Hacker News: generationP

New comment by generationP in "Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf]"

generationP — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 15:01:41 +0000

Graham/Knuth/Patashnik is a lot less "basic discrete maths you're most likely to need" and a lot more "number sequences we've known and loved". Almost more useful for physicists due to the amount of summation fu you'll learn there.

New comment by generationP in "Mathematics for Computer Science (2018) [pdf]"

generationP — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:59:50 +0000

I found the choice of material quite nonstandard. And the writing is witty, full of MIT humor. It's a bit sad that the writing has stopped in 2018.

New comment by generationP in "Dark Pattern Games"

generationP — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:26:00 +0000

Most of the dark patterns are not fun. The "psychological dark patterns" are, to some healthy degree.

New comment by generationP in "Dark Pattern Games"

generationP — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 02:24:52 +0000

Neat... but most good RPGs fit much of the "psychological dark patterns" listed at https://www.darkpattern.games/pattern/4/psychological-dark-p... . So the total scores won't be as useful as they might look like.

New comment by generationP in "Math Books"

generationP — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:46:14 +0000

This looks like an index of Mir books, without any additional sorting or curation. You probably can get a good education on many topics out of these, but also waste significant time on reading out-of-date and out-of-order texts. Someone experienced could make this a lot more useful by proposing a reading order and giving some sort of evaluations of importance and quality.

And keep in mind that these are from the pre-1990 USSR, so don't expect any modern maths or CS.

New comment by generationP in "Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category"

generationP — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 18:05:49 +0000

I have a hunch that most of the slop is not just on CS but specifically about AI. For some reason, a lot of people's first idea when they encounter an LLM is "let's have this LLM write an opinion piece about LLMs", as if they want to test its self-awareness or hack it by self-recursion. And then they get a medley of the learning data, which if they are lucky contains some technical explanations sprinkled in.

That said, AI-generated papers have already been spotted in other disciplines besides cs, and some of them are really obvious (arXiv:2508.11634v1 starts with a review of a non-existing paper). I really hope arXiv won't react by narrowing its scope to "novel research only"; in fact there is already AI slop in that category and it is harder to spot for a moderator.

("Peer-reviewed papers only" is mostly equivalent to "go away". Authors post on the arXiv in order to get early feedback, not just to have their paper openly accessible. And most journals at least formally discourage authors from posting their papers on the arXiv.)

New comment by generationP in "Tim Bray on Grokipedia"

generationP — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 17:44:20 +0000

Look for anything written by Jesse Singal or Charles Murray for the well-researched anti-woke content I'm referring to (and there is a lot of more; these are just two authors who made it their focus; some of the best stuff comes actually comes from journalists with wider purviews).

I don't know what "Cult of Personality" you are referring to; unless you are hallucinating this particular reference, I've gone to school in the wrong country for that particular report to be part of my assigned reading (and the right country, sadly, seems to have skipped it entirely; there might be an update out in a few years...). Either way, what is the relevance here? What I've been saying is that I'm far from sure of this project's success and would be doing it quite differently. Musk's personal characteristics may well be the reason why he did it the way he did, but ultimately the project won't live and die by them (already because he himself will likely lose interest soon enough).

New comment by generationP in "Tim Bray on Grokipedia"

generationP — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 02:25:06 +0000

Note that I've said "anti-woke content", not "anti-woke media". I am including the occasional "course correction" opeds and actually well-researched longreads you're seeing in places like NYT, Atlantic and such. Partisan outlets for partisan readers aren't doing the heavy lifting here, but the success of Substack and the unexpected survival of Twitter under Elon have convinced editors to listen. Elon's personality isn't of importance here; he mostly needs to just push a few buttons to make a sub-critical news item go super-critical.

New comment by generationP in "Tim Bray on Grokipedia"

generationP — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 23:38:25 +0000

Yeah, encyclopedias are meant to be indexes to knowledge, not repositories thereof. The WP feature-creeped its way to the latter, but it is not reliably good at it, and I'm not sure if there is an easy way to tell how good a given page is without knowing the subject in the first place.

New comment by generationP in "Tim Bray on Grokipedia"

generationP — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 23:34:53 +0000

Don't forget that public opinion and the media landscape are quite different in 2025 from what they were in the 2010s when most prior studies on WP bias have been written. Sufficiently pertinent (sadly this isn't synonymous with high quality) conservative and anti-woke content can reach wide audiences, particularly when Elon puts his thumb on the scale. Besides, to my knowledge, none of the prior attempts at studying WP bias has even tried to make a big enough fuss to change said bias; the final outcomes of the studies were conference papers.

New comment by generationP in "Tim Bray on Grokipedia"

generationP — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 22:17:06 +0000

Wondering if the project will get better from the pushback or will just be folded like one of Elon's many ADHD experiments. In a sense, encyclopedias should be easy for LLMs: they are meant to survey and summarize well-documented material rather than contain novel insights; they are often imprecise and muddled already (look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_tree and see how many conventions coexist without an explanation of their differences; it used to be worse a few years ago); the writing style is pretty much that of GPT-5. But the problem type of "summarize a biased source and try to remove the bias" isn't among the ones I've seen LLMs being tested for, and this is what Elon's project lives and dies by.

If I were doing a project like this, I would hire a few dozen topical experts to go over the WP articles relevant to their fields and comment on their biases rather than waste their time rewriting the articles from scratch. The results can then be published as a study, and can probably be used to shame the WP into cleaning their shit up, without needlessly duplicating the 90% of the work that it has been doing well.

New comment by generationP in "Gov workers say their shutdown out-of-office replies were forcibly changed"

generationP — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 19:47:49 +0000

That's the longest pronoun signature I've seen.

New comment by generationP in "Why Romania excels in international Olympiads"

generationP — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 04:31:34 +0000

NB: None of what you are saying is confirmed by the WP page you are citing.

New comment by generationP in "Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover"

generationP — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 22:44:28 +0000

And soon it will be "but I don't want to learn Lean".

New comment by generationP in "The Timmy Trap"

generationP — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 15:20:20 +0000

The cube doesn't work, or at least it didn't for me. The goggly eyes really do make a difference.

New comment by generationP in "Intel CEO Letter to Employees"

generationP — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 21:33:12 +0000

When I get fired, the news better come in an email titled "Steps in the Right Direction".

New comment by generationP in "I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst"

generationP — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:35:53 +0000

I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.

New comment by generationP in "I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst"

generationP — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:34:58 +0000

Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.

New comment by generationP in "MIT asks arXiv to withdraw preprint of paper on AI and scientific discovery"

generationP — Sat, 17 May 2025 02:26:50 +0000

That looks like the kind of paper that causes companies to lose lots of money by hyping up what is likely a less-than-impressive method. But it does not make any theoretical claims, so it cannot contaminate research.

New comment by generationP in "Mathematician solves algebra's oldest problem using intriguing number sequences"

generationP — Sun, 04 May 2025 12:13:26 +0000

You're right, the authors are not to blame for the lack of context -- I misdirected my anger at the phys.org nonsense towards the actual authors.