frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

https://www.thesignalist.io/s/the-dialogue-dividend/
43•kodesko•4h ago

Comments

dh2022•1h ago
OMG - strong vibes to Einstein crediting Michele Besso, his colleague at the Swiss Patent Office, with helping him discussing some concepts in the special relativity paper: see at the end of the paper https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
jboggan•55m ago
In 2017 LLMs weren't powerful enough to generate working code on their own, but my goal was to at least create a chatbot that could help you rubber-duck-debug your way to a solution. Unfortunately the tech wasn't quite strong enough for that, and not enough engineers even knew what rubber-duck-debugging was. RIP Duckly.

Trying to train an LLM on two 1080ti's on the StackOverflow corpus in my living room was a vibe though. Good times.

kodesko•22m ago
Duckly deserved to actually work. There’s a small irony here: the closest study I found to this, robots specifically built to simulate attentive listening, found they performed no better than an actual inanimate rubber duck for adult engineers. The mechanical signal of listening doesn’t seem to be the active ingredient. Makes me wonder if Duckly would have needed real disagreement to close a gap a duck can’t, not just better natural language.
jboggan•6m ago
You're probably on to something with the value of disagreement. I think it's one reason why chatting with current models doesn't create the same stimulation as rubber-ducking used to bring. The models are typically too quick to agree and amplify what you think rather than truly break it down and push back.

And thanks for saying it should have worked, I agree. My chagrin has increased over the years as I have realized the magnitude of my ill-timing.

mikeryan•51m ago
I started my web dev career in 1999 so my main code references were a combination of O’reilly and “for dummies” books. As a wet behind the ears engineer I’d find myself regularly walking over to my more senior friend Dan’s cubicle for help.

Half the time on the walk over, trying to frame the question in my mind I’d figure out the answer or at least next step. It got to the point where Dan would see me heading towards him and suddenly turn around and he’d as “Figure it out?” And I’d throw him a thumbs up on the way back to my desk.

fellowniusmonk•50m ago
A collection of thoughts on this.

Pierces Firstness is exactly what drives this.

The move from thinking to semantic conversion is important for investigation/introspection.

Arguing with yourself also seems to engage your brains "theory of mind" centers, so different pathways get activated to examine the problem space.

The problem with Ai is the fact that it hallucinates and if you're doing anything truly novel in an integration or framing sense it bottoms out very quickly and can't engage. A human operator can decompose the problem and get accuracy checks for known areas in the training data of course.

Now to be I'm not saying Ai can't produce novel work on the edge but in my experience it is antagonistic towards those goals.

Case in point, CRDTs, many don't use tombstones but they are the minority, and if you try iterate a new CRDT off of one that doesn't use tombstones, let's say diamond-types, it will keep pulling you back to tombstones.

The problem is that the number of humans who understand dynamic investigation and the push pull of exploring an idea you don't hold with someone has always been very small, and now with reflexive internet argument culture driving how we view "debate" and "discussion".

I don't know if we've reduced the leisure to think or what but things are not great for finding speculative thinking partners.

piinbinary•47m ago
Writing is as good, or even better https://www.paulgraham.com/words.html
epolanski•23m ago
You can tell you didn't read the article before jumping into commenting, as this point is addressed.
piinbinary•18m ago
Only as

> the act of writing out a problem to a model still forces the same sentence-level precision described earlier

(model referring to LLM here)

but not as writing for writing's sake

hyperific•32m ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
irishcoffee•27m ago
I keep a rubber duck on my desk and have for at least 10 years, because of this. Great conversation starter.
K0balt•24m ago
LLMs are really good rubber ducks.
Congeec•7m ago
Communicating ideas helps, but thinking out loud may not work better to some people.

Thinking silently fits Asian Americans better than Euro Americans*.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-murder-and-the-m...

msteffen•7m ago
> The Enigma of Reason (Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 2017): their argumentative theory holds that reasoning evolved for social rather than individual epistemic purposes, to produce and evaluate arguments in group contexts.

Yes! I love that someone wrote this down!

This seems so obvious to me now. I often ask LLMs to cite their sources (they do hallucinate from time to time), and they often give me sources that don't say what is claimed. "How would the LLM know not to give this to me?" I wonder. They're trained to explain but not to convince, so they don't know what's convincing, and they should.

I think humans hallucinate at least as much as LLMs—arguments of any complexity are impossible to formulate without leaping at least a bit—but other humans ground us. That's why when people become socially isolated, they join cults or adopt conspiracy theories or the like.

Conversely, "this is convincing to an expert" converges on “this is true" as our collective expertise grows over time. This is the foundation of the scientific method, of progress in all engineering disciplines, etc.

Epic Games announces Lore version control system

https://lore.org/
467•regnerba•2h ago•236 comments

Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/anthropic-trump-administration-fable.html
89•thm•2h ago•43 comments

Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD

https://github.com/Adam-CAD/CADAM
38•zachdive•1h ago•15 comments

GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/glm-5-2-is-the-new-leading-open-weights-model-on-the-artif...
578•himata4113•8h ago•310 comments

Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

https://ribbie.tv/watch
37•brownrout•45m ago•15 comments

French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

https://www.science.org/content/article/french-physicist-and-media-star-loses-doctorate-after-pla...
77•bookofjoe•2h ago•63 comments

Trellis AI (YC W24) hiring a product lead to build agents for healthcare access

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/trellis-ai/jobs/Cg94htp-product-lead
1•macklinkachorn•29m ago

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-holds-off-blacklisting-chinas-deepseek-more-than-100-firms...
28•giuliomagnifico•13h ago•14 comments

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

https://wpvip.com/future-of-the-web-2026/
748•thm•5h ago•407 comments

RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method

https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc10008/
204•schappim•6h ago•100 comments

Want your images back? That'll be $5

https://www.lutr.dev/want-your-images-back-sure-that-ll-be-5-dollars
479•lutr•4h ago•206 comments

Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/35949-volkswagen-app?page=3
208•microtonal•2h ago•132 comments

MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C

https://github.com/rxi/microui
107•peter_d_sherman•5h ago•36 comments

How we run Firecracker VMs inside EC2 and start browsers in less than 1s

https://browser-use.com/posts/firecracker-browser-infra
18•gregpr07•1d ago•2 comments

Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code

https://github.com/evanklem/polypore
41•evanklem2004•2h ago•16 comments

TREX: An AI code reviewer that runs your code

https://www.greptile.com/blog/trex-code-execution
6•dakshgupta•2h ago•0 comments

Hacker News but for independent blogs

https://bubbles.town/
394•headalgorithm•9h ago•128 comments

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

https://charitydotwtf.substack.com/p/ai-demands-more-engineering-discipline
178•BerislavLopac•3h ago•73 comments

Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

https://johnowhitaker.github.io/inkwash/about
82•Yenrabbit•3d ago•17 comments

Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

https://www.thesignalist.io/s/the-dialogue-dividend/
45•kodesko•4h ago•15 comments

U.S. science is in chaos

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/americas-compact-between-science-and-politics-is-broken/
245•presspot•7h ago•288 comments

GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17

https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/36469-grapheneos-has-been-ported-to-android-17-and-official-rele...
954•Cider9986•20h ago•526 comments

Kirkland Roundabouts

https://kirklandroundabouts.com
79•DenisM•2d ago•49 comments

Image Compression

https://www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/image-compression
84•vinhnx•3d ago•12 comments

Show HN: Deconvolution – a Rust image deconvolution and restoration crate

https://github.com/pbkx/deconvolution
8•rmi0•2d ago•0 comments

Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields

https://airfields-freeman.com/
117•wizardforhire•2d ago•29 comments

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

https://cells2pixels.github.io/
155•esychology•8h ago•39 comments

The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

https://claude.com/blog/the-founders-playbook
146•e2e4•10h ago•130 comments

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)

https://www.freerange.city/p/why-do-commercial-spaces-sit-vacant
38•Redoubts•10h ago•84 comments

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-and-potential-fall-of-letterboxd
29•speckx•1w ago•12 comments