Hacker News: coolness

New comment by coolness in "Debug Project"

coolness — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 08:50:00 +0000

Good work! The animations are super cool, how did you make them?

New comment by coolness in "Why I may ‘hire’ AI instead of a graduate student"

coolness — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 09:31:47 +0000

This used to be the case: research was conducted mostly at academic institutions that did not provide degrees [1]. The "research university" is a relatively new thing

[1] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10/the-origin-of-the-research...

New comment by coolness in "Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code"

coolness — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:06:45 +0000

Slight tangent: i was wondering why DeepSeek would develop something like this. In the linked paper it says

> In production, DeepSeek-OCR can generate training data for LLMs/VLMs at a scale of 200k+ pages per day (a single A100-40G).

That... doesn't sound legal

New comment by coolness in "We mourn our craft"

coolness — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:29:30 +0000

Great post. Super sad state of affairs but we move on and learn new things. Programming was always a tool and now the tool has changed from something that required skill and understanding to complaining to a neural net. Just have to focus on the problem being solved more.

New comment by coolness in "Lights and Shadows (2020)"

coolness — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 13:26:15 +0000

damn, i was really excited to have a new article by this guy. Makes some of the best articles out there for sure

New comment by coolness in "Pokémon Team Optimization"

coolness — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:58:12 +0000

Wow thats very cool, i was puzzled at first as to why the pokemon types were in Finnish!

New comment by coolness in "Why proteins fold and how GPUs help us fold"

coolness — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:49:56 +0000

Yeah, I don't really understand why someone would make a blog and use AI to write the articles. Isn't having a blog more about the joy of writing and the learning you do while writing it?

New comment by coolness in "The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition"

coolness — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 09:15:38 +0000

Great post and amazing progress in this field! However, I have to wonder if some of these letters were part of the training data for Gemini, since they are well-known and someone has probably already done the painstaking work of transcribing them...

New comment by coolness in "Update and shut down no longer restarts PC, 25H2 patch addresses decades-old bug"

coolness — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 12:47:58 +0000

Yeah, even with this fixed it's going to be annoying because it first restarts, so you have to stay at the PC to select windows in grub

New comment by coolness in "No reachable chess position with more than 218 moves"

coolness — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 07:06:06 +0000

I also thought this but OP is right: https://dev.timenote.info/de/Nenad-Petrovic

> In 1964 Petrović constructed a position with 218 possible moves for White.

New comment by coolness in "Relearning math as an adult"

coolness — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 11:45:09 +0000

Great story and I'm sure the new math chops help her a lot during her studies.

In case anyone else is interested, it is possible to study computer science without any entrance exams due to the Digital Education for All initivative (https://www.helsinki.fi/fi/projektit/digital-education-all in Finnish, sorry). You get the full study right after completing 60 credits (out of a total 180 credits) worth of courses in the first year.

New comment by coolness in "(Unsuccessfully) Fine-tuning GPT to play "Connections""

coolness — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:46:29 +0000

This is a great idea actually, this way you could also enforce that all the words appear _exactly once_ (by rejecting during sampling words that were already in the answer) which seemed to be a significant issue for me when I tried this.

New comment by coolness in "(Unsuccessfully) Fine-tuning GPT to play "Connections""

coolness — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 09:39:29 +0000

> I expect if you asked it to correct its output in a followup message, it could do so without much difficulty.

I had a similar idea to the author and tried this many times, albeit with the free version of ChatGPT. After getting wrong results, I prompted it to correct them, even telling the model explicitly that a category is wrong or doesn't make sense. Nothing I did made a difference.

My two cents on why this doesn't work has to do with the fact that the answer should contain a discrete set of words given in the prompt, and importantly, they should not be duplicated. I suspect that these currents models are not very good at following the instruction "the token should appear in the answer exactly once"

New comment by coolness in "The Last of the Fungus"

coolness — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 08:05:52 +0000

What an engagingly-written and interesting piece. I really enjoyed the glimpse into the lives of ordinary people somewhere where I may never get the opportunity to travel to.

New comment by coolness in "Infinite AI Array"

coolness — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 23:42:43 +0000

Some of the underlying CuDNN algorithms have nondeterministic implementations, which applies to PyTorch as well. See https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/notes/randomness.html

New comment by coolness in "Google combines Maps and Waze teams in restructuring move"

coolness — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:36:50 +0000

You can change the language of Google Maps to Finnish, and still keep the phone on English. At least in the latest versions of Android. This makes it pronounce the street names properly

New comment by coolness in "Human Chess is a chess variant where playing the top engine move is forbidden"

coolness — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 12:30:55 +0000

I loved the idea, but on further thought, the AI has a huge advantage in knowing what the engine move is, so they can never lose to incorrectly calling the last move and engine move.

New comment by coolness in "Show HN: Noctie – A chess AI that predicts your rating"

coolness — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 15:55:44 +0000

The computer seems to move very slowly, and gets much more time for each move than me. Is this intended, or is it because everyone on HN is trying it out? Might be some sort of client - backend synch issue.

edit: the computer now flagged on my screen, but I did not get any message of a result

New comment by coolness in "Nord – An Arctic, north-bluish color palette"

coolness — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 15:05:52 +0000

Reminds me of the business card scene in American Psycho:

"Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness of it. Oh, my God. It even has a watermark."

New comment by coolness in "Show HN: Play against well-known chess players' openings"

coolness — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 08:48:51 +0000

Eric Rosen accepted my Stafford gambit! [1]

ps. Is there an option to play black?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIecRRl1cfc