Hacker News: boccaff

New comment by boccaff in "We have proof automation now"

boccaff — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:17:22 +0000

Don't we still need to verify that what the LLM proved is actually the stated system?If agents cutting corners (like deleting tests) is a concern, how can we be sure that the verification corresponds to the software and that every _load bearing_ assumption is true? I don't think that simply trusting the Lean core is enough.

New comment by boccaff in "Financing the AI boom: from cash flows to debt [pdf]"

boccaff — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:19:13 +0000

The value of AI and related companies on retirement funds

New comment by boccaff in "Pluto.jl 1.0 release – reactive notebook for Julia"

boccaff — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 10:43:44 +0000

It is interesting that they are paying attention to that, as the section on interactivity [1] brings "how to disable a cell" that would prevent its reactivity and anything that depends upon. With some careful placement, you can disable the automatic calculations. Another thing would be tuning the parameter for confirming before a long runtime. Set it to 50 ms, and only run "almost instant things".

[1]https://discourse.julialang.org/t/pluto-1-0-release/137296#p...

New comment by boccaff in "New arXiv policy: 1-year ban for hallucinated references"

boccaff — Fri, 15 May 2026 10:43:41 +0000

There is a lot of "throw it against the wall, and if it sticks, write it up" empirical work against benchmarks. It leads to post-hoc rationalization of the work and browser plugins using LLMs to find references for work that is already written. It is a bureaucratic view about "you need a citation for this", where people misunderstand the citation as a checkbox, instead of "you need to substantiate this claim, as I, the reviewer, do not accept this as a fact".

New comment by boccaff in "Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm"

boccaff — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 22:39:08 +0000

The estimated area of no-till in Brazil is between 33 to 50 million hectares. It won't be hard for you to find videos of no-till corn being planted following soybean. There is also grass cover that is planted after the main crop season, that is later grazed. This cover stays till the next year and the new crop is planted without tilling. You may need to use "plantio direto" "milho safrinha" and "braquiária de cobertura" plus some translation.

New comment by boccaff in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

boccaff — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 12:06:39 +0000

llama models pushed the envelope for a while, and having them "open-weight" allowed a lot of tinkering. I would say that most of fine tuned evolved from work on top of llama models.

New comment by boccaff in "Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules"

boccaff — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:52:00 +0000

tree algorithms on sklearn use parallel arrays to represent the tree structure.

New comment by boccaff in "Decision trees – the unreasonable power of nested decision rules"

boccaff — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 12:49:42 +0000

short answer: No.

longer answer: Random forests use the average of multiple trees that are trained in a way to reduce the correlation between trees (bagging with modified trees). Boosting trains sequentially, with each classifier working on the resulting residuals so far.

I am assuming that you meant boosted decision trees, sometimes gradient boosted decisions trees, as usually one have boosted decision trees. I think xgboost added boosted RF, and you can boost any supervised model, but it is not usual.

New comment by boccaff in "Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated"

boccaff — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 18:21:06 +0000

Do you have any pointer to search for that?

New comment by boccaff in "Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time"

boccaff — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 21:35:54 +0000

You can see aggregated results on `stats` [1] for every year. In general, half the people drop in the first 3-4 days. For last year, by day 12 there is less than 1/5 of day 01. While the stats do count people that completed later, the shape appears to track well with what I saw during the events since 2021.

[1] https://adventofcode.com/2024/stats

New comment by boccaff in "Advent of Code 2025: Number of puzzles reduce from 25 to 12 for the first time"

boccaff — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 21:28:47 +0000

I am not aware of Eric saying something about that alternative, but this comment on reddit[1] makes a lot of sense to me:

> Given that part 2 is often a very simple modification of part 1, this could lead to many of the days being total letdowns. I can enjoy a simple puzzle, but I'd be a bit disappointed if one day is a single line change to the previous day.

I'd also add that not having to be worried everyday about something makes a lot of sense. He can have fewer days "on call" in December with.

[1]https://www.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/chang...

New comment by boccaff in "Why friction is necessary for growth"

boccaff — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 16:26:29 +0000

You could think about how most people can get away without doing anything physical to survive, so we must artificially exercise to be healthy. The question then is if this analogy hold for mental capacities, and I think it does.

New comment by boccaff in "The role of Amazon fires in the record atmospheric CO₂ growth in 2024"

boccaff — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 23:34:06 +0000

hard, and expensive, but doable as long as carbon credits are a thing: https://re.green/en/?force_locale=1

there are a few others in Brazil, like Biomas and Mombak

New comment by boccaff in "Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?"

boccaff — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 11:10:07 +0000

>2. be very careful when using rm command (use alias rm='rm -i' )

and treat mv/cp/rsync like rm

New comment by boccaff in "Why Datadog bought Eppo for $220M, and what it means for experimentation"

boccaff — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:40:52 +0000

Announcement from Eppo[1]

[1] https://www.geteppo.com/blog/eppo-is-now-part-of-datadog

New comment by boccaff in "Spectral Imaging Made Easy: A Powerful Python Library"

boccaff — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 14:41:20 +0000

There is a multitude of applications leveraging parts of the spectra different than the visible. I come from an agricultural background, and you can see examples from improving classification of land use, detection and classification of diseases, nutritional status assessment, indirect measurements of properties of plants and soil... it is endless, and every time any part of the tool stack gets cheaper, you have more and more potential applications. This comment [1] have a nice description for the library.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42507805

New comment by boccaff in "OCaml Syntax Sucks (2016)"

boccaff — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 09:49:33 +0000

If anything, OCaml's error messages are something that sucks, especially for newcomers. The `Error: Syntax Error` message that points to an empty last line in the file leaves you doing the parser work, in a language that you don't understand.

New comment by boccaff in "What Excessive Screen Time Does to the Adult Brain"

boccaff — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 09:01:17 +0000

I'd guess that you can equate "screen time" to "smartphone use" in most of the population but here. Similar to what people are using the screen for.

To include so many variations of screen would complicate a lot the study, and without a prior about why it should matter, you are probably safer starting with something more homogeneous.

New comment by boccaff in "React for R"

boccaff — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:54:05 +0000

When I've dealt with R in production, cursed meant: - Difficult to keep package versioning, even with "renv". - If an analyst decide to use a single function from the "tidyverse", you have a tons of dependencies. - Large docker images (1G+) due to packages like "devtools" and very large dependency tree for the "productivity packages" (see above). - Hard to communicate with the process. With luck, you can set it up and work with 'r-script' [1]. Without luck, stdout from process or simple files for io.

In the end, to have a nice webapp, we ended up rewriting the R code into typescript. Julia don´t solve this also, as you have a hard time to set it up to communicate with other things. It seems that we can´t avoid the "2 or 3 languages" problem if you don´t use python.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/r-script

New comment by boccaff in "D&D is Anti-Medieval"

boccaff — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:27:38 +0000

This impression looks more like the main events of the movie.

You have the several turns on the Battle of Osgiliath, and Boromir alluding to Gondor paying the cost for holding the frotiers with Mordor.