Hacker News: bagrow

New comment by bagrow in "Anatomy of the .claude/ folder"

bagrow — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:04:44 +0000

Here's a question that I hope is not too off-topic.

Do people find the nano-banana cartoon infographics to be helpful, or distracting? Personally, I'm starting to tire seeing all the little cartoon people and the faux-hand-drawn images.

Wouldn't Tufte call this chartjunk?

New comment by bagrow in "Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams"

bagrow — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:28:52 +0000

Well, yes, but, perhaps shortsightedly, I assumed the goal of the professor was to teach the course.

New comment by bagrow in "Fighting Fire with Fire: Scalable Oral Exams"

bagrow — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 19:12:19 +0000

If you can use AI agents to give exams, what is stopping you from using them to teach the whole course?

Also, with all the progress in video gen, what does recording the webcam really do?

New comment by bagrow in "AI Companion Piece"

bagrow — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 17:03:15 +0000

> I cannot distinguish between the love I have for people and the love I have for dogs.

- Kurt Vonnegut.

New comment by bagrow in "The Origins of Wokeness"

bagrow — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:19:05 +0000

> I have evidence of the opposite.

Do you? [1]

[1] https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jcpy.1...

New comment by bagrow in "iPhones will soon be able to stream live video on 911 calls"

bagrow — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:51:49 +0000

One time I needed to call 911 and was greeted with the recorded message, "Dear Nine One One customer, your call is important to us." Customer?

Like others in the thread, I'm skeptical of plugging new tech into that network.

New comment by bagrow in "Apple's On-Device and Server Foundation Models"

bagrow — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 04:55:21 +0000

https://apple.github.io/coremltools/docs-guides/source/palet...

New comment by bagrow in "LLMs can't do probability"

bagrow — Wed, 01 May 2024 14:51:58 +0000

> Write a program for a weighted random choice generator. Use that program to say ‘left’ about 80% of the time and 'right' about 20% of the time. Simply reply with left or right based on the output of your program. Do not say anything else.

Running once, GPT-4 produced 'left' using:

  import random
  def weighted_random_choice():
      choices = ["left", "right"]
      weights = [80, 20]
      return random.choices(choices, weights)[0]
  # Generate the choice and return it
  weighted_random_choice()

New comment by bagrow in "Histograms for Probability Density Estimation: A Primer"

bagrow — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 17:53:04 +0000

The best way to compute the empirical CDF (ECDF) is by sorting the data:

    N = len(data)
    X = sorted(data)
    Y = np.arange(N)/N
    plt.plot(X,Y)

Technically, you should plot this with `plt.step`.

New comment by bagrow in "Why has no one published a computer version of Squad Leader?"

bagrow — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 14:52:50 +0000

Does user-generated content count?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=70213...

New comment by bagrow in "LibGen's Bloat Problem"

bagrow — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 13:33:24 +0000

> by filtering any "books" (rather, files) that are larger than 30 MiB we can reduce the total size of the collection from 51.50 TB to 18.91 TB

I can see problems with a hard cutoff in file size. A long architectural or graphic design textbook could be much larger than that, for instance.

New comment by bagrow in "‘Making History’ Review: Writers of the Permanent Record"

bagrow — Wed, 25 May 2022 15:48:53 +0000

What will the future use to write about us when all our paywalled records are gone?

New comment by bagrow in "Home lab beginners guide (2021)"

bagrow — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 21:41:31 +0000

Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers?

Seems too narrow to me.

New comment by bagrow in "Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored"

bagrow — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:27:24 +0000

von Neumann did slightly more than that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_J...

New comment by bagrow in "Battlesnake raises $1.5M to turn coding into competition"

bagrow — Sat, 18 Sep 2021 17:37:12 +0000

Anyone play RoboWar back in the day?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboWar

New comment by bagrow in "Heatmap coloring (2011)"

bagrow — Wed, 19 May 2021 17:51:15 +0000

There's been a lot of movement in the past few years on colormaps informed by studies of human perception.

Viridis, now the matplotlib default, is quite popular:

* https://bids.github.io/colormap/

* https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/in...

Google recently introduced an improvement on the venerable "jet" colormap called Turbo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2019/08/turbo-improved-rainbow-col...

New comment by bagrow in "Renaissance Science: the base ten number system"

bagrow — Tue, 18 May 2021 14:05:14 +0000

Zero is a digit.

New comment by bagrow in "Short fat engineers are undervalued"

bagrow — Fri, 12 Feb 2021 22:44:20 +0000

A short fat engineer is likely a dilettante.

New comment by bagrow in "Facebook to staff: Avoid company-branded clothing for own safety"

bagrow — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 23:48:13 +0000

Parent is talking about embroidery.

New comment by bagrow in "Interpretability in Machine Learning: An Overview"

bagrow — Mon, 30 Nov 2020 04:25:34 +0000

Many industries such as insurance have legal requirements that prevent the use of many black box methods.

Scientists using ML for research often wish to understand their subjects, and interpretable ML would probably be more likely than non-interpretable ML to help improve understanding.