Hacker News: laowantong

The AI Scientist Generates Its First Peer-Reviewed Scientific Publication

laowantong — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:15:21 +0000

Article URL: https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43476065

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by laowantong in "Show HN: SQL Noir – Learn SQL by solving crimes"

laowantong — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 08:08:32 +0000

A great addition to a field where there aren't many offerings: SQL Island (https://sql-island.informatik.uni-kl.de) and SQL Murder Mystery (https://mystery.knightlab.com) come to mind. The mechanism of SQL Noir is close to that of the latter, i.e., an undirected, essentially standalone adventure. I myself am working on SQLab, a SQL game engine that allows you to augment an arbitrary base with exercises on that base to produce directed, standalone adventures: https://github.com/laowantong/sqlab. You download a dump of the database (currently MySQL, SQLite, Postgres), and can play under any administrator interface. On the same page there's a link to the long police investigation I designed for my (French) students. If you're a teacher or researcher in the field, the principles of SQLab are explained here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16120.

Let AI name your files to fit the contents

laowantong — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 10:41:15 +0000

Article URL: https://riffo.ai/rename

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42930721

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Suspicious sale of Melania Trump's NFT (2022)

laowantong — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 04:59:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.vice.com/en/article/analyzing-the-very-bizarre-sale-of-melania-trumps-dollar170000-nft/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42765113

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by laowantong in "Geometric line-art of Wacław Szpakowski (2017)"

laowantong — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 06:18:54 +0000

A goldmine of Logo exercises, where the goal would be to write the shortest program for a given drawing. All of them could be classified by Kolmogorov complexity.

Brain Drain: David vs. Goliath

laowantong — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 14:59:18 +0000

Article URL: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/10/17/training-data-scarcity-synthetic-quality-model-genai-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41888152

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Lean (Proof Assistant)

laowantong — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 06:42:57 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_(proof_assistant)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40666635

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by laowantong in "Ask HN: Are there any websites for SQL puzzle games?"

laowantong — Sat, 02 Mar 2024 07:15:38 +0000

At beginner level, there is SQL Island https://sql-island.informatik.uni-kl.de, with versions in German, English and French.

Guano Islands Act

laowantong — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 09:04:30 +0000

Article URL: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38580063

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by laowantong in "Writing documentation for your house"

laowantong — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 05:30:12 +0000

As an Airbnb host, I have done this sort of thing for my guests and my own usage, but with a "flat" structure: a simple, searchable inventory (https://maisonrougevernet.fr/inventaire) which doubles as technical documentation for some items (with optionally links to PDFs, videos, etc.).

New comment by laowantong in "Mocodo, a grid-constrained text-to-ERD tool"

laowantong — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 07:41:56 +0000

Warning: French-flavored ERD, aka Merise MCD.

Text-to-diagram tools are great, but often make the user struggle with the automatic layout (e.g. Graphviz).

Mocodo adopts a mixed approach to the layout problem : diagram-as-text, but the line breaks and the order of the nodes (entities and relationships) are used as positional hints. The resulting layout is constrained to an invisible grid corresponding to a left-to-right and top-to-down reading of the source.

Moreover, since there are relatively few possible grid positions, automatically rearranging the layout becomes an assignment problem, which can be solved by a simple b&b algorithm.

Obviously, this wouldn't scale, but this is just a teaching tool that I use to present small ERDs to my students.

You may test it at https://mocodo.net. Click the turning arrows to draw the diagram and the shuffle symbol to rearrange it randomly.

Mocodo, a grid-constrained text-to-ERD tool

laowantong — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 07:41:56 +0000

Article URL: https://mocodo.net

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254605

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by laowantong in "Show HN: Private, text to entity-relationship diagram tool"

laowantong — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 06:57:38 +0000

My own tool adopts a mixed approach to the layout problem : diagram-as-text, but the line breaks and the order of the boxes (entities and relations) are used as position hints. The resulting layout is constrained to an invisible grid corresponding to a left-to-right and top-to-down reading of the source.

Moreover, since there are relatively few possible grid positions, automatically rearranging the layout becomes an assignment problem, which can be solved by a simple b&b algorithm.

Obviously, this wouldn't scale, but this is just a teaching tool that I use to present small ERDs to my students.

You may test it at https://mocodo.net. Click the turning arrows symbol to draw the diagram and the shuffle symbol to rearrange it randomly.

Warning: French-flavored ERD, aka Merise MCD.