Hacker News: futune

New comment by futune in "Making Sense of Proof by Contradiction [pdf]"

futune — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 09:31:33 +0000

I think this is a good comment. Could you also provide an example of a true (essential?) proof of contradiction of an elementary mathematical statement, to illustrate?

New comment by futune in "Crawling BitTorrent DHTs for Fun and Profit [pdf]"

futune — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 05:57:38 +0000

If /dev/null is fast and web scale, I will use it.

New comment by futune in "Solving Wordle using information theory"

futune — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:19:46 +0000

I did this immediately when wordle came out, too. Here's what I got for top 5 starting words along with the entropy:

"tears" 6.00570508021708 "teras" 5.95925128791865 "teals" 5.90122552646963 "tares" 5.88711668336419 "lears" 5.86158270234831

Using another metric which I called consistency (I think it was just minimizing the biggest bucket possible afterwards, trying to beat absurdle fast), the best starting word was tied between "arise", "raise", "aesir", "reais" and "serai". All of these have a worst-case scenario of 168 valid words remaining.

I find it interesting that different implementations seem to come up with slightly different rankings. Maybe the dictionaries are different?

New comment by futune in "Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo"

futune — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:38:12 +0000

It makes sense to me if the buyer is concerned that the performance would revert towards the mean on second generation if you attempt to breed further. But... The new paradigm is not breeding, it's cloning. So it seems like "one shot" high performance steeds even without pedigree could be viable?

I feel like I am missing a lot.

New comment by futune in "Firefox confirms working on own adblocker [video]"

futune — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:34:39 +0000

What would it even mean for the ublock origin runtime framework aka firefox to be equipped with an adblocker?!

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

futune — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 08:56:49 +0000

Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo way back was it for me. Not exactly genAI, but that was when I saw that where I thought we were vs where we actually were on a problem could shift by 10 years in 1 week.

New comment by futune in "The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid"

futune — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 19:25:57 +0000

Seems like the opposite to me. We don't like theft because the victim loses something. If stealing a car spawned a new car for you while the "victim" kept his, would it be a problem? So I don't really get the murder analogy. It's more like if the government had defined some act as murder even though nobody died.

New comment by futune in "Squillions: How money laundering won"

futune — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:58:15 +0000

I love "Let our Fame be Great", about the history of the peoples of the Caucasus. Strongly recommended.

New comment by futune in "Where does next-token prediction leave us?"

futune — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:57:49 +0000

The first person videos of drones hunting terrified soldiers coming out of Ukraine seem relevant. Apparently the last moments of the hunt are pretty much automated now, which increased the kill-rate considerably.

New comment by futune in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

futune — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:27:15 +0000

I had the same reaction.

New comment by futune in "Motorola phones have started hijacking the Amazon app to insert affiliate codes"

futune — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:25:29 +0000

I was thinking the same. But it worries me that these news about Motorola in particular doing shady shit. I was looking forward to the upcoming GrapheneOS/Motorola partnership :(

New comment by futune in "Why Do We Sleep Under Blankets, Even on the Hottest Nights? (2017)"

futune — Mon, 25 May 2026 11:42:25 +0000

This is a fascinating topic which was covered in-depth here: https://acoup.blog/2021/03/05/collections-clothing-how-did-t...

If I remember correctly, it claim is that about 50% of all labour over the course of history has gone into making textiles. More than food!

New comment by futune in "Apparently Google hates us now"

futune — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:45:24 +0000

Having a stupid name is tables stakes in the search space.

New comment by futune in "Saying goodbye to asm.js"

futune — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:06:14 +0000

So the death of asm.js is upon us? We are drifting away from the timeline of the prophecy:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...

(And to those who haven't encountered this before, I strongly recommend a watch. It may be the greatest tech talk of all time, for certain values of greatest.)

New comment by futune in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

futune — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:08:10 +0000

If you phrase it as an "insurance scheme", then sure they can? All insurance schemes work by giving you money if bad stuff you don't control happens. I'm sure they could.

They probably won't.

New comment by futune in "Microsoft surprises with its first server Linux distribution: Azure Linux 4.0"

futune — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:47 +0000

I remember a reading a similar prediction from several years ago, too, with more or less the same reasons. If I'm able to dig it up, I'll post a link.

It does make complete sense, doesn't it?...

New comment by futune in "Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker"

futune — Tue, 19 May 2026 08:28:17 +0000

I use ect on a monthly basis, at least. Especially for png files. It's pretty great!

New comment by futune in "Someone Shared a Real Monet Painting as AI and Asked for Critiques"

futune — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:07:19 +0000

Are the comments real?

I guess this is kind of the recursive version of the purported phenomenon, but, are we sure all those comments aren't just bot generated outrage so people can have big engagement by feeling superiour or whatever?

New comment by futune in "AMÁLIA and the future of European Portuguese LLMs"

futune — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:46:35 +0000

I guess Americanisms bleeding over into English LLMs as used in Britain happens similarly.

Should we also be expecting to see bleed-over of Indian English into generic English LLMs? Or is it not relatively large enough compared to America to force it, unlike Brazil to Portugal?

New comment by futune in "The locals don't know"

futune — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:31:21 +0000

At first I checked out this happiness survey claim, which is true. Then I was thinking, maybe my initial informal impression was wrong?

But looking at the depression and alcoholism data, it also seems to be true!

This is really confusing!