Hacker News: OisinMoran

New comment by OisinMoran in "The Indie Internet Index – submit your favorite sites"

OisinMoran — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:49:56 +0000

Oh delightful, thank you for this! I also maintain a somewhat similar meta-list on my site lynkmi: https://lynkmi.com/oisin/lynkmi%2520adjacent

Going to dig into these soon and will post a few!

New comment by OisinMoran in "Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game"

OisinMoran — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:46:17 +0000

Ooh this one is fun too! Though it doesn't get quite as hard as the slider one. Breezed through all 47 levels of this pretty easily while there were one or two impossible seeming ones in the slider.

New comment by OisinMoran in "Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game"

OisinMoran — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:39:15 +0000

This is fun! I just played once and got 0.0016, which it says is "absurdly below the theoretical limit"...

Okay, tried again and got 0.0034 which is still says is beyond the human limit! I'll have to give this to my mum because we often argue about colours and I suspect she might be a tetrachromat.

Both tests on a Pixel 10 btw

New comment by OisinMoran in "My journey to the microwave alternate timeline"

OisinMoran — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:33:41 +0000

No mention of the Miele Dialog which gets as close as I've seen (though not quite there) to my dream of crispy fried eggs with runny yolk in the microwave. Their big example is being able to cook a fish while it remains in a block of ice. Pretty damn cool!

https://www.reviewed.com/ovens/features/we-tried-an-oven-tha...

New comment by OisinMoran in "A solver for Semantle"

OisinMoran — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:05:15 +0000

I think the way the similarity is done is based on word co-occurrence and the dataset used is news articles. So you can imagine that not a lot of news articles mention castle in that context.

New comment by OisinMoran in "A solver for Semantle"

OisinMoran — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:49:30 +0000

This is super interesting, thanks for sharing! I did a similar thing a few years ago which I'd been meaning to properly finish and share, and your post was the inspiration needed to make mine public (albeit still in a state much too messy for my liking, hopefully having it public will force me to improve it).

We took fairly different approaches, but I really enjoy the visual explanation element of yours! Well done.

My investigation stemmed from wondering if the seemingly useless 1st, 10th, and 1000th nearest word similarity scores were enough to uniquely ID the word. Turns out—yes, pretty much! It's effectively just a kind of reverse engineering, similar to how you also made your own version of the game. Can definitely improve on a lot.

Tried today's puzzle and got it in two (first was 999/1000).

Here's my code & write up: https://github.com/OisinMoran/Solving-Semantle/blob/main/Sol...

New comment by OisinMoran in "Dark web agent spotted bedroom wall clue to rescue girl from abuse"

OisinMoran — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 04:59:42 +0000

To be fair, I initially had the same thought, and the HN item just two below this as I write also has agent (but the LLM kind) in its title.

New comment by OisinMoran in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

OisinMoran — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:38:03 +0000

Just on the redaction point, I did notice one email that looked correctly redacted but when zoomed in you could see some pixels from a few letters had escaped a little. It might be possible to reverse engineer the email just from that.

New comment by OisinMoran in "Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route"

OisinMoran — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:45:47 +0000

Can vouch for his “Oranges” too! A phenomenal writer

The Landau Sampler

OisinMoran — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 02:46:07 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/OisinMoran/landau_sampler

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46819983

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by OisinMoran in "In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?"

OisinMoran — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:20:34 +0000

I had a very similar issue with Chants of Sennaar (another incredible game), where there were exactly 3 words I was missing, I knew what they were, but couldn't find them. I kept going anyway and found one (by a different method than usual), then eventually after scouring the whole map twice had to look it up and there was just a stairs down the edge of one section that I didn't see at all, but which also didn't respond to the "hint" button that normally shows you any direction you can go or thing you can interact with.

Also very glad I looked up the solution for the Obelisk puzzle in Fez as there was no way I was getting that (seemingly incredibly contrived, but apparently not correctly solved yet) solution.

New comment by OisinMoran in "In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?"

OisinMoran — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:10:19 +0000

An excellent 3 part video from Elyot Grant [0] introduced me to the term "fiero" for this conquering after a struggle, in contrast to a simple "aha/eureka". The difference being one is transmissible, the other is not. Thought it was a nice distinction. Highly recommend the videos!

[0] Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCHciE9CYfA

New comment by OisinMoran in "New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective"

OisinMoran — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:13:28 +0000

OT but recently came across this incredible video of a very engaging solve of a very beautiful Sudoku modification.

If you like puzzles this will brighten your day.

https://youtu.be/yKf9aUIxdb4

New comment by OisinMoran in "New York Times games are hard: A computational perspective"

OisinMoran — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:12:17 +0000

Just Connections, Wordle, and Mini for me (in that order), with the occasional Crossword (tend towards a barbell strategy of just doing maybe Mon, Tue, Sun to get the quick hits and a real challenging puzzle).

Also experience the odd difficulty due to Americanisms, but can't really fault a puzzle coming from something called the New York Times for that. I do however think the puzzle setting for Connections is inferior to The Wall from Only Connect, where they got the idea from. If you haven't seen that yet it's definitely worth a watch (it gets harder as as a season progresses).

New comment by OisinMoran in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

OisinMoran — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:13:07 +0000

"You have 1 minute to design a maze that takes 2 minutes to solve"

New comment by OisinMoran in "Prime chains"

OisinMoran — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 14:00:52 +0000

Fun! If bi-twin chains are those where +1 AND -1 are prime, I wonder what the longest chain is where either +1 OR -1 are prime. And while we're at it, why not XOR too.

New comment by OisinMoran in "All 23-Bit Still Lifes Are Glider Constructible"

OisinMoran — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 13:14:26 +0000

If there haven't been any proposals for a friendly name for the 23 bit holdout it looks like a pair of glasses to me. So perhaps "spectacles" would be a nice one, similar to the spectre of recent aperiodic monotile fame.

New comment by OisinMoran in "List of individual trees"

OisinMoran — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:59:41 +0000

Delighted to see my local one in there, with a description reading like it was written by Douglas Adams.

“The Hungry Tree is an otherwise unremarkable specimen of the London plane, which has become known for having partially consumed a nearby park bench.”

New comment by OisinMoran in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

OisinMoran — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:21:16 +0000

https://oisinmoran.com/ with a few entries that have made it the HN front page over the years.

New comment by OisinMoran in "Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)"

OisinMoran — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 20:52:48 +0000

Reminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there is a phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by playing a record titled I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X.