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jasonhong

1,257 karma · joined May 17, 2017

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jasonhong··on Show HN: Made an open-source Lego AI generator
You might also be interested in this research at CMU:

https://avalovelace1.github.io/BrickGPT/

We introduce BrickGPT, the first approach for generating physically stable toy brick models from text prompts. To achieve this, we construct a large-scale, physically stable dataset of brick designs, along with their associated captions, and train an autoregressive large language model to predict the next brick to add via next-token prediction. To improve the stability of the resulting designs, we employ an efficient validity check and physics-aware rollback during autoregressive inference, which prunes infeasible token predictions using physics laws and assembly constraints. Our experiments show that BrickGPT produces stable, diverse, and aesthetically pleasing brick designs that align closely with the input text prompts. We also develop a text-based brick texturing method to generate colored and textured designs. We show that our designs can be assembled manually by humans and automatically by robotic arms. We also release our new dataset, StableText2Brick, containing over 47,000 brick structures of over 28,000 unique 3D objects accompanied by detailed captions, along with our code and models.

jasonhong··on A brief history of the Bloomberg terminal
Strongly agree with you. Doug Engelbart (of mouse + groupware + hypertext fame) once said that if ease of use were the only design criteria, we would all ride tricycles instead of bicycles.

Not every user interface has to be or should be walk up and use. But there also needs to be a clear payoff to training.

jasonhong··on Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
CHI has evolved a lot over time, due to changes in how people use computers. CHI is a large umbrella conference with many subfields (Design, Privacy and Security, Accessibility, Healthcare, Education, Visualization, Games, novel hardware, novel interaction techniques, and more.

Note that CHI still has some technical papers. There are also other specialized adjacent conferences that focus more on technical aspects of HCI, like UIST and IMWUT.

jasonhong··on Four CHI '26 papers I wish I wrote
The scope of HCI has changed because how people use computers has also changed dramatically since the 1980s, when the CHI conference started.

The disciplines that fall under the HCI umbrella has also changed dramatically. In the 1980s, it was cognitive psychologists and computer scientists. Social psychology came in, then design, then ethnography, developing countries, social justice, public policy, and many many more. Having been in the field for almost 30 years, I think that this breadth is part of HCI's strength, though also it's weakness.

Aside: I saw Tom Mitchell (of Machine Learning fame) give a talk about how the field evolved over the past 40 years. What I found fascinating is that, for the most part, there was a single question that drove the field: how to make computers learn from experience (or data)? However, there isn't a single such question for HCI. Again, it's part of its strength and its weakness.

jasonhong··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
There was a recent link on HN about Tao explaining Six Essential Mathematical Concepts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49503521

Here's an excerpt of the video where he explains his idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svl_1upFpQo

My summary: Science is like a hike. You have a general sense of what direction you want to go. You explore things along the way. You might make wrong turns but might also discover something new and interesting. While on your journey, you might spot new mountains or waterfalls or other vistas that look like they might be good to explore.

In contrast, AI is like taking a helicopter to your destination. Yes you got there quickly, but you missed a lot on the way.

Related, Tao later talks about the pipeline. It used to be that seminal proofs were rare, so there was lots of time for the community to review them, process them, share them, and summarize them in textbooks. Nowadays, AI helps a lot with generating more proofs, but not so much with the other parts of the pipeline.

Tao also explains the math pipeline issue in his talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians, also shared on HN last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056620

My overall take: Tao is very thoughtful and insightful about progress in AI and math, and about what the tradeoffs are. We're seeing similar problems in computer science (my field), where conferences are now getting over 10x the number of submitted papers over just a few years ago (not an exaggeration). It's straining the research community in ability to review, understand, and present the papers.

jasonhong··on Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study
I saw Jim Clark (of SGI and Netscape fame) talk one time about his new healthcare startup (Healtheon). He said something insightful that captures a lot of why it's hard to get things done in general: one person's inefficiency is someone else's bottom line.
jasonhong··on Dear people who work at the airport
Replace "passengers" with "users" and replace "airport workers" with "product team members", and you have a good argument for why good usability and good service design really matter in the world.
jasonhong··on Metal-Organic Frameworks, Chemistry's New Miracle Materials (2018)
I heard an interview with him this morning, where he's already in China. Some of his stated reasons for the move (also listed in the articles below) include the slashed research funding in the USA, increasing restrictions on research and international collaborations, as well as wanting a stronger push for the AI revolution in science.

https://www.kompas.id/artikel/when-nobel-winner-in-chemistry... https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/why-nobel-laurea...

jasonhong··on Top researchers leave USA for the Netherlands (in Dutch)
Whether China is immigration friendly or not is debatable. However, here's a recent announcement from last week:

Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Omar M. Yaghi joins Tsinghua University full-time https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1244/14984.htm

jasonhong··on Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
It's worth pointing out that sometimes, some papers just become part of the general context of things and are no longer explicitly cited. Or people cite textbooks or general survey papers instead.

For example, take a look at Albert Einstein's Google Scholar profile. He's not the top cited physicist. Not even close. It's because other researchers don't explicitly cite his papers. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=qc6CJjYAAAAJ&hl=en...

Same with Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web. Imagine if his original paper were cited every time someone deployed a web site.

jasonhong··on A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline
Speaking as someone who has graduated over a dozen PhD students in computer science...

Yes, it is possible to complete a PhD in 3-4 years, but it's not really good for your career. The bar our department sets for a PhD is that at the end of it, you should be a world expert in your specific topic.

A PhD is more like an apprenticeship, where you develop and refine your skills, your background knowledge in your area of specialization, your ability to write and do presentations, and your taste in research problems. These are all things take a lot of time to mature.

The problem with graduating fast is that (a) you wouldn't be able to do internships, (b) you would severely limit your ability to grow your social network (via workshops, conferences, internships, department service, etc), (c) you would limit your ability to deepen and broaden your portfolio of research, and (d) you limit the time your ideas have to percolate out into the rest of the research community and industry.

While I can't speak directly about your friend's experiences, learning how to do peer review and learning how to write first drafts are really important skills that can indirectly help with coming up and executing on a dissertation idea.

jasonhong··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)
We're working on AI user testing, to make it dramatically faster and cheaper for product managers and dev teams to find major usability issues with web sites. Give us a web site and a task users would do (e.g. "Add a pink shirt to the shopping cart"), and we have some AI users try their best to do the task. The output is a report with a prioritized list of problems identified, plus narrated videos that show each AI user trying the site.

If you want to try it out, we offer some free credits at https://fuguux.com

Any feedback you have would be incredibly helpful! We're considering more kinds of reporting, support for QA testing, better integration with CI/CD, and more.

Note: we don't want to replace real user testing, but rather complement it. With AI user testing, you can get quick feedback on potential usability problems in hours for a fraction of the cost, making it so you can iterate much faster. We advocate doing user tests with real people to understand problems that require domain knowledge or nuance.

jasonhong··on Connecticut and the 1 Kilometer Effect
Two concepts that help explain the original article are Diffusion of Innovations and Social Proof.

Diffusion of Innovations is a widely cited theory explaining why people do or don't adopt any kind of innovation, from boiling water to eating limes on British ships to installing telephones. The concept of innovators, early adopters, and late adopters comes from this theory. More relevant to this post is that this theory posits five factors contributing to adoption, one of which is Observability: you can easily see other people gaining benefit from an innovation. The more Observable an innovation, the more likely it is to be adopted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations

The other is Social Proof. Seeing what other people are doing, especially those that are similar to you in some way, can help steer your behavior, often in subtle and unconscious ways. There are studies about how simple signs like "people who stayed in this hotel room re-used their towels" or "most of your neighbors are reducing their electricity usage too" can shift people's behaviors, even without people explicitly realizing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_proof

My colleagues and I used these concepts in several pieces of research on what we called Social Cybersecurity (joking that the term "Social Security" was already taken). The insight we had was that cybersecurity has very low observability, making it hard for innovations to diffuse through one's social network. That is, I don't know what your cybersecurity practices are, and vice versa, making it hard for best practices to be adopted.

One intervention we did was a large-scale intervention on Facebook to improve observability, showing that simple messages like "108 of your friends use extra security settings" did increase clickthru and adoption rates of those settings. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2660267.2660271

We also have many other studies along similar lines, e.g. many triggers for talking about and adopting security are social in nature (https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/soups2014/sou...), that security settings that are more social in nature are more likely to be adopted (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2675133.2675225), and more.

jasonhong··on The American Healthcare Conundrum
I saw Jim Clark (founder of SGI, Netscape, Healtheon) talk one time about entrepreneurship. He said something that compactly explains a lot of issues humanity faces in general: "One person's inefficiency is someone else's bottom line."

A lot of the things that the original post shares has this characteristic. Sure, things in US healthcare are wildly inefficient, but that's how a lot of these companies make a lot of money. And they will lobby and fight to the death that cash flow.

jasonhong··on Design Thinking Books (2024)
I've used The Design of Everyday Things in many classes I teach. I would agree that it's not practical, but that's not its goal. Instead, it gives you frameworks for thinking about things as well as vocabulary for talking about those things.

Off the top of my head, some of the key ideas include:

* Affordances, that objects should have (often visual) cues that give hints as to how to use things * Mental models, that every design has three different models, namely system implementation, design model, and user model, and that the design model and user model should try to match each other * Gulf of Evaluation (the gap between the current system state and people's understanding of it) and Gulf of Execution (the gap between what people want the system to do and how to use the system to do it) * Kinds of Errors and how to design to prevent and recover from them, e.g. slips (chose the right action but accidentally did the wrong thing, e.g. fat finger) vs mistakes (chose the wrong action to do)

What's particularly useful about Norman's book is that these key ideas apply for all kinds of user interfaces, from command-line to GUI to voice-only to AR/VR to AI chatbot. I'd encourage you to think about this book in this kind of framing, that it gives you general frameworks for reasoning and talking about UX problems rather than specific practical solutions.

jasonhong··on SETI@home is in hiberation
Wanted to share this funny SETI@home prank that Monzy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Maynes-Aminzade) did in 1999, where he created a fake VB app that tricked a coworker into believing that his computer successfully found an extraterrestrial signal.

The original site is down, but jump to November 5, 1999 to see the screenshot. https://web.archive.org/web/20030404093458/http://www.monzy....

jasonhong··on Is pawn promotion to rook or bishop something that is seen in play? (2012)
Lichess has a series of puzzles you can try where underpromotion is the theme (which is unfortunately a major giveaway to solving these puzzles, since they otherwise be rather hard to solve)

https://lichess.org/training/underPromotion

jasonhong··on The death of industrial design and the era of dull electronics
The general term for what you're describing here is a Dominant Design, and it has a lot of the characteristics of what you intuited. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_design
jasonhong··on Demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high
In May earlier this year, the New York Times had a similar article about AI not replacing radiologists: https://archive.is/cw1Zt

It has similar insights, and good comments from doctors and from Hinton:

“It can augment, assist and quantify, but I am not in a place where I give up interpretive conclusions to the technology.”

“Five years from now, it will be malpractice not to use A.I.,” he said. “But it will be humans and A.I. working together.”

Dr. Hinton agrees. In retrospect, he believes he spoke too broadly in 2016, he said in an email. He didn’t make clear that he was speaking purely about image analysis, and was wrong on timing but not the direction, he added.

jasonhong··on An embarrassing failure of the US patent system: Nintendo's latest patents
It costs a non-trivial amount of money to file a patent in the USA
jasonhong··on Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation
The last person in usually gets the best deal, in that they can get preference and push everyone else (previous investors, founders, and employees) down. If things goes south, they get their money out before anyone else.
jasonhong··on NIH limits scientists to six applications per year
Having been on the program committee for some of these conferences, this issue of limiting number of submissions was being discussed long before GenAI. Specifically, there was talk of a few highly prolific security researchers that submitted 15-20 papers to these conferences each cycle, with pretty good quality too.
jasonhong··on Quantum Computation Lecture Notes (2022)
I'd also add (4) be incredibly curious about lots of things; (5) surround yourself with other smart, curious, and committed people who have a culture of critiquing ideas; and (6) devote a lot of time to deep thinking.
jasonhong··on US pauses new student visa interviews as it mulls expanding social media vetting
I'd say it's worse than that. This new policy of vetting will be extremely high cost in terms of time, money, and lost opportunities for students and universities, while also be rather useless in practice. Seriously, what student applicant won't clean up their social media profile? What threats will actually be caught by this approach?

This whole policy is dumber than conventional security theater.

But then again, that's the point of this policy. It has the thinnest veneer of being for a legitimate purpose while hurting those that this administration wants to hurt.

jasonhong··on US pauses new student visa interviews as it mulls expanding social media vetting
What is the basis for your assertion? Pretty much every list of top universities in the world routinely lists a large number of US universities.

For example, in the Shanghai ranking, 16 of the top 20 universities are in the USA. https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2024

In US News and World reports of top universities, 14 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the USA. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/ra...

In The Times Higher Education ranking, 13 of the top 20 universities in the world are in the USA. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

To be blunt, your assertion has extremely weak evidence. I urge you to look at facts and evidence and not your feels.

jasonhong··on Richard Garwin’s role in designing the hydrogen bomb was obscured
Incidentally, IEEE Spectrum published a fascinating interview with Dr. Garwin just a few months ago. https://spectrum.ieee.org/richard-garwin

> At IBM, where he worked from 1952 to 1993, Garwin was a key contributor or a facilitator on some of the most important products and breakthroughs of his era, including magnetic resonance imaging, touchscreen monitors, laser printers, and the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm. > > And all that was after he did the thing for which he is most famous. At age 23 and at the behest of Edward Teller, Garwin designed the very first working hydrogen bomb...

jasonhong··on Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities
My colleagues who studied this issue told me that there were several patents on bus tracking, making it cost prohibitive for many cities.

It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowded those buses were. https://tiramisutransit.com/

jasonhong··on The Academic Pipeline Stall: Why Industry Must Stand for Academia
This post is a great example of whataboutism and distracting people from the big picture: science funding works and has led to a large number of innovations that many of us here on HN use every day.

The original article talks about several of these, including RISC, out-of-order execution, speculative prefetching, vector processing, GPGPU, and multicore.

It's easy to cherry pick and find things that you might personally disagree with. That's true with any system created by us humans. That doesn't mean that you should burn the whole thing down, which is what this administration is doing.

I feel like I've been making the same post over and over on threads like these. NSF-funded research has led to innovations like the above, as well as multibillion dollar companies like Google, Databricks, Duolingo, and more (and that's just in computer science). NSF-funded research has had an incredible Return on Investment in terms of jobs, economic growth, and national security. It took generations to build the American scientific enterprise, and the system has worked incredibly well as is. It's incredibly short-sighted and a massive self-own to destroy something that has advanced the USA and the world so much.

jasonhong··on NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions
Having served on several NSF review panels, NSF (and academia in general) manages conflicts of interest rather seriously. You cannot review proposals if you have collaborated with any of the investigators of a proposal within the past few years (the time is well defined but I don't recall what it is off the top of my head).

Also, NSF program officers can have conflicts as well, for example if you are on leave from a university then you can't be heading a review panel that has any grants related to that university.

At my university, we also have to do periodic online training about conflicts of interest, and have to fill out financial forms disclosing whether we have a financial stake in the work (e.g. if we own a startup and are trying to direct research funds to that startup).

Basically, I've always felt that we held ourselves to a higher standard than Congress held itself too (e.g. being on a Congressional oversight committee and owning stock in affected companies, but that's a different rant).

jasonhong··on Why can't Ivies cope with losing a few hundred million?
This was recently discussed on Hacker News about two weeks ago.

See this blog post by Steve Blank talking about the rise of research universities and why the USA is a science powerhouse. https://steveblank.com/2025/04/15/how-the-u-s-became-a-scien...

And the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692360

Also, pragmatically, it's a system that has yielded incredible ROI since WW2, in terms of new industries, new companies, jobs, science, economic gains, productivity gains, and national security. The US university system is the envy of the entire world, and it's being targeted for dismantling by very petty, cruel, and incompetent people.

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