HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

cckolon

195 karma · joined January 31, 2024

carlkolon.com
submissionscomments
cckolon··on Triple-A Minesweeper
There might be a mine here
cckolon··on Show HN: Ledge.sh – Runnable Markdown Notes
Reminds me of Atuin runbooks!

https://blog.atuin.sh/atuin-desktop-runbooks-that-run/

cckolon··on Too AI; Didn't Read
Ironic that this itself is an obvious slop site
cckolon··on Carl's Required Reading
Thank you :)
cckolon··on Carl's Required Reading
I love these! “Not Quite the Same” sounds a lot like “The Wrong Abstraction” from my list. It’s a really important point and I’m glad to see there are more articles about it!
cckolon··on Carl's Required Reading
Thanks for the callout! I have much more experience with geography but you’re totally right. I’ll add a note
cckolon··on What Is a Nomogram and Why Would It Interest Me?
The US Navy still uses nomograms for chemistry control on nuclear reactors!
cckolon··on Show HN: TikZ Editor – WYSIWYG editor for figures in LaTeX
This is so cool. I would have loved this in college.
cckolon··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I’m implementing the Lox programming language (from Crafting Interpreters [0]) in Rust.

https://github.com/cckolon/rlox

[0] https://craftinginterpreters.com/

cckolon··on Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo
Exploration-exploitation tradeoff strikes again
cckolon··on Flightradar24 for Ships
How does this differ from something like MarineTraffic?
cckolon··on 72M Points of Interest
Your computer is a sweet machine
cckolon··on Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net – Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual
Nice, that’s really cool.
cckolon··on Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net – Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual
I use full length vectors (512 dimensions) and have seen very fast lookups with pgvector (HNSW index) and sqlite-vec on 20k vectors. I think any decent vector database should be able to handle 44k entries… which one are you using now?
cckolon··on Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net – Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual
This is really cool. How is reranking built in? Is there a model that runs inside the database? If so, how did you choose it?
cckolon··on Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net – Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual
Thanks! Yeah embedding is simple enough and my needs were small enough that I didn’t want to pay. Both llama-server and ollama are great options, and if container size isn’t an issue you get a greater variety running what you want with sentence transformers.

Cool site :)

cckolon··on Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net – Joint Fleet Maintenance Manual
This is a really cool idea. By “different models” do you mean models fine tuned on different sources? How would you decide how to classify chunks?
cckolon··on AI at work is anti-labor by design
Aren’t most inventions anti-labor by this rationale? We employ fewer farmers than we used to, but this is good for society because people who would be farmers are now working on other things.
cckolon··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://carlkolon.com

My submarine combat game was on the front page a while ago!

https://bearingsonly.net

cckolon··on What I learned gathering nootropic ratings (2022)
> 5 - 9 means strong effects, definitely not placebo.

It’s impossible for anyone to say this convincingly about their own experience. If it were easy to tell whether an effect was due to placebo, we wouldn’t need blinded trials!

cckolon··on Aesop in Words of One Syllable
Reminds me of Randall Monroe’s obsession with Simple English

https://xkcd.com/547/

cckolon··on P-Hacking in Startups
Example 01 is basically the “green jellybeans cause acne” problem

https://xkcd.com/882/

cckolon··on Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions
My wife is a doctor. When I showed her this paper she said “that’s true for humans as well”.
cckolon··on A manager is not your best friend
I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]

> [Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.

[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1980/september/le...

cckolon··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025)
https://ewatchbill.com - a fair schedule generator that uses simulated annealing to minimize a ‘unfairness’ heuristic. I wrote it for my friends in the Navy who have to write duty bills every month.

https://bearingsonly.net - a submarine combat game in the browser.

cckolon··on Accountability Sinks
Reminds me of a Rickover quote:

"If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible."

cckolon··on Show HN: Chonky – a neural approach for text semantic chunking
This would be useful when chunking PDFs scanned with OCR. I've done that before and paragraph breaks were detected pretty inconsistently.
cckolon··on Show HN: A submarine combat game in the browser
Hey all, the page crashed but it's back up now, sorry for the downtime!
cckolon··on Show HN: A submarine combat game in the browser
Maybe you don't want to give yourself away!
cckolon··on Show HN: A submarine combat game in the browser
I didn't make a solo game mode, but you can play against yourself by opening the link in a new tab if that's helpful
Page 1 of 2Next →