Hacker News: fritzo

New comment by fritzo in "Who's the smartest corvid?"

fritzo — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 17:58:41 +0000

By "sizable rock" do you mean large pebble or small boulder?

New comment by fritzo in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

fritzo — Thu, 21 May 2026 16:29:12 +0000

What has "artificial" to do with it? Human intelligence is also unauthorized unconscious plagiarism.

New comment by fritzo in "Dumb ways for an open source project to die"

fritzo — Tue, 19 May 2026 22:47:40 +0000

Dependency bloat and dependency bitrot have made solutions less permanent, have increased the maintenance burden. My ancient projects with zero dependencies still stand. But projects I built on shifting dependencies are rotting and cracking.

New comment by fritzo in "Claude Opus 4.7"

fritzo — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:58:51 +0000

Looks to me like a mob of humans, angry they've been deceived by ambiguous communications, product nerfing, surprisingly low usage limits, and an appallingly sycophantic overconfident coding agent

New comment by fritzo in "Claude Opus 4.7"

fritzo — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:50:27 +0000

ln -s CLAUDE.md AGENTS.md

There's your one line change.

New comment by fritzo in "In Denmark, the spread of solar panels has become a divisive issue"

fritzo — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 21:18:06 +0000

If it's a poor location for photovoltaics, it's exactly as a poor for photosynthesis

New comment by fritzo in "LinkedIn uses 2.4 GB RAM across two tabs"

fritzo — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 17:35:25 +0000

Sorry for my ignorance, but what exactly is the distinction between hn and social media? Is it the personalization that distinguishes the two? Does "social" mean "feed depends on graph neighborhood"? So collaborative filtering + ranking algorithms + moderation is not social media until you add graph neighborhoods?

New comment by fritzo in "A laser-based process that enables adhesive-free paper packaging"

fritzo — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:34:04 +0000

I've also seen a glue-less paper binding trick where two pieces of paper are finely crimped together with some high pressure tool in alternating v^v^v^ patterns, actually making tiny tears in the paper. Does anyone know what kind of tool does that?

New comment by fritzo in "Day 1 of ARC-AGI-3"

fritzo — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 04:57:55 +0000

ELI5 what is a harness?

EDIT from https://arcprize.org/media/ARC_AGI_3_Technical_Report.pdf:

> We seek to fight two forms of overfitting that would muddy public sensefinding:

> Task-specific overfitting. This includes any agent that is created with knowledge of public ARC-AGI-3 environments, subsequently being evaluated on the same environments. It could be either directly trained on these environments, or using a harness that is handcrafted or specifically configured by someone with knowledge of the public environments.

New comment by fritzo in "AI users whose lives were wrecked by delusion"

fritzo — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:50:40 +0000

Sounds like her first thought was, "I'm talking to a manic guy, and I can use him to make money"

New comment by fritzo in "Government agencies buy commercial data about Americans in bulk"

fritzo — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:42:29 +0000

Wait, is 474 a number or a proper noun?

New comment by fritzo in "So where are all the AI apps?"

fritzo — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 19:35:09 +0000

They're private, that's the beauty. Code is so cheap now, we can ween ourselves off massive dependency chains.

200 years ago text was much more expensive, and more people memorized sayings and poems and quotations. Now text is cheap, and we rarely quote.

New comment by fritzo in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

fritzo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:53:03 +0000

Those business goals will soon realize they need more electricity. More brains will be devoted to power generation.

New comment by fritzo in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

fritzo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 19:42:01 +0000

The same could be asked about people. The answer is social intelligence.

New comment by fritzo in "Chest Fridge (2009)"

fritzo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:23:41 +0000

By that logic, best fridge is no fridge at all ;)

New comment by fritzo in "The Los Angeles Aqueduct Is Wild"

fritzo — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 04:41:02 +0000

Thank you, I was so confused by the obvious clickbait! I love Grady's videos, but yikes.

New comment by fritzo in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

fritzo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:08:48 +0000

> optimum properties for estimating a posterior distribution

Circular reasoning: that's true only if the posterior is normal, or if your "optimal" is defined by second moments. In infinite variance cases, the best estimator can be median or an alpha moment for alpha < 2, but yikes the math is much more difficult.

-- A mathematician who has indeed fallen into the beauty trap

New comment by fritzo in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

fritzo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:04:30 +0000

Heavy tails are everywhere. Normal distributions have absurdly light tails. Levy alpha stable distributions have power law tails. Power law tails are everywhere.

Some things with heavy tails:

  token occurrences
  comment thread upvotes
  startup IPOs
  social follower counts
  network latency
  github stars
  git diffs
  power station size
  weather events

New comment by fritzo in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

fritzo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:59:27 +0000

Right. And the CLT is not actually limited to normal distributions. Both of the distribution families I mentioned are central limit theorems. The CLT we first see in school regards means of finite variance distributions, where the finite variance assumption is made because it makes the math easier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem#The_gene...

New comment by fritzo in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

fritzo — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 23:54:18 +0000

Hot take: bell curves are everywhere exactly because the math is simple.

The causal chain is: the math is simple -> teachers teach simple things -> students learn what they're taught -> we see the world in terms of concepts we've learned.

The central limit theorem generalizes beyond simple math to hard math: Levy alpha stable distributions when variance is not finite, the Fisher-Tippett-Gnedenko theorem and Gumbel/Fréchet/Weibull distributions regarding extreme values. Those curves are also everwhere, but we don't see them because we weren't taught them because the math is tough.