Hacker News: bjourne

New comment by bjourne in "Notes on DeepSeek"

bjourne — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:59:32 +0000

Wikipedia and text bots are unreliable sources for the exact same reason---they are anonymous. The point of a citation is stating that "I know this because X told me". The validity of that argument entirely depends on the authority and reputational harm X would suffer for being wrong.

New comment by bjourne in "Ultrafast machine learning on FPGAs via Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks"

bjourne — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:38:04 +0000

Sorry, I haven't had time to read your papers in full yet. Have you considered that LUTs on many FPGAs aren't 2:1 but instead, say, 6:3 and also may contain flip-flops and muxes? FPGA synthesis may not be as easy as "just" translating the activation functions to LUTs.

New comment by bjourne in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

bjourne — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:30:54 +0000

Regressive consumer tax due to tariffs?

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?"

bjourne — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:18:38 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: What are the best examples of good technical writing you know of?"

bjourne — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:14:51 +0000

RMS' C language tutorial.

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?"

bjourne — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:09:25 +0000

Yes, it does. Breadth of search is exactly what the effort setting controls.

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: How are thinking efforts implemented?"

bjourne — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:23:51 +0000

LLMs work by generating the most likely continuation to a prompt. But they can also generate multiple likely continuations. This create multiple branches which in turn can generate even more branches. The LLM can then evaluate the branches, prune the unpromising ones, and merge the best ones. More branches means more tokens, means more effort.

New comment by bjourne in "Been trying to post and I am getting flagged for it"

bjourne — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:26:40 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48321198

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?"

bjourne — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:20:10 +0000

One problem is that people trust the bot. To give you an example. If you submit articles for scientific publication you will get reviews that are at least co-authored by the bot. People defer their own judgement to what the bot says.

New comment by bjourne in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 22:08:34 +0000

I told the bot I liked Steely Dan, Eagles, Bob Seger, and Roxette and asked it for music recommendations. It replied with Toto. Exasperated, I wrote "Oh, shit, you stupid bot, you don't know ANYTHING about music!"

New comment by bjourne in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:14:43 +0000

PAP has exploited Singapore's strict libel laws to bankrupt opposition parties by suing for defamation. It is not so difficult to retain power when the opposition has no money for campaigning.

New comment by bjourne in "Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore Story (2023)"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:01:51 +0000

For starters, Singapore wasn't founded by a group of ethno-national colonists who drove out the indigenous population...

New comment by bjourne in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:42:35 +0000

Well, I don't know you, your teacher, or even what subject we're discussing but you wrote that you did "not have to bother with homework and assignments". Perhaps you would have learned more if the instruction had not failed to make you study? :P

New comment by bjourne in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:00:44 +0000

> I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades

This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.

New comment by bjourne in "Why Janet? (2023)"

bjourne — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 09:53:01 +0000

Namespaces as first class objects. Janet namespaces symbols by renaming them. It's not the same thing.

New comment by bjourne in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

bjourne — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:40:19 +0000

The author cites 50-year-old education studies. It's exactly like citing 50-year-old papers about cancer research. They seriously need to update their views on what the state-of-the-art in pedagogy is.

New comment by bjourne in "Why Janet? (2023)"

bjourne — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:56:24 +0000

Damn it, Janet. No proper namespaces. Hard pass.

New comment by bjourne in "Should you normalize RGB values by 255 or 256?"

bjourne — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:48:32 +0000

How do you fit 256 distinct values into 255 bins?

New comment by bjourne in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

bjourne — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:23:27 +0000

Copyleft is about republishing. You can't prevent anyone from using your compiler or text editor to develop non-free software.

New comment by bjourne in "Cessation of public development of Kefir C compiler"

bjourne — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:19:18 +0000

Sure, Free Software hasn't been the vehicle for societal change that RMS and others certainly hoped. I remember being flamed out in a user group for suggesting that our conference shouldn't be held in a "non-free" country such as Morocco, Turkey, or China because it's counter-productive to freedom. Very few people actually got it. But it's orthogonal to LLM trainers also using free software in "non-approved" ways.