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wbradleyon Signs of introspection in large language models

I’m guessing they adjusted the activations of certain edges within the hidden layers during forward propagation in a manner that resembles the difference in activation between two concepts, in order to make the “diff” seem to show up magically within the forward prop pass. Then the test is to see how the output responds to this forced “injected thought.”

wbradleyon Superpowers: How I'm using coding agents in October 2025

I think the point is that ~/.claude should be dispersed among ~/.config/claude, ~/.local/state/claude, etc

I agree with this, it’s frustrating that in 2025 apps are still polluting my home dir.

wbradleyon Show HN: Every Breath You Take – Heart Rate Variability Training

> error: PyObjC requires macOS to build

Looks like this depends on macOS.

wbradleyon Math for kids outside of the Calculus Sequence

I ended up going the opposite direction. My 11th grade trigonometry teacher forced me to repeat trig despite my having gotten a B. I was angry at the time! She did me a favor because by the time I got to Calculus in University it was very intuitive and I didn’t have much of a problem with it.

wbradleyon Let ChatGPT run free on random webpages and do what it likes

So, uh… what happened?

wbradleyon System – A resource that aims to explain how everything in the world is related

I went looking for mentions of Semantic Networks, RDF, triplets, taxonomy, or other common knowledge-related terms but I found nothing. Thoughts about pre-existing knowledge graph systems and how they may or may not apply to System? Thanks!

wbradleyon Compile-Time Sort in D

The idea of static meaning “fully evaluate this at compile time” in D is a good one.

wbradleyon Functools – The Power of Higher-Order Functions in Python

Please do not promote the use of wildcard imports.

wbradleyon Modern C++ gamedev: thoughts and misconceptions

Here's a link to the named parameters spec. http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2014/n417...

wbradleyon Show HN: Bel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algebraic_data_type

wbradleyon The Troubling Economics of Food Halls

Yeah, that's true. I could have chosen a better example there. I was trying to pick a tech that Apple tended to prevent competition in back then. Perhaps Safari/Webkit would have been a better example.

wbradleyon The Troubling Economics of Food Halls

My brain kept leaping to this analogy...

Chef : Software Engineer

2017 : 2010

Donaldson : Apple

Alcohol : iMessage

Food Hall : App Store

30% : 30%

wbradleyon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2018)

Looks interesting! However, there is some confusion over whether it's truly REMOTE or not. The job description page says

> Live or be willing to move to Mexico City - this is not a remote position

wbradleyon Charles Simonyi on Intentional Software Joining Microsoft

For about three years I maintained the official internal coding conventions documentation for the Microsoft Word development team. This was when we were working on Office 2007. I remember loving the spirit of Hungarian notation. Using it in practice was also a major lesson and shaped my valuation of naming variables and types.

That same timeframe we ported Word's codebase from C to C++. That meant rewriting a bunch of manually ordered vtables for COM as regular virtual member functions on classes, and sadly, the elimination of anonymous unions from the codebase. But, type systems have really taken over and I think that's a good thing.

Because Word was written in C it followed a beautiful pattern of functions calling other functions all the way down. It treated data as data, and did not utilize classes or inheritance. I later came to understand the value of that way of thinking but at the time I thought it was so old fashioned. Of course, lacking the OO mindset meant that Word also lacked a great deal of encapsulation, and had horrible coupling across certain modules. Most notably, Undo, and Display.

I suppose that's enough reminiscing for now.

wbradleyon Ask HN: What simple tools or products are you most proud of making?

http://timedelta.com/

My wife and I made it so that I could quickly paste timestamps from various log files and see the relative time between then and now. It also allows for a pretty basic relative time entry, like "2 weeks ago", etc...

wbradleyon A Guide to Setting up Gmail Inbox Actions

Cool idea.

wbradleyon FundersClub Unveils Venture News

This is Will from FundersClub. We're considering that. Thank you!

wbradleyon FundersClub Unveils Venture News

This is Will from FundersClub. Thanks for the feedback. We will consider ways to improve contrast and legibility.