Hacker News: Javantea_

New comment by Javantea_ in "The Storm Hits the Art Market"

Javantea_ — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 04:05:39 +0000

Yeah art has objective value and subjective value. Every once in a while you'll find something with a lot of subjective value. Finding something with both is also a thing but it's not easy to find them for a low price.

The reason that expensive art exists is because there's a market. The fact that the market is weird and in decline doesn't change the fact that wealthy people find art to be a worthwhile thing to buy.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book"

Javantea_ — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:48:08 +0000

I'm surprised no one in the comments has mentioned overfitting. Perhaps this is too obvious but I think of it as a very clear bug in a model if it asserts something to be true because it has heard it once. I realize that training a model is not easy, but this is something that should've been caught before it was released. Either QA is sleeping on the job or they have intentionally released a model with serious flaws in its design/training. I also understand the intense pressure to release early and often, but this type of thing isn't a warning.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Launch HN: Vassar Robotics (YC X25) – $219 robot arm that learns new skills"

Javantea_ — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 21:31:39 +0000

Can you compare your robot to Baxter? I'm curious to see how this works.

Congrats on shipping!

New comment by Javantea_ in "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"

Javantea_ — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 20:21:26 +0000

https://www.cell-game.com/ https://www.altsci.com/blog/ Blogs are a deep dive sometimes and light fare other times.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Libreboot 20230423"

Javantea_ — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 14:17:28 +0000

That's not correct. Each distro has a huge amount of code in the form of patches, packaging and installation that they handle.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Deepfake scams are here and we're not ready"

Javantea_ — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 04:58:32 +0000

In what way are we not ready? If you don't have the necessary critical reasoning skills to doubt Joe Rogan telling you about complete bullshit, no one needs technology to trick you into a scam. If you have critical reasoning skills, it's pretty hard to convince you to part with your money. Who exactly does this scam target?

New comment by Javantea_ in "How to arrange any number of stars on the U.S. flag (2016)"

Javantea_ — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 03:16:37 +0000

This helps answer a serious argument I had on whether Puerto Rico and/or Washington D.C. should become states. Some people argued that the the flag could stay the same. I think the most clever answer would be to make a flag with a star randomly placed to annoy flag-obsessed nerds. More seriously, I think the reason that a 51st or 52nd state can't be added is that the urgency of the matter is lacking. Doing something about statehood would require it to be exceedingly popular and even then the odds are poor.

New comment by Javantea_ in "D3wasm 0.4 – Doom 3 in WASM"

Javantea_ — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 18:22:21 +0000

I used emscripten to make physics and math software written in Fortran available to my JavaScript program. I would've used wasm, but it was in poor shape back when I wrote the software. There are a lot of things besides games and graphics written in C/C++ that can be used in JavaScript as a result of emscripten and wasm.

New comment by Javantea_ in "After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel"

Javantea_ — Sun, 04 Sep 2022 21:41:08 +0000

You ignore the fact that there are perverse incentives among the participants. It's possible to implement, and I'm doing it myself. If I had more time to spend on it, we could end spam. Instead I am fine as is: most of the spammers have given up.

New comment by Javantea_ in "What would a “good” WebMD look like?"

Javantea_ — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 20:29:30 +0000

Medscape is owned by WebMD fyi.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Tell HN: I have the perfect job, why is it not enough?"

Javantea_ — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 22:41:11 +0000

Can you give any advice on how to get in the right mindset to give significant part of your income to charity? Or did you have no trouble deciding that? I understand how fortunate I am, but I cannot convince myself to give.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Tell HN: I have the perfect job, why is it not enough?"

Javantea_ — Mon, 11 Jul 2022 21:43:49 +0000

Step 1: Practice gratitude.

Step 2: Consider taking the science of well-being course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being

Step 3: Find (or geek out in) a hobby that you can obsess about and that your friends and family can accept.

Step 4: If you can't find out a path toward self-actualization, ask your employer or boss about ways that you can improve the business mission goals. In that path, you should find a path toward self-actualization and go for it.

Step 5: Accept the excellent result you get because outcomes are very dependent on luck.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?"

Javantea_ — Wed, 25 May 2022 17:21:16 +0000

Rock Band 3 was pretty close to that game for me. It convinced me to get real drum training and to learn the keyboard.

I want to play a game where all the NPCs are AI trained with Seq2Seq neural networks. I have been trying to write the game off and on for a while, but it's not easy to write. There are some things that come pretty close, but are not quite there.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Welcome to the User Testnet"

Javantea_ — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 05:04:50 +0000

MysteryTwisterC3 is an excellent way to learn RSA, ECC, and so on through the process of cryptanalysis. https://mysterytwister.org/home/welcome/ To learn how to implement stuff correctly, I recommend trying to work through an algorithm (say SHA-1 for example), and try to find people that explain it. Once you're ready to implement it yourself, go through the list of flaws in common implementations (side-channel, power analysis, diff, linear, etc) and try to prove whether your implementation is vulnerable or not vulnerable. Once you've done this more than once, you can do it for a lot of things.

It turns out one of the best books on cryptography is in a bundle if you like to read, Applied Cryptography: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cybersecurity-2022-wiley-...

Schneier has answered this question also: https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/1015.html...

New comment by Javantea_ in "Tokyo police lose 2 floppy disks containing info on public housing applicants"

Javantea_ — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 19:43:48 +0000

Thank you for sharing your source code for Empire!

New comment by Javantea_ in "Player of Games"

Javantea_ — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 15:40:00 +0000

I don't have a lot of experience with IMPALA, but the sequence of events you describe should be very easy for an end-to-end system. Assuming you don't have an end to end system, just getting a gradient would result in rapid learning of that sequence. I'm surprised that at 2.5e9 frames you're not done. Perhaps there is a hyperparameter issue. Sorry I can't help but it sounds like you are in the same place I am with ML project. Good luck.

New comment by Javantea_ in "The lab-leak theory: inside the fight to uncover Covid-19’s origins"

Javantea_ — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 07:20:30 +0000

Here I have a little bit of experience. When a person has shown themselves to be a pathological liar, you can't judge their ideas on their own merits because the cost of judging far outweighs the cost of producing garbage ideas. That is why attention is so valuable, there are plenty of people out there who do not make it their trade to espouse nonsense.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Writing a game from first principles in 65c02 – Part One"

Javantea_ — Sat, 29 May 2021 19:30:48 +0000

The emulator doesn't work in Firefox because of a syntax error, await in the top level isn't supported. Remember to test your code in more than one browser.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Ask HN: I'm quitting my job, will create a game – any advice?"

Javantea_ — Thu, 10 Dec 2020 19:26:34 +0000

Is your game for sale or available? I'm releasing my first game now and am curious to see examples of negative results -- since all I ever see are positive results.

New comment by Javantea_ in "Ask HN: How do I overcome mental laziness?"

Javantea_ — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:53:05 +0000

Your questions are answered in the thread, which is a pretty significant feat to overcome (I ditto the pomodoro method, exercise, and higher expectations). That said, laziness is not all bad. Keep some of it in case you need it. Given sufficient motivation, I recommend aligning your productivity with meaningful outcomes. If you can't, you will be back here looking for another solution in not much time with a bigger problem. But then again, there are worse things in life than being lazy.