karl_gluck

I feel for this guy, so much. I bounced around between dentists, and may have even encountered the guy on Wilshire. But despite night grinding, TMJ and stage 4-5 gum recession, I've found stability after a bunch of years and dentists that I told to go pound sand when they wanted to make substantial physical modifications to my teeth. One of the worst was in Santa Monica; his AI receptionist still calls me trying to book appointments so they can drill in my "overdue fillings". Garbage.

What worked for me: Spider silk floss - It's thicker and somehow smoother than the "waxed" PFOS crud. Does a great job of getting stuff out of the pockets between teeth. LIVFRESH toothpaste - Better than any other toothpaste despite having no abrasives. Expensive as hell but you do only need a tiny amount. Just get used to putting water on your toothbrush first, it somehow evaporates on contact. Therasol mouthwash - Does this weird thing that wraps up any leftover food bits in your mouth into a gel you can easily spit out. Lasts for hours. Absolutely nothing like listerine or any other mouthwash I've ever tried.

Also use a tongue scraper, ultrasonic night-guard cleaner (the $20 ones work just fine) and occasionally use a Proclaim water flosser. The former are amazingly valuable, the latter... is fine I guess. It's not a substitute for real flossing. Hope this helps someone.

Idk, it’s actually great. It makes me feel like I’m listening to stardew valley. As a coder it hits exactly the right mix of engaging, hopeful, surprising and duration. Hope y’all like it too!

Agreed. After an implementation session, I often use:

"did you notice any inconsistencies or opportunities to clarify/consolidate parameters or functionality while you were working?"

Another strategy that has worked well for my MCP server is noticing a sequence of failed tool-calls, then returning a response that contains a request for the agent to provide feedback via a skill.

I’d love to give NixOS a try on an old ThinkPad. I’m pretty comfortable with Claude; is it as simple as ask and go, or do you have any suggestions for getting started?

Strongly agreed. He played BlizzCon a few years back and it was my favorite part of the weekend.

Is this HN user runako’s comment[1] from 2 days ago turned into an article?

I guess it’s very possible multiple people are coming up with the same idea at the same time but given this was submitted by the author it seems kinda rude not to mention it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=runako#48426082

At least some, but let me give an example.

Request: “manual step X should not be part of the automated build script”

Fulfilled as: build script is now split in two. X is still done as a manual step in between. Rather than prompting and waiting for it to be done, the documentation and scripts no longer mention X.

Part poorly written requirements, part implementing under pressure, and part lack of engineering discipline.

The main issue is catching stuff like this early enough to course-correct. Differences in time zone, language and cultural norms can make that a challenge, all of which LLMs have the advantage in.

You have said this in a few places throughout the thread. At this point, citation is needed.

I work for a real business and switched from API billing to max+overflow. It saves money. It’s crazy not to. What are you talking about?

Not the op, but it’s fairly easy to hit if you automate a kanban and have some stuff you want to get done. All those little “wouldn’t it be great if” tasks that show up after doing a big task become very doable, it just soaks your tokens.

This is exactly why my preferred method at the moment is simple markdown files with instructions. At worst, a human could do it.

Yes, but at this point I'd almost rather have my CC info exposed than my personal info. There is law and consequence for fraudulent charges that protects me from loss (if not inconvenience) but there is basically no protection for playing fast and loose with my PII--in fact, it's the opposite! They sell it!

karlgluck.com

There was a time when I built games entirely using Visual Studio 6 Edit and Continue. These were the days when debuggers were reliable. Nowadays, I treat the debugger’s output like a best guess: it’s probably right about local variable values and the call stack, but it sometimes has nothing useful to say, and very occasionally is actively misleading.

Thanks for this -- have been using Cody a lot and just tried Windsurf on my hobby project. So far it seems immediately like a step up. Has anyone paid for it? The free version is doing good work.

If a company provides a service for free to enable selling something else, and that something else becomes illegal to sell, then it’s up to the company whether they want to keep offering the free service. They can’t continue doing things that are now illegal just because that’s how they made money in the past. No decision-making power has been taken away.

Congratulations! Happy to hear you describe making an indie mmo as fun and not that hard these days :)

Is there a way to interact or chat on mobile?

Any recommendations?

Check out the Winternitz One-Time Signature

Sphere10.com/articles/cryptography/pqc/wots

Signing many things with one identity is possible by precomputing a Merkle tree, but this takes time and the signatures get big.

Google Apps Script can do all of this. Take the email body and put it into a Google doc, then export the doc as a pdf to drive and attach it from there to send.

Wow, the exact opposite of what I might have guessed from the title.

Does this mean percutaneous coronary intervention [PCI] is over-applied, or something else?

Another implementation:

https://github.com/karlgluck/ThresholdJS

This is a very straightforward encoding of a single 256-bit number.

This is a more interesting take to me than others since it seems you’ve actually learned it?

I see the response later that you’d rather use whatever the team already uses, but could you explain this very strong opinion?

I maintained a 200,000 loc TCL codebase running the front end for millions of lines of industrial C spread over hundreds of machines. It was glorious. After moving on, I’m still struggling to figure out why TCL is so unpopular outside that domain. Other comments seem to boil down to not understanding the language or how to apply it. So what’s your take?

Yeah—as a TCL fan, I agree. Comparing implementations of common coding tasks with other languages doesn’t highlight TCL’s strengths or, really, its purpose.

Personally, TCL fits a niche like QBASIC did. QBASIC was the shortest path from brain -> code drawing on a monitor. Literally 1 line to draw a shape, no initialization and not even an entry point function.

TCL similarly lets you just get on with what you’re doing when you need glue code, GUI’s, and DSL’s. It is easily (even trivially) able to do things that are just a pain in other languages, especially all at once:

- interop with native code (no limits on who calls who or in what order)

- define GUI’s that behave well without it being a huge pain to make anything non-trivial (lookin at you, UE5)

- create novel control flow that feels built-in

- implement an interactive GUI debugger with breakpoints & variable watch in ~200 LOC (saw this once, it’s amazing what you get “for free”)

- save or load a running program’s entire state, including code defined at runtime

- detour any function, allowing you to optimize or patch on the fly

- run from tiny, standalone executables so your users don’t have to install a ton of crap just to run your widget

There’s more but you get the idea. It’s been around for decades for a reason :)

Same. I started building an automated solution for building gamedev environments in VM’s[1] but I can’t help but think there should be a better way.

[1] https://github.com/karlgluck/swiss-chocolatey-lab

For years I’ve been pouring through all the apps/platforms like this, but after being burned too many times I am (incredibly) reluctant to tie my second brain to a box that will lock itself unless I pay. Even if it’s just an interface, it’s too disruptive when my whole workflow is upended by a service getting bought/shutting down/“upgrading” to break old features/increases fees.

I see a “free trial”. That plus the landing page not mentioning open source, a permanent license, or common/interchangeable formats bounced me immediately, despite what I’m sure are some great capabilities that folks put a lot of time and work into. Maybe I’m missing something? Is that kind of app not sustainable so we don’t see them, or do I just not know where to look?

That’s what I thought too, until a friend sent me the paper “Class switch towards non-inflammatory, spike-specific IgG4 antibodies after repeated SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination” published a few weeks ago:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798

From what I can understand, it seems mRNA vaccines can cause a non-inflammatory response to actual infection that prolongs the disease. I’m supportive of vaccination, but that doesn’t mean side effects can’t happen especially with new technology.

Can someone remind me why Merkle trees of Lamport signatures aren’t the solution for postquantum asymmetric signing? Sure the signatures are huge, but they’re secure unless you can trivially invert the hash function.

Same thing here--I love this keyboard, and have exactly the same issues. I resort to plugging the receiver into the monitor's built-in USB hub which is 8" away. Would love a wired version too, though.

Y’all might also enjoy the GOLEM project: http://www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu/golem/

It’s of a similar age and goals, but evolved physical creatures with a screensaver.

I ran that screensaver as a middle schooler and happened to work with Prof. Lipson at the Computational Synthesis Lab in college.

Like other posters here, I feel genetic algorithms got a bit overshadowed by neural networks. Circa 2010, GA’s were capable of some real feats that still seem cutting edge today: deriving the full set of differential equations of metabolism for a bacteria, self-modeling through exploration, finding fundamental laws of physics by watching a double pendulum video, and more.

A ton of good came out of that lab, including a big part of modern open-source 3d printing (which was originally pursued to print the multi-material GOLEM robots!)

One of my force-multipliers is the Inmotion V5F monowheel [1]

This is among my favorite devices of all time. It is quick, nimble, and lightweight. It has completely replaced walking, a car or a bicycle for my local trips. While there is a learning curve, unlike a bicycle, it has required almost [2] no maintenance in ~4000 miles of riding, and both hands are free to hold things so I can carry much more than I ever could on a bike. I've transported a desk, groceries, a 50 lb box of firewood, gardening tools, and so on. Plus, riding one is just plain FUN: it feels like skiing or flying. You really have to try it to know.

A pessimistic estimate of the V5F monowheel's efficiency:

* Battery = 320 Wh = 275335 calories

* Weight = 12 kg for the device, so with a rider around 95kg

* Range = 20 km on the low end (25-30 km is typical, manufacturer claims 38±3 km)

Efficiency = 275335 calories / 95000g / 20km = 0.14 calories/g/km

An optimistic estimate given my actual riding experience:

Efficiency = 275335 calories / 91175g / 30km = 0.10 calories/g/km

[1] https://www.myinmotion.com/products/solowheel-glide-2

[2] It still works just fine despite me beating the hell out of it, but the battery has worn down to ~70%