Hacker News: macleginn

New comment by macleginn in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

macleginn — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:38:23 +0000

The actual paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6787638

New comment by macleginn in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

macleginn — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:48:33 +0000

In many places, there is a distinction between "master's through research" (a gateway to PhD) and "master's through study" (more coursework, less independent research, a gateway to r-n-d-level positions in the industry).

New comment by macleginn in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

macleginn — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:46:23 +0000

But nobody has 4 + 4? The traditional system was in Europe 5 + 3, now we mostly have 3/4 + 2 + 3 (Europe) or 3 + 1 + 3 (UK/Ireland).

I don't have a lot of experience with the US system, but from my experience after 3/4 years newly minted postgrads are probably not yet ready to knowingly commit to 5 years of specialised training. European-style MA/MSc's often feel "useless" because they actually help people switch course and find a new footing. However, good master's programmes are either flexible enough for advanced students to take more specialised modules or have high demands to begin with.

New comment by macleginn in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

macleginn — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:40:15 +0000

There may be issues with the implementation, but masters only programmes are absolutely commonplace in Europe. Some are better, some are worse, but good ones are genuinely helpful for people to, e.g., upskill before going into industry or decide whether they want to do a PhD.

New comment by macleginn in "NHS to grant Palantir contractors unlimited access to patient data"

macleginn — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:17:02 +0000

https://archive.is/nu26P

NHS to grant Palantir contractors unlimited access to patient data

macleginn — Mon, 11 May 2026 11:17:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/8ce1b9be-1d51-466b-90de-54bff1a504ca

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48093537

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

New comment by macleginn in "Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST (finite state transducer) binary"

macleginn — Sun, 10 May 2026 17:40:27 +0000

An old C++ library using a related approach (DAWG) was seemingly created by a Japanese programmer: https://code.google.com/archive/p/dawgdic/

It was later used to power a popular Python package for processing Russian morphology (pymorphy).

New comment by macleginn in "He asked AI to count carbs 27000 times. It couldn't give the same answer twice"

macleginn — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:37:28 +0000

It doesn't really matter if the model cannot make a good educated guess about calories in the food if it cannot give a consistent response given the same input.

New comment by macleginn in "I Built an AI Trading Platform in Six Days. That's Terrifying"

macleginn — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 18:18:32 +0000

Matt Levine: "Which honestly is a little bit cool? I mean, bad, whatever, correlated and predictable and manipulable. But also, like, everyone who runs the big frontier artificial intelligence labs is going around saying that in a few years they will build a superintelligence. What if one good use of superintelligence is deciding how to allocate capital throughout the economy? What if Claude becomes all-wise and all-knowing? What if we just delegated all economic decisions to Claude; what if it wisely decided what projects to fund and what businesses to pursue? How would that happen? How would “we,” collectively, delegate all our economic decisions to Claude? Maybe like this? Maybe all the retail investors will delegate their investing decisions to Claude."

New comment by macleginn in "Diatec, known for its mechanical keyboard brand FILCO, has ceased operations"

macleginn — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 19:14:19 +0000

Years ago I ordered Ninja 2 from Japan and was sadly expecting to pay another 20% or so in customs fees, but the price was given in yen, and the customs probably couldn’t figure it out, so they released it to me for free. It’s still going strong.

New comment by macleginn in "Flow Map Learning via Nongradient Vector Flow [pdf]"

macleginn — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 08:38:31 +0000

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New comment by macleginn in "China lures home its top AI talent from Silicon Valley"

macleginn — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:17:49 +0000

https://archive.is/sV8Yq

China lures home its top AI talent from Silicon Valley

macleginn — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:17:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/b167c6d3-b982-482a-98c3-5303a7b80c6a

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47743326

Points: 13

# Comments: 1

New comment by macleginn in "Dark Castle"

macleginn — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:47:12 +0000

If the author sees this: it's "whose old Apples", not "who's". Only mentioning this because it's very prominent on the landing page.

Also the feedback form doesn't work in Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.

New comment by macleginn in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

macleginn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:50:44 +0000

Surprisingly, this seems to be not true. Moscow, a city of 10+ million people, has huge forests inside or adjacent to the city limits. People leave rubbish here and there, but unless forests are rezoned and actively developed as "recreation zones" or some such, they are doing okay. One can easily find more species of birds in a large Moscow park than in the whole of Baden-Wuerttemberg. The trick is not depleting the ecosystem to begin with.

New comment by macleginn in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

macleginn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:50:28 +0000

This is very nice, but unfortunately, it will take forever (in human-life terms) to bring "real" forests back.

(In my previous post, I forgot to mention stunning rainforests near Sintra in Portugal.)

New comment by macleginn in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

macleginn — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:45:01 +0000

A lot of areas in Western Europe are either completely deforested or have very weird low-density half-dead wooded areas, especially Germany. One has to go all the way to Poland/Serbia/Bulgaria to get a real forest experience again.

New comment by macleginn in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

macleginn — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:18:10 +0000

How are they different? If you "know" something, you are 100% confident in it, which gives you an easy 0 for this question (or a surprising 1). Philosophically, the problem is more that there is no difference between confidently and modestly wrong in terms of consequences of binary decisions.

New comment by macleginn in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

macleginn — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:00:12 +0000

The Brier score is pathological when the guess is 0.5: regardless of the outcome, it will be equal to 0.25, so if you define "better than random" as having a score < 0.25, actually acting randomly makes you "overconfident".

New comment by macleginn in "Battle for Wesnoth: open-source, turn-based strategy game"

macleginn — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:02:31 +0000

So it's like HMM but the whole map is in battle mode?