Hacker News: OisinMoran

New comment by OisinMoran in "Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated"

OisinMoran — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:50:47 +0000

Fan Fiction: Open weight distillations / riffs

New comment by OisinMoran in "Breakthroughs for batteries could soon make them better"

OisinMoran — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:48:36 +0000

Your last sentence is simply not true. Helicopters are massive in terms of volume and weight, and incredibly loud. You're also assuming our current layout of everything would stay the same. Imagine if teleportation existed, do you think cities, towns, and suburbs would still look the same?

A collision is less likely in 3D than in 2D, and obviously the chicken would be delivered to you via drone rather than the inverse.

New comment by OisinMoran in "Googlebook"

OisinMoran — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:56:11 +0000

Upcoming launches: Mapsbook, Waymobook, Walletbook, Authenticatorbook, ...

New comment by OisinMoran in "Googlebook"

OisinMoran — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:54:56 +0000

Google have been terrible at copywriting (at least in their hardware line) for as long as I can remember. Here's an example from 2020: https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1312560706965983234

It's a shame because I love the Pixel series and they're doing it a disservice by not marketing it better. Apple's copy on the other hand is generally excellent.

New comment by OisinMoran in "Googlebook"

OisinMoran — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:49:47 +0000

Yeah I've been exclusively on Pixels since the 2 and love them

New comment by OisinMoran in "Ping-pong robot beats top-level human players"

OisinMoran — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 23:59:03 +0000

This is great, I remember being sorely disappointed by the hyped up Timo Boll vs Kuka robot 12 years ago. I thought it was going to be a real match and seemed like the robot would destroy him, but ended up just being a marketing stunt and felt like a fixed fight, with no real digging into the tech or why the robot "lost". Still some cool footage: https://youtu.be/tIIJME8-au8

New comment by OisinMoran in "The Theory of Interstellar Trade [pdf] (1978)"

OisinMoran — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:05:04 +0000

“It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.”

Love this paper

New comment by OisinMoran in "All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)"

OisinMoran — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:31:18 +0000

You may enjoy this piece, Domes are over-rated:

https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...

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