I am a Bozeman resident, got my PhD from MSU and my wife works there. Really was not expecting to see something from MSU make the front page of HN, well, ever, really. This is pretty cool.
Bozeman tech scene is popping off recently!
Readit Newscrabl commented on Show HN: The Montana MiniComputer mtmc.cs.montana.edu/... · Posted by u/recursivedoubts
crabl commented on Scribble-based forecasting and AI 2027 dynomight.net/scribbles/... · Posted by u/venkii
Interesting! My first thought looking at the scribble chart was "isn't this Monte Carlo simulation?" but reading further it seems more aligned with the "third way" that William Briggs describes in his book Uncertainty[1]. He argues we should focus on direct probability statements about observables over getting lost in parameter estimation or hypothesis testing.
^[1]: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-39756-6
crabl commented on Unheard works by Erik Satie to premiere 100 years after his death theguardian.com/music/202... · Posted by u/gripewater
Ian Penman wrote a fantastic biography of Satie, published earlier this year. Worth a read! He was a profoundly strange and fascinating person: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635902532/erik-satie-three-piec...
crabl commented on Texting myself the weather every day bensilverman.co.uk/posts/... · Posted by u/benslv
Having explored Twillio for text messaging recently, turns out it’s getting very hard to be able to send them programmatically in the US due to lengthy A2P registration process. I understand in spirit this aims to reduce text spam, but my feeling is this becoming another money making opportunity for carriers.
https://www.twilio.com/docs/flex/admin-guide/setup/conversat...
Sole prop registrations (for individuals/non-corporations) are not _too_ onerous anymore and generally have a faster time to approval, provided you submit the right docs. Totally agree it's a money grab though. Twilio et al. have so much power to keep bad actors at bay but keep pushing responsibility to the consumers of their API. I feel like setting up push notifications is easier though, which is saying something.
crabl commented on Intelligent Agent Technology: Open Sesame! (1993) blog.gingerbeardman.com/2... · Posted by u/msephton
Everything old is new again: I came across a demo for Telescript [1] the other day that would not look out of place in a pitch deck today, save the references to AT&T. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtrs3jtY96k
[1] http://www.datarover.com/Telescript/Documentation/TRM/chapte...
crabl commented on The rise of judgement over technical skill notsocommonthoughts.com/b... · Posted by u/kohlhofer
As the marginal cost of writing code decreases, the opportunity cost associated with writing the "right" code increases dramatically
I am optimistic longer term, pessimistic near term
What needs to happen is the education of "junior programmers" needs to be revamped to embrace generative AI. In the same way we embraced google or stackoverflow. We're at a weird transition state where the juniors are being taught to code with an abacus, while the industry has moved on to different tools. Generative AI feels taboo in education circles instead of embraced.
Now there will eventually be a generation of coders just "born" into AI, etc, and they will do great in this new ecosystem. Eventually education will catch up. But the cohort currently coming up as juniors will feel the most pain.
As a potential solution, do you think formal/semi-formal software development education (undergrad programs, colleges/polytechnics, dev bootcamps, etc) should lean super heavily into AI? To the extent that it's not just "use ChatGPT to help you complete this assignment" but rather "complete this assignment using *only* ChatGPT: you're not allowed to write any of the code by yourself".
LLMs clearly struggle when presented with JSON, especially large amounts of it.
There's nothing stopping your endpoints from returning data in some other format. LLMs actually seem to excel with XML for instance. But you could just use a template to define some narrative text.
We've been using Markdown tables to return data to the LLM with some success
crabl commented on I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days twitter.com/Steve_Yegge/s... · Posted by u/tosh
I must be the dumbest "prompt engineer" ever, each time I ask an AI to fix or even worse, create something from scratch it rarely returns the right answer and when asked for modification it will struggle even more.
All the incredible performance and success stories always come from these Twitter posts, I do find value in asking simple but tedious task like a small refactor or generate commands, but this "AI takes the wheel level" does not feel real.
What I've noticed from my extensive use over the past couple weeks has been Claude Code really sucks at thinking things through enough to understand the second and third order consequences of the code that it's writing. That said, it's easy enough to work around its deficiencies by using a model with extended thinking (Grok, GPT4.5, Sonnet 3.7 in thinking mode) to write prompts for it and use Claude Code as basically a dumb code-spewing minion. My workflow has been: give Grok enough context on the problem with specific code examples, ask it to develop an implementation plan that a junior developer can follow, and paste the result into Claude Code, asking it to diligently follow the implementation plan and nothing else.
I have a Lamy Safari that I got in 2012 and works just as well today.
It's what I still recommend to anyone who asks what to get.
Just get the pen, with its cartridge, add more cartridges -- you can stay here and already you're way better than with most standard ball pens that you'd be using otherwise.
Then, get the small converter, plop it in, get your first bottle of ink -- and again you can stay here and enjoy your pen-and-ink experience for a long long time.
Now if you want to try a few different inks, do that next. Maybe get a second pen, see whether 'fine' or 'medium' sized nibs is more your thing.
Go further than that if you want, but you don't have to.
Either way, that first step is enough to improve your life a lot