<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: CrazyStat</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=CrazyStat</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 20 Sep 2026 11:50:31 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=CrazyStat" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Asking Authors About Their Own Papers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To be fair, low quality superficial reviews were also not uncommon before LLMs…</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:28:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769441</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769441</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769441</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Asking authors about their own papers"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it?<p>Authorship standards differ by field. In biology, for example, it would be common to list someone as an author if they assisted in one experiment. They might be at a different institution and may be unaware of all but the vaguest outline of the paper as a whole—they just got brought onboard because they are an expert in one particular task that needed to be done. In exchange they get to be a middle author (not worth much) and develop a relationship with someone whose expertise they may need on one of their own papers in the future (the primary benefit).<p>That is not the case here, of course—I just wanted to provide some context for your position not being universally applicable.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 19:26:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769430</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769430</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769430</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Im glad you brought up abstract algebra—that was the one class in my math undergrad that I never developed an intuition for. I learned to do the proofs by pushing symbols around and putting bars on top of them but I never felt like I understood what was happening.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 19 Sep 2026 13:06:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766283</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766283</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49766283</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Apple Reference Image: A New Approach for Verified Photography"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Apple Reference Image could be (part of) a solution, by certifying that both images were taken by the same device<p>This is explicitly not possible, as the post you were replying to pointed out.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:39:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726883</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726883</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49726883</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Astra and Fable still hack on simple variants of alignment evals from 2025"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Codex still does this regularly, in my experience: “two tests mistakenly asserted [insert condition here], I have corrected them.”<p>It always apologizes when caught, of course.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 13 Sep 2026 17:39:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686475</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You can claim you’re acting honestly all day long but you still have a CEO with a long-standing reputation for lying.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:36:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666332</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666332</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49666332</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ok, but this doesn’t scale well. It takes a nontrivial amount of time to evaluate each person, and it would have to be done repeatedly as they age. You would need an entire government bureaucracy devoted to it. Then people will want an appeals process for when decisions don’t go their way—both parents and children.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:11:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661807</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661807</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49661807</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The whole purpose of law is to be a uniform system of justice. At best it could offer guidelines for how to evaluate people: perhaps level of education attained, demonstrated ability to take responsibility for themselves, etc. But the evaluation under those guidelines would
still have to be made by humans.<p>There is precedent for such a system, e.g. minors can petition to be emancipated which allows them to be treated in many regards like an adult.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:37:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659223</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659223</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659223</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s hard to give the misunderstanding/coincidence claim credence when Altman explicitly referenced Her in relation to the feature.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:13:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658788</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658788</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49658788</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If a law is going to treat 5 year olds differently from 50 year olds then a line has to be drawn somewhere. 18 is arbitrary, but no more arbitrary than any other age you could pick.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 12:57:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657683</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657683</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49657683</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Claude is only available to people over 18 years"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's almost been 15 years since the Snowden leaks, and there were rumors going around before that. I don't think it would have been that outlandish.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2026 11:53:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656886</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656886</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49656886</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I've heard some people say the model's solution is quite different from theirs (but I have no clue how to personally assess the spiritual truth of this, so please give it zero weight)<p>Why would you include a statement that you want us to give zero weight to, unless you don’t actually want us to give it zero weight?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:52:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651698</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651698</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49651698</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "GPT-6 Astra"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I hardly think it’s fair to label an objection so old that Turing included it (and discussed it at length) in the list of objections to thinking machines in 1950 “moving the goalposts.”<p>> These arguments take the form, “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X”. Numerous features X are suggested in this connexion. I offer a selection:<p>> Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly (p. 448), have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes (p. 448), fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream (p. 448), make some one fall in love with it, <i>learn from experience (pp. 456 f.)</i>, use words properly, be the subject of its own thought (p. 449), have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new (p. 450). (Some of these disabilities are given special consideration as indicated by the page numbers.)<p>(emphasis added).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 03 Sep 2026 22:01:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557740</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557740</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49557740</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Even better, from the BMJ christmas edition <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102" rel="nofollow">https://www.bmj.com/content/347/bmj.f7102</a><p>> Around 0.5% of women consistently affirmed their status as virgins and did not use assisted reproductive technology, yet reported virgin births.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 11:25:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520500</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49520500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "EVE Online moves to Python 3"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> it clearly is just technology debt they've been carrying around from a silly decision over a decade ago<p>Almost three decades ago—development started in 1999 and the game was released in 2003.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 17:57:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491861</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491861</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49491861</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Today Codex decided that it could resolve the blocker by just changing the mandatory policy it was running up against into an “advisory policy.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 22:34:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413268</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413268</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413268</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "My favorite nonfiction books about cults, scams, and schemes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>People I know personally were strongly ostracized after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses (in the US) and the Catholic church (in Latin America). Cut out of their existing social circles, immediate family members refusing to attend their wedding over it, etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Aug 2026 19:23:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411642</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411642</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49411642</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "Karpathy’s Pelican"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sam Altman: “GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert.”<p>Elon Musk on Grok: “better than PhD level in everything.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 02 Aug 2026 23:54:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149614</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49149614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Now talk to someone living near the equator like Singapore, and 0F is unimaginably cold (even 40F is basically unheard of), and 100F is very hot but not extraordinarily so.<p>Bad example--Singapore has never had a single 100F day in recorded history. The highest temperature ever recorded was 37C/98.6F. As a small island its climate is greatly moderated by the masses of water around it. It rarely gets above 90F.<p>The broader point about the 0-100 Fahrenheit scale being convenient for people from a certain climate is correct, of course.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:27:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130255</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130255</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49130255</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by CrazyStat in "I love LLMs, I hate hype"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me.<p>No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I regularly have to correct them from doing stuff that's <i>really dumb</i> based on my expertise within my area of specialization. More than once I've managed to extract >3 orders of magnitude performance gains after asking them to justify why their code was so slow. Probably there's still some stupid stuff in there. But it's better than the code I would have written, and I never could have paid for a proper developer to write it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:46:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886497</link><dc:creator>CrazyStat</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886497</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886497</guid></item></channel></rss>