Hacker News: bnegreve

New comment by bnegreve in "Germany: Amazon is not allowed to force customers to watch ads on Prime Video"

bnegreve — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 06:01:52 +0000

> Blame the consumers.

The consumer is not a single person, and until we (the consumers) all coordinate, our individual incentive is to not pay (Classical prisoner dilemma).

So "voting with your wallet" doesn't maximize your personal interest.

New comment by bnegreve in "Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable"

bnegreve — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 10:27:23 +0000

> There's no "True" to an LLM, just how probable tokens are given previous context.

It may be enough: tool assisted LLMs already know when to use tools such as calculators or question answering systems when hallucinating an answer is likely to impact next token prediction error.

So next-token prediction error incentivize them to seek for true answers.

That doesn't guaranty anything of course, but if we were only interested in provably correct answers we would be working on theorem provers, not on LLMs

New comment by bnegreve in "Finland Bans Smartphones in Schools"

bnegreve — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 10:26:43 +0000

Surely reading/writing are useful skills that most people did not have before school was mandatory.

New comment by bnegreve in "Pixel is a unit of length and area"

bnegreve — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 13:48:36 +0000

> in "pixels wide" the word "wide" acts as a square root operator on the area and means "pixels^(-2)"

Did you meant "pixels^(1/2)"? I'm not sure what kind of units pixels^(-2) would be.

New comment by bnegreve in "418 I’m a teapot"

bnegreve — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 07:57:35 +0000

So many things in the IT world started as non-professional things by non-professional engineers. If you're a professional who lives off one of these things you should be glad that someone wanted to have fun at some point.

Let this HTTP code be a reminder of that.

New comment by bnegreve in "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Machine Learning and Neural Networks"

bnegreve — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 13:35:16 +0000

Most disciplines in CS have done that one way or another.

New comment by bnegreve in "Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source"

bnegreve — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 08:30:14 +0000

It is probably good news, but to be fair land use and GHG emissions are not the same thing, especially given that fertilizers are involved.

New comment by bnegreve in "FFT-based ocean-wave rendering, implemented in Godot"

bnegreve — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 10:41:58 +0000

It is very impressive, and better than anything I've seen before but think something is bit off with the swell. If I had to explain I would say that high frequency waves don't travel on top of low frequency waves the way they do in the video.

New comment by bnegreve in "Majority of sites and apps use dark patterns in the marketing of subscriptions"

bnegreve — Thu, 11 Jul 2024 10:44:02 +0000

> but then set up a website where that button keeps jumping away from your mouse for 20 minutes, while it's showing you uplifting messages why in fact, you should continue with the subscription. Still, only one click

Most laws can be misinterpreted, it doesn't necessarily mean they are useless.

New comment by bnegreve in "Wireless power transfer system achieves 270-kilowatt charge"

bnegreve — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:49:48 +0000

> over an 4.75-inch gap

New comment by bnegreve in "Group chats rule the world"

bnegreve — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 19:12:01 +0000

> every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.

There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included in this particular subgroup, I also have some bad news for you.

New comment by bnegreve in "Remember When You Named Your Girlfriend as a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either"

bnegreve — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 11:49:34 +0000

I don't know. If the case is not discussed in court, we will never know. This is why we should not blindly follow a will out of respect of the dead person, because there may be evidence this is just a mistake.

New comment by bnegreve in "Remember When You Named Your Girlfriend as a Beneficiary? He Didn't Either"

bnegreve — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 11:17:46 +0000

> In respect for the dead person, we absolutely have to carry out their will.

We trust judges when they decide to send people to prison for decades, so I don't see why we shouldn't trust them if they decide that this will is probably a mistake.

New comment by bnegreve in "The danger of the mediocre success when testing startup hypotheses (2023)"

bnegreve — Mon, 13 May 2024 15:38:09 +0000

I agree and I don't think it is specific to the world of entrepreneurs and/or social science experiments. If your target variable depends on a large number of correlated variables you are very unlikely to formulate the correct hypothesis by accident. This is why you need intuition or good judgement in science, just as much as in every thing else.

New comment by bnegreve in "European Space Agency to measure Earth at millimeter scale"

bnegreve — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 11:53:30 +0000

- The satellite will accomplish this [precision] by having the usual main Earth-measuring techniques co-located on board [satelite navigation, interferometry, laser ..] When used together, the ESA expects to be able to correct for biases inherent in each technique.

- An updated International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) will have immediate benefits on satellite-based systems, impacting Galileo-enabled applications in fields like aviation, traffic management, autonomous vehicles, positioning and navigation

- The space agency added that meteorology, natural hazard prediction, monitoring climate change effects, land management and surveying – as well as the study of gravitational and non-gravitational forces as fields – would also see benefits.

- ...

New comment by bnegreve in "Europe's deepest mine to become giant gravity battery"

bnegreve — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 05:35:32 +0000

Soon we will be hearing of the global flattening.

New comment by bnegreve in "There's More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless"

bnegreve — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:42:59 +0000

The title is rather ambiguous: evidence that RTO mandates do not increase firm performance is not evidence that returning to office is useless.

> we do not find significant changes in firm performance in terms of profitability and stock market valuation after the RTO mandates.

New comment by bnegreve in "Researchers have found a faster way to do integer linear programming"

bnegreve — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 06:28:59 +0000

> Implementing them in large industrial (or open source) code bases in a maintainable way -- and then actually maintaining that code -- is a different skillset, a different set of interestes,

You're making a very general point on how algorithm research and software development are two different things, which is of course true. However OP's question is genuine: a lot of research in OR is very practical, and researchers often hack solvers to demonstrate that whatever idea offers a benefit over existing solving techniques. There are no reason to believe that a good new idea like this one couldn't be demonstrated and incorporated into new solvers quickly (especially given the competition).

So the quoted sentence is indeed a bit mysterious. I think it just meant to avoid comment such as "if it's so good why isn't it used in cplex?".

New comment by bnegreve in "'Couple,' 'Few,' and 'Several'"

bnegreve — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 08:25:28 +0000

Oh, indeed it is mentioned, i overlooked this part.

> It even mentions Jupiter's moons later

It is not a coincidence, I reused the example to illustrate my point.

New comment by bnegreve in "'Couple,' 'Few,' and 'Several'"

bnegreve — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 05:44:20 +0000

I am not a native speaker, but my feeling is that several can also be used to insist on non-uniqueness. E.g. "Most rich families own several cars" or "Jupiter has several moons" (= not one). I'm surprised that it is not mentioned in the article.