Hacker News: gjstein

New comment by gjstein in "Verizon outages reported across U.S."

gjstein — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:40:57 +0000

DC local. Total outage this afternoon. SOS on my phone for a few hours. Unable to log into my account.

New comment by gjstein in "AirPods libreated from Apple's ecosystem"

gjstein — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:18:49 +0000

What sort of laptop/desktop do you have? I regularly use my AirPods with my Steam Deck and they work great!

New comment by gjstein in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"

gjstein — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:15:16 +0000

Ursula Le Guin in her preface to The Left Hand of Darkness [1], describes Science Fiction as "descriptive." She invents "elaborately circumstantial lies" as a means of describing what she sees as some truth in our being. The full quote:

> I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at us at certain odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are. I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

This is how I think about both science fiction and fantasy. Elements of world building are different, even within each sub-genre, but this element of incorporating elements that are inconsistent with our world to tell stories is common to both. It's also why the term "speculative fiction" persists: a category that subsumes sci-fi and fantasy.

[1] Read that full preface here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/342990/the-left-hand...

New comment by gjstein in "Children's arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math"

gjstein — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:04:57 +0000

Feynman is no random celebrity. In addition to be a renowned physicist, his famous "Feynman Lectures" and his thoughts on pedagogy are similarly legendary.

New comment by gjstein in "Ask HN: Have you ever seen a pathfinding algorithm of this type?"

gjstein — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 21:27:03 +0000

So far, no one has mentioned "Bug Algorithms", which have a similar structure of (1) walk in the direction of the goal, (2) walk around obstacles as they are encountered, (3) leave the obstacle to proceed when some condition is met. They are very simple to implement (though not optimal) and there are a number of variants to play around with. Howie Choset has some good lecture slides that describe them [1]. However, as some others have mentioned, something like Jump Point Search [2] is likely a better option given the described scenario.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~motionplanning/lecture/Chap2-Bug-Alg... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_point_search

New comment by gjstein in "CuPy: NumPy and SciPy for GPU"

gjstein — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 14:12:12 +0000

The idea that this is a drop in replacement for numpy (e.g., `import cupy as np`) is quite nice, though I've gotten similar benefit out of using `pytorch` for this purpose. It's a very popular and well-supported library with a syntax that's similar to numpy.

However, the AMD-GPU compatibility for CuPy is quite an attractive feature.

New comment by gjstein in "Is My Blue Your Blue?"

gjstein — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 02:09:24 +0000

Similar: XKCD conducted a color survey back in 2010 [1]. The results are detailed and the writeup quite interesting.

[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

New comment by gjstein in "Ask HN: Resources about math behind A/B testing"

gjstein — Sat, 10 Aug 2024 15:26:35 +0000

I'd also like to mention the classic book "Reinforcement Learning" by Sutton & Barto, which goes into some relevant mathematical aspects for choosing the "best" among a set of options. They have a full link of the PDF for free on their website [1]. Chapter 2 on "Multi-Armed Bandits" is where to start.

[1] http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html

New comment by gjstein in "X redesigns water pistol emoji back to a firearm"

gjstein — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:21:53 +0000

Doesn't Slack violate that constraint? Slack allows (or at least seems to) using iOS system emoji to respond to messages.

New comment by gjstein in "How many photons are received per bit transmitted from Voyager 1?"

gjstein — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 13:51:06 +0000

This is true enough, though remember that material properties change dramatically when you start moving through wavelengths by orders of magnitude. Silicon is transparent in the mid-infrared, which is what makes silicon photonics possible [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_photonics

PaperOps: Run experiments and add results to a PDF with a single Make command

gjstein — Fri, 10 May 2024 15:12:18 +0000

Article URL: https://cs.gmu.edu/~gjstein/2024/5/paperops-demo/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40319979

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by gjstein in "Examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News"

gjstein — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:36:00 +0000

This is a cynical take on what I think is a meaningful benefit that the above commenter is talking about. If you use ChatGPT to learn concepts and approach it with the caveat that you should make sure you understand what you are trying to learn (something that helps to verify that what is being presented to you by the system is "accurate"), it's a fantastic resource. That isn't to say it's true for learning all things, but I'm generally impressed and optimistic for ChatGPT to be as valuable a teaching/learning resource as any other I might find on the web.

New comment by gjstein in "Improving deep sleep may prevent dementia, study finds"

gjstein — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 15:47:36 +0000

I have some mixed feelings about this. I used to do this ~10 years ago when I was a distance runner, but now exercising so hard will throw my body off in other ways and I don't feel good having pushed so hard. Perhaps this is exactly the point you're making, but I don't target zone 5 for long these days. Deep sleep, sure, but at what cost to the rest of my body?

New comment by gjstein in "Global trends in incidence, death, burden and risk factors of early-onset cancer"

gjstein — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:58:31 +0000

Agreed! I've never seen something like this before, but it seems that all articles in this (nascent) journal have the same sort of information. Does anyone know if this is standard across journals for research in this space?

New comment by gjstein in "Playing with genetic algorithms in Python"

gjstein — Wed, 06 Sep 2023 18:40:12 +0000

It seems like using np.random.choice is indeed a slow way to get a grid in which 5% of the values are 1. I would recommend using np.random.rand(size) >= mutations:

  > python3 -m timeit 'import numpy as np; mutations=0.05; rows=10; columns=10; np.random.choice([0,1], p=[(1-mutations), mutations],size=(rows,columns))'
  50000 loops, best of 5: 8.88 usec per loop`

  > python3 -m timeit 'import numpy as np; mutations=0.05; rows=10; columns=10; np.random.rand(rows,columns) <= mutations'
  200000 loops, best of 5: 1.06 usec per loop

SayPlan: Scalable Task Planning Using 3D Scene Graphs

gjstein — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 14:05:01 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06135

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36709342

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by gjstein in "Claude 2"

gjstein — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 14:05:30 +0000

Excited for this, but I think with all this conversation about the role an AI assistant should play in work and development, this line feels incomplete to me:

> Think of Claude as a friendly, enthusiastic colleague or personal assistant who can be instructed in natural language to help you with many tasks.

It omits that the colleague may have outdated knowledge or not understand whatever problem you give it. The colleague's "enthusiasm" should be tempered with oversight so that the outputs they produce are not directly used without scrutiny. It seems that most people using these tools increasingly understand this, but to leave it off the website seems ... sloppy at this point.

Edit: upon logging in, I'm greeted by a warning "It may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information, or produce offensive or biased content."

New comment by gjstein in "Dashcam images reveal where police are deployed"

gjstein — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 14:40:31 +0000

Rewatching Person of Interest now. Amazing how relevant it is; aged incredibly well.

New comment by gjstein in "Meta releases Intermediate Graphics Library"

gjstein — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 21:05:21 +0000

What sort of Docker support will this have? I have a very shaky setup right now to run Unity headless that requires OpenGL and VirtualGL. It feels like that pipeline won’t work forever and am looking for alternatives.

New comment by gjstein in "Average age of a car in the US is more than 13 years"

gjstein — Tue, 16 May 2023 01:02:55 +0000

That really is a somewhat incredible statistic to me, not because it's surprising given my own empirical evidence, but because of all the things one does in/with a car for years at a time. My car has been driven across the country multiple times, survived fairly extreme cold and heat multiple times a year, and still it shows no signs of stopping. It's always been amazing to me how long cars last considering what most people put them through.