Hacker News: mapmeld

New comment by mapmeld in "John Jumper to join Anthropic"

mapmeld — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:12:03 +0000

If AlphaFold really is brute force on known protein problem space, would it then be usable as a model for novel proteins?

New comment by mapmeld in "Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school"

mapmeld — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:07:19 +0000

Were schools banning search engines? I remember teachers recommending Dogpile (because it would combine search engines), and we did some computer lab stuff in the 00s, but there was no one saying that we should ignore search or the internet altogether.

In middle school I remember being assigned a book report that would include the author's biography. I'd just finished a book (The Gammage Cup) and of course my local library did not have any information about the author. So in that situation it was assumed that you would learn traditional research methods, but also that you would just pick a classic book where the information was readily available.

New comment by mapmeld in "Map Clustering Is Not My Favorite"

mapmeld — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:54:45 +0000

WebGL is a major upgrade for maps. But as an old school web maps person, the obvious solution to the first problem (nearby points clustered even on the city level) is to use the maxZoom option which is in most clustering libraries.

New comment by mapmeld in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

mapmeld — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:12:06 +0000

I think it's an interesting perspective, because translation is one of the jobs that I (a) hear is the first to lose work due to AI, and (b) often used as an example of "acceptable" AI by people who are skeptics of LLMs and AI-generated art.

New comment by mapmeld in "Report on an Unidentified Space Station"

mapmeld — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:47:51 +0000

I was also thinking of this story around the Backrooms lore (since you can find references that it is infinite or planet-sized repeating). Of course I couldn't remember enough to have it pop up on Google or ChatGPT. Grateful that someone posted it.

New comment by mapmeld in "What are locusts and what happened to them?"

mapmeld — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:01:46 +0000

I highly recommend one of the books cited in this article (Jeffrey A. Lockwood's Locust). He writes about hiking to the glacier to find preserved locusts, the formation of the Entomological Commission which discovered that existing anti-locust practices were ineffective, all sorts of details.

New comment by mapmeld in "Someone used my open source project to phish people"

mapmeld — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:25:25 +0000

If you have a website somewhere with an unrestricted comment box, it gets spammed. That doesn't take a special AI, because for years there have been script kiddies scanning new domains, IP addresses on AWS, common wp-admin URLs, etc.

New comment by mapmeld in "Utah lawmakers form united front in push to ban prediction markets"

mapmeld — Mon, 18 May 2026 14:37:01 +0000

It's very strange that they think prediction markets "cut through all the noise of the current media conglomerates" and yet the temperature bet is easily manipulated, and any bets about war and other foreign affairs are resolved by reading news reports from the field and not some new group of independent arbitrators or investigators. The war journalists are even being pressured by the gamblers to change their reporting https://www.timesofisrael.com/gamblers-trying-to-win-a-bet-o...

New comment by mapmeld in "Rewrite Bun in Rust has been merged"

mapmeld — Thu, 14 May 2026 12:33:02 +0000

It doesn't say what will happen, but isn't their comment responding to people who don't like the look of this rewrite, and telling them basically that they don't have to think/worry about it? I definitely read it as 'not yet' and not 'another week or so'.

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

mapmeld — Mon, 11 May 2026 03:11:09 +0000

I finally went to Alcatraz after years where I've either lived in SF or visited for work. It was worth spending some time out there! Great views as well.

New comment by mapmeld in "I built "Middle Class Museum", a tour of things that used to be affordable"

mapmeld — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:57:25 +0000

Yes I think the author is mixing it up with the liquids ban. And in my limited experience, at major airports with new scanners, people care much less about both of these now.

New comment by mapmeld in "GitHub's Fake Star Economy"

mapmeld — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:18:11 +0000

Making the conversations about VCs expecting thousands of stars, is thinking too big. It's probably more often someone pays $20 to make one of their projects look good, for their CV, for vanity, thinking this will get them the push that they need to get clicks on reddit, or noticed over some other open source project. If there is someone offering a 10k star project an investment over 8k without looking at the project or revenue potential, I can only think they are clueless, or picking a student project to fund each summer.

The fake accounts often star my old repos to look like real users. They are usually very sketchy if you think for a minute, for example starring 5,000 projects in a month and no other GitHub activity. One time I found a GitHub Sponsor ring, which must be a money laundering / stolen credit cards thing?

New comment by mapmeld in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

mapmeld — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:36:31 +0000

Sounds like a combination of 'can it be geocoded?' and 'is their location precise enough?' There is some progress on resolving human-written locations in cities ( https://www.danvk.org/2026/03/08/oldnyc-updates.html ) but I imagine once you lose reference points, '100 feet into Golden Gate Park...' would be interpretable but not possible to fix to one point.

New comment by mapmeld in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

mapmeld — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:32:56 +0000

I've also noticed that iNaturalist also fuzzes exact locations for some species within a geographic grid (example: zebra) even the ranch zebra in California.

New comment by mapmeld in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

mapmeld — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:51:28 +0000

It's strange. I'm sure that he talked to experts who would immediately say, yes many programming languages exist. But two cryptographers who wrote money systems both using C++ is not informative. Today maybe we could expect one to use Rust.

New comment by mapmeld in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

mapmeld — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 04:14:20 +0000

This section stood out to me because it started out explaining PGP to a layman like this, but then the author gets overly excited that a cryptographer would be interested in... basic cryptography

> I’d learned enough by then to know that P.G.P. relies on public-key cryptography. So does Bitcoin. [...]

> How interesting, I thought, that Mr. Back’s grad-school hobby involved the same cryptographic technique that Satoshi had repurposed.

New comment by mapmeld in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

mapmeld — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:21:00 +0000

I think it's an AI-generated response.

New comment by mapmeld in "21,864 Yugoslavian .yu domains"

mapmeld — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 20:05:30 +0000

According to an article from last year, .su might get retired by 2030

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43351793

New comment by mapmeld in "Why AI systems don't learn – On autonomous learning from cognitive science"

mapmeld — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 15:56:44 +0000

People have tried to suss this out on the ML subreddit, and it is confusing. Most of the worst messages from Tay were just people discovering a "repeat after me: __" function, so it's hard just to figure out which Tay messages to consider as responses of the model.

There seems to have been interest in a model which would pick up language and style of its conversations (not actually learning information or looking up facts). If you haven't trained an LSTM model before - you could train on Shakespeare's plays and get out ye olde English in a screenplay format, but from line to line there was no consistency in plot, characters, entrances and exits, etc. in a way which you'd expect after GPT-2. Twitter would be good for keeping a short-form conversation. So I believe Tay and the Watson that appeared on Jeopardy are more from this 'classical NLP' thinking and not proto-LLMs, if that makes sense.

New comment by mapmeld in "OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)"

mapmeld — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:27:43 +0000

My problem with this is less that it's perpetual engagement, but that I use ChatGPT for direct programming outputs, like "go through a geojson file and if the feature is within 150 miles of X, keep and record the distance in miles". Whether it gives a good answer or not, the suggestion at the end is a synthesis of my ChatGPT history, so it could be offering to rewrite a whole script, draw diagrams, or bring in past questions for one franken-suggestion. This is either the wrong kind of engagement for me, or maybe "teaching" me to move my full work process into the chat. I've asked it many times to give concise answers and to not offer suggestions like this, but the suggestions are really baked in.