News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

prossercj

Re:Ask HN: Are you tired too in this AI era? on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:41AM (#50302613)
One thing you might consider, that helped me: modify your agent's personality to suit you. You may be exhausted because you're talking to someone you don't like all day. I've instructed Claude to talk to me like Confucius, because I have philosophical taste, and it makes a world of difference in terms of how I feel at the end of the day.

Claude's default personality is a bit too combative for me. Another instruction I've given it is "don't argue to win".

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:38PM (#50295544)
Am I the only one who regularly tells Claude to "make it so"?

RIP

Re:Hayden Panetierre Dies at 36 on Monday August 17, 2026 @08:16AM (#49329644)
Very sad. For fans of Kingdom Hearts, she was also the voice of Kairi
Re:Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on Wednesday April 15, 2026 @08:08PM (#47787035)
Don't forget the extra instructions about not eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Re:SpaceX in Merger Talks with xAI on Thursday January 29, 2026 @03:48PM (#46816369)
To be fair, it is no small feat to get all of Elon's personalities to agree with each other
Is it? I heard that it was falling.
This is remarkable if you consider how much it must wound Apple's pride to make this deal with their main rival in the smartphone software space, especially after all the fuss they made about "Apple Intelligence". It's a tacit admission that Google is just better at this kind of thing.
Re:Ask HN: Am I the only one not using AI? on Thursday October 23, 2025 @08:30AM (#45681075)
I don't use it for large-scale code generation, but I do find it useful for small code snippets. For example asking how to initialize a widget in Kendo UI with specific behavior. With snippets, I can just run the code and verify that it works with minimal effort. It's often more about reminding me of something I already knew rather than discovering something novel. I wouldn't trust it with anything novel.

In general, I think of it as a better kind of search. The knowledge available on the internet is enormous, and LLMs are pretty good at finding and synthesizing it relative to a prompt. But that's a different task than generating its own ideas. I think of it like a highly efficient secretary. I wouldn't ask my secretary how to solve a problem, but I absolutely would ask if we have any records pertaining to the problem, and perhaps would also ask for a summary of those records.

Re:Open AI Announces $1.5M Bonus for Every Employee on Thursday August 07, 2025 @12:52PM (#44826900)
This is that meeting
How is it for gaming? Had any compatibility issues?
Short answer: no
Re:Teachers Are Not OK on Monday June 02, 2025 @03:05PM (#44161957)
Strong agree. This reminds me of one of my pet theories: that research and education are fundamentally different skills. A good researcher should be flexible and open-minded, almost to a fault, but a good educator needs to be committed to certain beliefs in order to teach them. More important, an educator should instill good habits (even if those habits involve asking good questions) and set a good example, a requirement entirely lacking from research.

So why do all of our universities only employ teachers who have been trained as researchers?

I think much of the 80% grinding that you describe is just the publish-or-perish mindset of graduate school, which the teachers pick up along the way (I'm not faulting them so much as the process). It's more about appearing to know, rather than knowing. This may be what you have to do to survive in a competitive research environment, but one is left wondering what any of that has to do with educating our children, especially the majority who will never become researchers.

This comment on that PR is pure gold. The bots are talking to each other:

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/pull/115732#issuecomment-2...

Older »