HN user

ccvannorman

2,798 karma

Hi, I'm Charlie!

Currently Founder at: MathBreakers

My website: vannorman.ai / www.mathbreakers.com

Formerly: CTO at StarCoach AI Biz Dev at HUE Solutions Engineer at SoftServe Inc VR / 3D app Consultant at Radian CTO at Code Hero

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news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Recourse for a Stolen Domain by Registrar?

ccvannorman
6pts6
news.ycombinator.com 3y ago

Ask HN: Vetting a Biz Dev Cofounder?

ccvannorman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 6y ago

Ask HN: Opportunities for a candidate with Ph.D in Physics in Tech?

ccvannorman
4pts6
news.ycombinator.com 7y ago

Ask HN: Best website to meet part time cofounder?

ccvannorman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: What is the best CV/Deep Learning online course?

ccvannorman
1pts2
galaxykate0.tumblr.com 8y ago

So You Want to Build a Generator

ccvannorman
3pts0
news.ycombinator.com 8y ago

Ask HN: Big bang refactor from 1M lines of php

ccvannorman
1pts1
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: What should I consider when relocating my ed-tech startup to India?

ccvannorman
3pts0
www.andrew-forrester.com 9y ago

No Contradictions With Infinity

ccvannorman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 9y ago

Ask HN: Best city/country to move my startup to?

ccvannorman
2pts2
www.gsb.stanford.edu 10y ago

How Smart Leaders Build Trust

ccvannorman
46pts4
www.businessinsider.com 10y ago

The FBI 'is manufacturing terrorism cases' on a greater scale than ever before

ccvannorman
255pts136
www.commondreams.org 10y ago

Did Obama administration offer New Balance a bribe to support TPP?

ccvannorman
3pts0
medium.com 10y ago

A magical friend for every child – using A.I

ccvannorman
1pts0
medium.com 10y ago

Embracing the prison of Routine

ccvannorman
2pts0
www.ibtimes.co.uk 10y ago

Anonymous hackers uncover ISIS plans to attack Atlanta, Italy and more

ccvannorman
4pts1
www.armstrongeconomics.com 10y ago

Police Civil Asset Forfeitures Exceed All Burglaries in 2014

ccvannorman
447pts129
phys.org 10y ago

Researcher shows that black holes do not exist

ccvannorman
2pts2
its.fourtwenty.in 10y ago

Show HN: It's almost four twenty somewhere in the world

ccvannorman
8pts2
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: How can a 3-D software engineer break into biotech?

ccvannorman
1pts0
www.youtube.com 10y ago

The Inner Life of a Cell (2011)

ccvannorman
2pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Anyone doing cool medical biotech things in 3-D?

ccvannorman
1pts0
news.ycombinator.com 10y ago

Ask HN: Any Go players here? (Not the language)

ccvannorman
22pts20
www.theguardian.com 11y ago

The government’s witch-hunters are ready to reform the BBC to death

ccvannorman
4pts0
pastebin.com 11y ago

DWANGO v2.0 (c) 1994

ccvannorman
1pts1
www.nature.com 11y ago

Genetics: No more addictive personality

ccvannorman
9pts0
en.wikipedia.org 11y ago

Dungeon Master, an epic 879 KB game from 1987

ccvannorman
2pts1
vimeo.com 11y ago

Search by Image, Recursively, Transparent PNG [video]

ccvannorman
5pts1
www.ted.com 11y ago

How to Make Stress Your Friend

ccvannorman
6pts3
www.readthetpp.com 11y ago

Read the Full Text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership

ccvannorman
12pts0

MathBreakers, Your Limitless Math Universe. It's a math game platform teaching fundamental grade school concepts like Fractions in an immersive 3D world with virtual manipulatives (no equations or worksheets).

Re-reading the Lean Startup to hone our GTM, market validation and growth engine.

(mathbreakers.com)

I looked at all linked articles and could not find an example of the points (they show a square grid of points with n~=100 but no other ordering of points to show the more optimal layout(s)).

Is there anywhere an image example of a superior layout for example with n>={100,1000,10000}..? I would love to see it. I am imagining it would look somewhat like a sloppy pizza.

I just finished an implementation of CI across three codebases totalling >50k lines and I can confirm a lot of the author's pain points, especially around logging and YAML variables.

Commit with one character YAML difference? Check.

Commit with 2-3 YAML lines just to add the right logging? Check.

Wait 5+ minutes for a YAML diff to propagate through our test pipeline for the nth time today? .. sigh .. check

BUT, after ironing all these things out (and running our own beefy self-hosted runner which is triggered to wake up when there's a test process to snack on), it's .. uh.. not so bad? For now?

I would personally pay $2x market price for a Phone, Computer, Tablet that guaranteed privacy (via whatever technical means necessary) for all my interactions with the internet.

Is that so much to ask?

Could the next "Apple" produce such hardware/software stack to black box this for the consumer -- simply buy "Pineapple" products and guarantee this stuff can't touch you (user obsfuciation for all external platforms could be a hard technical challenge, I know - hence the big value if delivered)

Show HN: JSON Query 9 months ago

I can't help myself and surely someone else has already done the same. But the query

  obj.friends.filter(x=>{ return x.city=='New York'})
  .sort((a, b) => a.age - b.age)
  .map(item => ({ name: item.name, age: item.age }));
does exactly the same without any plugin.

am I missing something?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 10 months ago

That is also not enough. An agent could build an application that functions, but you also need to have a well-designed underlying architecture if you want the application to be extensible and maintainable - something the original dreamer may not even be capable of - so perhaps a shared extended dream share with a Sr. architect is also needed. Oh wait .. I guess we're back to square 1 again? lol

I joined a company with 20k lines of Next/React generated in 1 month. I spent over a week rewriting many parts of the application (mostly the data model and duplicated/conflicting functionality).

At first I was frustrated but my boss said it was actually a perfect sequence, since that "crappy code" did generate a working demo that our future customers loved, which gave us the validation to re-write. And I agree!

LLMs are just another tool in the chest; a curious, lighting fast jr developer with an IQ of 85 who can't learn and needs a memory wipe whenever they make a design mistake.

When I use it knowing its constraints it's a great tool! But yeah if used wrong you are going to make a mess, just like any powerful tool

Yes, better prompting is absolutely essential, and I still love to let Claude do the heavy lifting when it comes to syntax and framing. But in trying to re-write the data model for this app, Claude continually failed to execute due to prompt size or context size limits (I use Claude Max). Breaking it into smaller parts became such a chore that I ended up doing a large part "by hand" (weird that we've come to expect so much automation, that "by hand" feels old school already!)

Oh, also when it broke down and I tried to restart (the data model rewrite) using a context summary, it started going backwards and migrating back to the old data model beacuse it couldn't tell which one was which .. sigh.

As someone who walked into 20k+ loc React/Next project, 95%+ vibecoded, I can say it's a relative nightmare to untangle the snarl of AI generated solutions. Particularly it is bad at separation of concerns and commingling the data. I found several places where there were in-line awaits for database objects, then db manipulations being done inline too, and I found them in the ux layer, the api layer, and even nested inside of other db repo files!

Someone once quipped that AI is like a college kid who studied a few programming courses, has access to all of stack overflow, lives in a world where hours go by in the blink of an eye, and has an IQ of 80 and is utterly incapable of learning.

I absolutely love this question.

Postulate: You cannot define a largest physically describable number.

My assumption is that due to the very nature of Kolmogorov complexity (and other Godel related / halting problem related / self referential descriptions), this is not an answerable or sensible question.

It falls under the same language-enabled recursion problems as:

- The least number that cannot be described in less than twenty syllables. - The least number that cannot be uniquely described by an expression of first-order set theory that contains no more than a googol (10^100) symbols.

Some things never change.

Yes, technology is the way we circumvent effort to deliver results (e.g. to live longer, healthier, and with less pain/fear.)

Yes, our civilization rewards and encourages short circuiting effort, depriving us of the basic positive feedback loop of effort to reward.

It's been like this since the invention of the wheel and fire. It's up to us to find and/or create meaningful (and effortful) lives, and it is more sustainable to focus on the path than the destination; every zen text teaches this.

This article started off strong but ended up quippy, spiteful and shallow. Still, I appreciate the effort ;-]

Yes.

The best analogy I can make is actually surprisingly from a book about romantic love, "Undefended Love" [0] where the PhD psychology author goes on to make this critical point:

We often set ourselves up for failure (e.g. negative self talk after a failed romantic outreach attempt) because it results in our progression into a safe and known pattern. They explain that our brains and emotions are somehow more comfortable with a known outcome, even though it is irrevocably and undeniably a worse outcome, simply because it is safe and known to us.

Thus. self-sabotage keeps us inside our comfort zone.

Imaging if you did win that [product launch, vc pitch, ...] your life gets catapulted into the big, scary unknown. Just quit now so we can be comfortable, easy, and lazy!

[0] by Jett Psaris & Marlena S. Lyons

using my default browser (brave) and pressing "enter" (doing a search) did not do anything. The page just sits there.

apparently, I need to make a selection of a search engine to use this.

I would not use this as a replacement for my duckduckgo or google searches simply because of the UX of not being able to type a query and press "enter" as the default.

Mathbreakers 2 (https://mathbreakers.com)

A 3D game to help students in grades 5-8 learn Arithmentic, Fractions, Geometry, and Algebra.

50% or more of middle school students experience math anxiety, and it's no wonder that so many people grow up believing, "I'm not a math person." Math can be incredibly fun and beautiful if approached and experienced the right way. Mathbreakers is a vibrant, interactive world where all game mechanics are built on intrinsic mathematical properties, so simply by playing the game, a foundation of understanding of those concepts is built.

We're doing early prototype testing now with a planned launch in September 2025. The game engine is PlayCanvas (engine-only) and the platform is WebGL (Mac/PC/ChromeOS).

Game dev here, building a game using the "engine-only" version of PlayCanvas (a 3d engine). Asset loading, rendering, physics, object management, update loops, raycasting is all handled by the engine (js). My code is everything else, including a low-tech drag and drop scene editor.

I've got to say it's the deepest I've ever been in the abstraction stack for building a game. I have to hand build everything. I definitely wouldn't want to write engine code itself unless I was building an engine; building a good engine takes heaps of engineering and time which I don't have.

I will say though, I absolutely love the level of fine control I have over every aspect of my game (when compared say to a Unity game or even a PlayCanvas game built by their editor).

This.

Heuristic or not, AI is still ultimately an algorithm (as another comment pointed out, heuristics are a subset of algorithms). AI cannot, to expand on your PRNG example, generate true random numbers; an example that, in my view, betrays the fundamental inability of an AI to "transcend" its underlying structure of pure algorithm.