krschacht

I was just using ChatGPT to help me pick an SDK library. It mentions a few options by name (e.g. Baileys, whatsapp-web.js), but when I click those names rather than opening a browser with the source page like it used to, it now opens a modal and uses ChatGPT to basically generate a fake homepage for this tool.

From what I can tell, there is no longer any way to easily get to the underlying web page that was referenced in generating its answer to my question.

This feels like a pretty meaningful step backwards. Am I missing something?

What are the most futuristic computing interfaces you can think of, that just aren’t widespread yet?

(In line with Gibson’s famous quote that, "The future is already here—it's just not evenly distributed.")

Is there a good reason why the UI we see in sci-fi don't make it into actual products?

Maybe there is some true limitation inherent in this style UI which causes them to stay as mere experiments / novelty?

I'm thinking about demos like this which I've seen go by HN over the years (I'm not involved in any of these):

LCARS demo: https://www.mewho.com/ritos/

Tron-like terminal: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui

Sci-fi UI components: https://github.com/arwes/arwes

And I've long been a fan of designers like gmunk doing UI work for film: https://gmunk.com/Oblivion-GFX

But I'm genuinely confused why the actual UIs we all use on a daily basis are all so derivative of one another when the space of UI possibilities is so vast.

Recently, I’ve been diving deep into Lisp. I re-read all of Paul Graham’s old writing about Lisp to understand his arguments. I want to reconcile for myself: if Lisp really is the most powerful language, why isn’t it more popular with startups? Would my next startup benefit if I used it?

It’s been particularly helpful to examine the HN source code, written in Arc, to better grasp what Paul means by each of his points (e.g., macros, language as data, etc.). I’ve also read through the entire proposal for Bel.

I think I understand the advantages of Lisp. It has a higher barrier to entry due to the parentheses syntax and the functional, non-object-oriented way of thinking. But once you overcome these challenges, Lisp makes it easy to build a new language for your domain, allowing for more conceptual compression. This is what ultimately enabled Viaweb to outpace competitors, implementing new features with such a small team at incredible speed.

It struck me that Lisp’s advantages and disadvantages parallel those of Linux. The “Lisp is the best language” argument lands similarly to the “Linux is the best OS” argument. Is there an opportunity for Lisp to learn from Linux?

The brilliant strategy of OS X when it came out was to build on top of Linux to gain its benefits while addressing the difficulties that made it challenging for novice computer users.

Is there an opportunity for someone to create a Lisp that harnesses all of its power but with an easier learning curve?

Paul argues that the parentheses and Polish notation are inherent consequences of the language’s power. This is one point I still don’t fully grasp. Why can’t the syntax of Lisp be made more approachable (more “reads like English”) while still maintaining its power?

I would like to my javascript app to have local access to a basic LLM.

In the next version of Chrome Google says that Gemini Nano will be included, thanks to the advances in WebAssembly. But it's surely going to be awhile (if ever) before other major browsers choose to integrate Gemini Nano.

Since WebAssembly is widely supported, has anyone experimented with LLMs that can run in-browser? Ideally, one that can even run on mobile Safari/Chrome?

How can I identify the kid-friendly topic of a sentence? Google NLP API and Stanford NLP are helpful for finding nouns & verbs, but I need to identify the subset of these that are meaningful “topics”, from a kids perspective. How can I do this?

Context: My company has become popular for explaining science to kids. We now see how hard it is for kids to explore their questions so we asked elementary teachers: if your students ask a question you can’t answer, submit it to us

We received 600K well-formed questions! It’s fascinating to browse. We’ve been so inspired by this that we now plan to answer every question and build a video-Wikipedia-for-kids (living at mystery.org). E.g. Here’s some random questions: https://tinyurl.com/y43bwtek

First we wonder: what’s the most popular question? This is tough! “Synonymous” questions look so different. Take a look at these, you’d give the same explanation to all three kids:

Why is there sand on beaches? How is sand made? Where does sand come from?

Ugh. Before we embark on de-duping, we’re first trying to find the topic(s) of each question. Organizing topics into a kid’s conceptual hierarchy will be useful:

Living things > Birds > Penguine Man-made things > Food > Junk food > French fries

NLP libraries help us get parts of speech & the “topics” we want are the nouns and verbs of the sentence, but not all are meaningful topics. E.g.:

Why do spoons and forks go in a certain place when setting the table?

“Place” is a noun, but it’s too vague here to be a topic. We would not want to let kids “Browse all questions about place.” So we need the subset of nouns which are meaningful topics.

> How did people make glue?

“Make” is a verb. In most questions, “make” is not a topic. But here it’s being used in a significant way. We’d want to list under:

All questions about making/invention All questions about glue

Any advice to filter down nouns & verbs in a sentence to the kid-friendly topics?