).

jacobedawsonon The case against social media is stronger than you think

The strongest counterpoint to that is the intense chilling effect that zero anonymity would have on political dissent and discourse that doesn't match the status quo or party line. I feel that would be much more dangerous for our society than occasionally suffering the consequence of some radicalized edge cases.

jacobedawsonon GPTs and Feeling Left Behind

"But anything beyond writing a simple function always leads to useless junk."

If that's the article writer's experience then they are simply using it incorrectly. The author seems to suggest most of their usage involves pasting code or chatting via the text interface, likely with a non-sota model.

It would be surprising to find that someone using e.g. Claude Code cli with full access to a codebase and carefully considered prompts is always getting useless junk.

jacobedawsonon About AI

Without sidetracking with definitions, there's a strong case to make that developing AGI is a winner takes all event. You would have access to any number of tireless human level experts that you could put to work at improving the AGI system, likely leading to ASI in a short amount of time, with a lead of even a day growing exponentially.

Where that leaves the rest of us is uncertain, but in many worlds the idea of status or marketing won't be relevant.

jacobedawsonon Study mode

An underrated quality of LLMs as study partner is that you can ask "stupid" questions without fear of embarrassment. Adding in a mode that doesn't just dump an answer but works to take you through the material step-by-step is magical. A tireless, capable, well-versed assistant on call 24/7 is an autodidact's dream.

I'm puzzled (but not surprised) by the standard HN resistance & skepticism. Learning something online 5 years ago often involved trawling incorrect, outdated or hostile content and attempting to piece together mental models without the chance to receive immediate feedback on intuition or ask follow up questions. This is leaps and bounds ahead of that experience.

Should we trust the information at face value without verifying from other sources? Of course not, that's part of the learning process. Will some (most?) people rely on it lazily without using it effectively? Certainly, and this technology won't help or hinder them any more than a good old fashioned textbook.

Personally I'm over the moon to be living at a time where we have access to incredible tools like this, and I'm impressed with the speed at which they're improving.

jacobedawsonon Sperm are very different from all other cells

Come on lads! Don't give up, we're only just past the tonsils!

jacobedawsonon Gemini in Chrome

As a heavy LLM user, professionally and personally, I use "summarize this" a lot - I find that most content in the world is low signal-to-noise and a lot of the time the salient / useful information is hidden within unnecessary layers.

The only time I didn't think summaries are useful is with creative fiction or pure entertainment content.

jacobedawsonon I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days

I'd add to that that the best results are with clear spec sheets, which you can create using Claude (web) or another model like ChatGPT or Grok. Telling them what you want and what tech you're using helps them create a technical description with clear segments and objectives, and in my experience works wonders in getting Claude Code on the right track, where it has full access to the entire context of your code base.

jacobedawsonon GEN3C: 3D-Informed World-Consistent Video

We present GEN3C, a generative video model with precise Camera Control and temporal 3D Consistency. Prior video models already generate realistic videos, but they tend to leverage little 3D information, leading to inconsistencies, such as objects popping in and out of existence. Camera control, if implemented at all, is imprecise, because camera parameters are mere inputs to the neural network which must then infer how the video depends on the camera. In contrast, GEN3C is guided by a 3D cache: point clouds obtained by predicting the pixel-wise depth of seed images or previously generated frames. When generating the next frames, GEN3C is conditioned on the 2D renderings of the 3D cache with the new camera trajectory provided by the user. Crucially, this means that GEN3C neither has to remember what it previously generated nor does it have to infer the image structure from the camera pose. The model, instead, can focus all its generative power on previously unobserved regions, as well as advancing the scene state to the next frame. Our results demonstrate more precise camera control than prior work, as well as state-of-the-art results in sparse-view novel view synthesis, even in challenging settings such as driving scenes and monocular dynamic video. Results are best viewed in videos. Check out our webpage! https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/GEN3C/

jacobedawsonon The Efficiency of Vim

Just to confirm though - when you 'just click there', you're taking your hand off the keyboard, moving your arm and hand to the mouse, moving the mouse to the position you see, hopefully clicking exactly where you want to go on the first try, then returning your arm into position and hand on the keyboard, right?

Everyone should do what works for them, but with e.g. flash it takes 3 keypresses in most cases to go to any position I can see on the screen, without taking my hands off the keyboard. I was relatively late to Vim but I would never go back, even just for the improved physical ergonomics of not having to move my arm repetitively back and forth between mouse and keyboard.

It feels a little like people that swear that they can type perfectly well with 2 fingers - I have seen some very fast 2 finger typists, but in truth they're missing out on efficiency and comfort in the long run because they don't want to face the short-term pain of learning the better technique (and it is pain).

jacobedawsonon Machines of loving grace: How AI could transform the world for the better

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit.

A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth."

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

jacobedawsonon There Is No Antimemetics Division (2018)

The Mars Trilogy is a slog imo because of the way it's written (e.g. insufferable dialogue), whereas the concepts and scope were just enough to keep me going. I felt the same way about his Ministry For The Future - he has great ideas written with pulp fiction skills.

I wonder if having books like this rewritten by an llm in a different style could reinvigorate poorly written / high concept stories.

jacobedawsonon The Saucer – A DIY trackpad attachment for the Voyager

I own the Voyager and it's a great piece of kit, my only wish is that it was wireless, but the team has clear reasons why they've stuck with wired boards (https://www.zsa.io/wireless). A trackpad would be lovely. Very portable and comes with a great key editor to handle layers.

Also worth checking out the one-man Bastard Keyboards (diy and prebuilt), he does the Charybdis kits with trackballs, or the Dilemma Max split mech with a trackpad alongside ortholinear keys: https://bastardkb.com/product/dilemma-max-prebuilt-preorder/

jacobedawsonon We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO

It's more often a signal to really reflect on whether you, individually as a Thanksgiving turkey, have really found yourself at the make-or-break nexus of turkey existence. The answer seems to be "no" most of the time.

jacobedawsonon Sweden plans new nuclear reactors by 2035, will share costs

Genuine question - I wasn't aware of this (fatalities per mwh for wind & solar), what would be the best source to find out more?

jacobedawsonon Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React

Best practice in general is not to use either of those hooks unless you notice performance issues, or have a good reason to, React is optimized pretty well and unless there are serious numbers of rerenders happening they aren't noticeable.

Josh Comeau has a nice overview of useMemo and useCallback, one of my favourites: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/react/usememo-and-usecallback/#w...

jacobedawsonon Richard Rhodes wrote a classic book about Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb

This is an excellent book - beautifully written, easy to read, and covering so many epic events that an entire film or series could be made from what is essentially a footnote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_heavy_water_sabotage (Operation Gunnerside).

jacobedawsonon Kelly Rowland couldn't have used the =HYPERLINK() function to message Nelly

Alternatively, she's an entertainer on tv and she was being entertaining.

jacobedawsonon Whole-brain connectome of the fruit fly

Codex provides access to proofread static snapshots of the FlyWire full-brain connectome - wiring diagram of Drosophila brain.