HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

murkt

1,341 karma · joined February 7, 2008

submissionscomments
murkt··on The Mythical Man-Month in the Age of AI
When I am making agents do a hard thing, I use Opus as both parent and child. I make the child review its code extensively, and then still make the parent read the work and review once again. It is much faster and cheaper than just rolling with no extra reviews, and then in a day I have fifty subtle bugs.
murkt··on 2D Vehicles
This is pretty fun!
murkt··on Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague
Not sure that throwing away plastic tubes with samples of plague bacteria is a good idea
murkt··on Why don't more developers “use the platform”?
One can also ask why that is needed and how it will make product better. Is that the highest priority to move a border three pixels to the left?
murkt··on Clef: Open-source decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform
Easy to reach doesn’t automatically mean “easy to see”.
murkt··on Gemini 4 Argon
Fable is available for a couple of months and even got an update on 1st of September. It’s really good, but since Opus 5.5 was released, there is not much point in using Fable anymore
murkt··on Gemini 4 Argon
Input token limit is 1M for Gemini models for a long time. Haven’t they been the first with 1M input?
murkt··on Vermont replacing power plants with home batteries
Batteries compete with peaker power plants, though.
murkt··on Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking
Where did you try it, how can you use it? I have nothing in my Workspace (I am admin), Gemini app, AI Studio. Only 3.6 Flash
murkt··on Muse Spark 1.3
Ohh, horizontal wheels. They’re about as good as I expected, models have pretty bad spatial awareness. I would expect Fable to be a bit better than old models, though.
murkt··on Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
Exactly! Proper wet heat. /s
murkt··on Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.

And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.

murkt··on Claude Cookbook
Yeah, along with UPPERCASE labels, which is a staple of AI designed pages
murkt··on GPT-5.6
It triggered for me on a completely pedestrian game design prompt a couple of days ago. I’ve sent feedback and continued with Opus, but that was really unexpected
murkt··on Show HN: I mapped 8.5M research papers into an interactive atlas
I remember similar kind of visualization from a decade ago, called paperscape. Looked cool, worked on clustering using citations and references.

Never got any idea on any use case that would be covered by such visualizations, apart from looking cool.

murkt··on A global workspace in language models
This supports my feelings of what works best when working with the models. Especially together with the directional bias in recall that’s mentioned here in the comments.

First, the model attention is actually limited, so less rules is usually better, but that’s common knowledge already. Or maybe it’s as common as common sense, and a lot of people still employ lots of rules and try to cram everything in one step.

Second, it’s often quite sufficient to just namedrop a technique and LLM will work differently. For example, when debugging, LLMs tend to try to brute force the problem and often end up in the weeds. Just add “use scientific method for debugging and keep journal file” is usually sufficient to improve their skill here.

Another example is refactoring. Just add “use Mikado method”, and it’s sufficient to wholly change the approach and produce much better results.

murkt··on Will It Mythos?
Some problems are very hard to solve with stupid code. This can easily be the case (computational geometry)
murkt··on Ten years of ClickHouse in open source
I am having a hard time picturing what could be the problem that you were solving.

Redis, Cassandra, RabbitMQ and Clickhouse. RabbitMQ looks like a black sheep in this lineup.

murkt··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Yeah, probably different halves of the book. I've read it a few years ago, and it looks like I've just ignored/forgot all that "bending reality" stuff. It's not my cup of tea, so I remembered only the good parts of it
murkt··on Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
Opus 4.5-4.7 was pretty bad at it, 4.8 was a bit better, and I have not tried Fable much.

So basically you have a good enough code that’s “intuitive” for a model, screenshots, and that’s it?

murkt··on Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD
I find all current LLMs to have pretty poor spatial awareness. It is becoming better, but still very poor. How are you dealing with that? Got any special tricks, any advice?
murkt··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Touching shoulders and shaking hands palm-down is “persuasion” bullshit.

Can’t say anything about other books, but Never Split the Difference is about hearing and understanding other peoples’s wants and opinions. Not this pickup-artist-like bullshit.

murkt··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Please read the actual book, it’s kind of the opposite from manipulation. You can read more detailed answers in the near branch of comments.
murkt··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
I’ve genuinely read only Never Split the Difference from your list, and it’s kind of the opposite from manipulation.

The book teaches how to actually hear people even in the very emotionally charged situations, how to properly ask them questions to understand their point of view and their needs.

If I understand my son’s needs and can give him what he wants in exchange of him giving me what I want, how is that a manipulation? I can yell at him, impose sanctions (eg no minecraft for two days) and we both will be greatly dissatisfied. Or we can both get what we want, which is a win-win.

murkt··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
“Never Split the Difference”, which is a book about how to successfully communicate with terrorists. Very suitable for talking with kids!

I’ve even read aloud a few chapters to my kids, because it’s very suitable for communication with parents as well

murkt··on Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
The post matches my experience as well, I am asking a question like “does A work like this and that”, and Claude responds with “you’re conflating A and B! Only A does this and that, and B does that other thing!”

Well, I am perfectly aware of B and that other thing and did not conflate them at all. I also achieved enlightment, so I don’t argue with Claude here, just ignore the obnoxiousness and move on.

murkt··on Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux
Ah, okay, my bad. Got too focused on the name. Googled the dates, Satya became CEO in 2014 and Sundar became CEO in 2015, so it’s actually not that different, especially when we look at the events more than a decade later.
murkt··on Azure Linux 4.0 is Microsoft's first general-purpose Linux
Sundar Pichai does not work in Microsoft, though. A bit weird to anchor the MS timeline on his position. When he became the CEO, actually? I don’t remember the year even approximately
murkt··on Claude Opus 4.8
Price hasn’t changes at all, though.
murkt··on Show HN: Needle: We Distilled Gemini Tool Calling into a 26M Model
Can this be a Siri-like core? Set me a timer, tell me what’s the weather, etc. Here is transcribed text and available list of tools for the model to call, and voice the output.
Page 1 of 9Next →