<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: DroneBetter</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DroneBetter</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Apr 2026 06:05:08 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=DroneBetter" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ideally, slowly grinding down duplicates into canonicals, keeping the ones whose answers are subject to change (with developments in languages and tools) up-to-date, removing cruft and making it more like a library (à la Rosetta Code) that's easy to find things in<p>and a change of form from (questions being asked primarily as a means to an end for one person) to (Q&A pairs being written as reference materials)<p>and requests for comment on which approach would be the most idiomatic or whether one has fallen into an XY trap or other things that rely on human 'taste' rather than LLMs' blithe march of obedience</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:23:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652333</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652333</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47652333</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Parrots pack twice as many neurons as primate brains of the same mass"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>or perhaps it's an artefact of them having a higher contrast against the asphalt and being somewhat fat and puffy compared to most roadkill animals</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:35:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575643</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575643</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>hey the AR/VR entry is wrong, right? Apple demonstrates it in the keynote webpages by having a 3D model relating to the keynotes' themes that can be placed and rotated in space, I doubt it would be for their own pages only.<p>unless it means having the webpage itself render in VR and not just an isolated model</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:08:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484723</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484723</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47484723</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "How BYD got EV chargers to work almost as fast as gas pumps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"home" can be substituted for "place where car resides when owner is at home" without meaningfully changing the point</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 22 Mar 2026 11:41:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476494</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476494</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47476494</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Last month Pornhub restricted access to its website in the UK, blaming the introduction of stricter age checks, and said its traffic had fallen by 77%.<p>assumedly the rate of consumption hasn't dramatically changed, so the OSA's immediate result has been either the decentralisation of porn providers (towards those small enough to dodge the law for now and be less exacting) or the mass adoption of proxies; I assume the former is the path of least resistance<p>this is notably the opposite of the feared outcome (which I suspect may be closer to the long-term effect) that the bar to meet the requirements would be so high (possibly involving hiring a lawyer) that smaller social/porn sites get regulated out of existence (see ie. <a href="https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help_with" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/ukosa1/uk_users_lobsters_needs_your_help...</a>)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:12:27 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47443521</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47443521</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47443521</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>well for one who does buckle down and read and do math, the expected amount of new information brought to them by a 3B1B video as supplementary material upon a topic (with the normal distribution being one that admits a direct comparison from the article) is nonzero, by merit of it possibly having ideas to convey from outside their usual purview and formal background that may be applicable to the doing of math (as has been the case for me, someone who [does math](<a href="https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Natalia_L._Skirrow" rel="nofollow">https://oeis.org/wiki/User:Natalia_L._Skirrow</a>)), while for Quanta fluff pieces it's zero.<p>by the metric of "if this expository piece were to be taken to a time before its subject had been considered and presented to researchers, how useful would its outline be towards reproducing the theory in its totality," Quanta's writings (on both classical and research math) mostly score 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:36:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434166</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434166</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434166</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I hate Quanta a lot<p>a vast amount of fluff for less than a college statistics professor would (hopefully) be able to impart with a chalkboard in 10 minutes, when Quanta has the ability to prepare animated diagrams like 3Blue1Brown but chooses not to use it<p>they could go down myriad paths, like how it provides that random walks on square lattices are asymptotically isotropic, or give any other simple easy-to-understand applications (like getting an asymptotic on the expected # of rolls of an n-sided die before the first reoccurring face) or explain what a normal distribution is, but they only want to tell a story to convey a feeling<p>they are a blight upon this world for not using their opportunity to further public engagement in a meaningful way</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:31:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432709</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432709</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432709</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>citing the Wikipedia page for trigonometry makes this feel a lot like you just told an LLM the expected comment format and told it to write insightful comments</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:46:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351325</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351325</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351325</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Six Math Essentials"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>counterpoint to
> easily four or five years of study just to play around a bit
it depends significantly on the branch of maths you choose! I've been told by a professor of fluid mechanics that he has difficulty posing and approving subjects of undergrad dissertations because the knowledge threshold for contributing meaningful ideas reliably is so high, but in my primary interest (combinatorics) this is very much not the case.<p>the OEIS is replete with old sequences that no-one has considered in much detail in a decade or two, and have a lot of 'low-hanging fruit' for one willing to toy with them.<p><a href="https://oeis.org/A185105" rel="nofollow">https://oeis.org/A185105</a> is a good example of such a sequence; "sample the elements of a random permutation of [n] in a random order and record each one's cycle (under repeated iteration), then T(n,k)/n! is the expected of the kth distinct cycle recorded," which seems like it would have been of some interest to someone in the last ≈13 years (since ie. it's well-known that the first cycle's length is uniform in [1..n]), but didn't receive any formulas until I happened upon it recently with my own toolbelt (which is quite modest and certainly could be learned in less than 4 years).<p>the OEIS is an excellent resource for both readinh and sharpening one's amateur teeth on novel (ie. unexplored, or at least undocumented) problems and very rewarding, if that's your goal with learninh maths</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:59:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124117</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124117</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47124117</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Erdos 281 solved with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>the proofs written by ChatGPT are necessarily reasoned about in plain language, and are a human-comprehensible length (that is what Tao did, since it hasn't been formalised in a proof-checking language); today, the many-gigabytes (or -terabytes) proofs (à la 4-colour theorem) are generally problems solved via SAT solvers that are required to prove nonexistence of smaller solutions by exhaustion.<p>and there is an ongoing literature review (which has been lucrative to both erdosproblems and the OEIS), and this one was relabelled upon the discovery of an earlier resolution</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 18 Jan 2026 21:55:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672531</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672531</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672531</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Ai, Japanese chimpanzee who counted and painted dies at 49"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>is there any further information on how she was trained and whether it used a reward for reaching objectives like teaching Kanzi (a bonobo) to play <i>Minecraft</i>? did a human demonstrate the controls or was there a simulation before the actual vehicle? or a hardcoded speed limit that was slowly raised?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:13:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610525</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610525</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610525</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Ai, Japanese chimpanzee who counted and painted dies at 49"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>it's weird to see that 6 years ago the public consensus on Musk was just that he was a well-intentioned soft-spoken nerd who liked computers and found himself with inadvertent money to allocate altruistically</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:08:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610463</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610463</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46610463</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Apple picks Gemini to power Siri"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>other people have a load of USB-C charging cables and are frustrated with having to buy Lightning ones and clutter their bags with more wires than necessary.<p>although Lightning was better-designed for being routinely used (pins on the outside of the wire end rather than inside the device, easy to clean and no protruding pieces in the device to damage/snap off), and the ideal scenario would have been making it an open standard</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:33:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609318</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46609318</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "AI isn't "just predicting the next word" anymore"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I somewhat take issue with the second math example (the geometry problem); that is solvable routinely by computer algebra systems, and being able to translate problems into inputs, hit run and transcribe the proof back to English prose (which for all we know was what it did, since OpenAI and Google have confirmed their entrants received these tools which human candidates did not) is not so astonishing as the blog post makes it out to be</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:03:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608925</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608925</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46608925</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Terence Tao: At the Erdos problem website, AI assistance now becoming routine"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think Zeilberger is taken heavily out of context and confused with Norman Wildberger a lot; he certainly has some eccentric opinions but that one is not at all reflected in his blog's contents (which are largely things like "[particular paper] presents [conjecture/proof] that can be [resolved/shortened] by routine methods" that are only routine because of his decades of work), it's a shame that him being the go-to example of a crank seems to have become engrained into LLMs</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 23:08:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028277</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028277</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028277</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Calculus for Mathematicians, Computer Scientists, and Physicists [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Archimedes had functionally developed a method of integration (which was how he obtained results like volume/surface area of a sphere, or centre of mass of a hemisphere) in a manuscript that got lost to time and then rediscovered in a palimpsest (pasted and written over with a religious text)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 23 Nov 2025 22:58:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028210</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028210</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46028210</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>that is an indictment of the implementations, not the fundamental limits of the architecture; most commercial LLMs now have web-searching available by default and can do both of those things, but couldn't when they were confined to the user's prompt and their training data (which was often not quite contemporary, until recently)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:05:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999654</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999654</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999654</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "[dead]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can't tell whether you're trying to convince humans, parody someone who might be, or give superficial sentiment for automated traders' webscrapers to be influenced by</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2025 23:54:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999559</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45999559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "Bumble Berry Pi – A Cheap DIY Raspberry Pi Handheld Cyberdeck"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>is Raspberry Pi OS entirely usable without a trackpad/mouse or does this need an external one to be connected?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 22:02:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869643</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869643</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by DroneBetter in "China launches 18 day Arctic shipping route"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>it looks like equirectangular (shine horizontal lasers from a rod through the poles through the Earth's surface onto a cylinder of the same height, record its surface image, then unfurl it), which is still about as bad as Mercator (shine omnidirectional light from a point source in the centre through the surface onto an infinitely tall cylinder) since the means by which it conserves area (exaggerating horizontal distance as much as it understates vertical) make distance:area only correct for diagonal Rhumb lines.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Nov 2025 02:58:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853722</link><dc:creator>DroneBetter</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45853722</guid></item></channel></rss>