Hacker News: mikpanko

Ask HN: Is there evidence that LLMs can extrapolate to new ideas?

mikpanko — Sat, 09 May 2026 18:33:26 +0000

ML is known to be good at interpolating between points in the training set, but does much worse at extrapolating. Both can produce innovation when applied to science. For example, a lot of innovation is about transferring existing ideas from one domain to another.

We start seeing examples of LLMs proving novel math theorems: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48071262. But those could be “interpolation”. Is there any strong evidence for or against LLMs being capable of extrapolating?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077122

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mikpanko in "Business Owners Are Worst Clients"

mikpanko — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:47:00 +0000

One possible explanation: business owners have more skin in the game and care the most, so they are the most demanding and can’t tolerate waste. So they are the hardest to satisfy.

Additionally, they are not used to mincing their words because they don’t have bosses and are the most direct (and also egoistic).

New comment by mikpanko in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

mikpanko — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 15:49:27 +0000

According to NYT it seems like there were 2 controllers and “2 more in the building”. They also wrote that 2 seems normal for the late slower time of the night.

Not saying this is the right number of controllers to have, just sharing what I read in NYT.

New comment by mikpanko in "Ask HN: What breaks first when your team grows from 10 to 50 people?"

mikpanko — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:50:21 +0000

I know about 2 big discontinuities in group dynamics, which are based on the limits of human cognition at specific sizes:

1) ~7 people. This is when each member cannot participate in the whole context and all important decisions. "2 pizza teams", limits of the working memory. Decisions cannot be done all together anymore. This results in hierarchies forming and people worrying about their positions in them.

2) ~150 people (Dunbar's number). This is when group members cannot all know each other anymore and have meaningful relationships. Max sizes of family-based tribes, an important unit size in the army. This results in inability to observe each other's actions well, so understanding who contributes a lot vs not shifts to indirect stories. Group members start building narratives instead of demonstrating contributions directly.

New comment by mikpanko in "I Love Board Games: A Personal Obsession Explained by Psychology"

mikpanko — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 04:07:16 +0000

For those interested in going deeper on this topic, I recommend C. Thi Nguyen’s excellent book “The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game”.

Airbnb poaches Meta GenAI leader to be new CTO

mikpanko — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 13:45:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/airbnb-tech-chief-meta-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46615993

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mikpanko in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

mikpanko — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 23:37:11 +0000

Beyond the common narrative on this topic, a factor to consider is that people might be more interested in hearing about death causes, which are not considered their own “fault”. These situations are less “fair”. Thus terrorism, homicide and accidents get a big focus.

New comment by mikpanko in "Launch HN: Grapevine (YC S19) – A company GPT that actually works"

mikpanko — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 21:20:25 +0000

Why do you think Glean and other top company GPT startups who are doing this for longer and have more resources cannot get this level of performance (helpful and accurate)? What makes your approach different and not easy to replicate?

New comment by mikpanko in "TrackWeight: Turn your MacBook's trackpad into a digital weighing scale"

mikpanko — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:39:40 +0000

Very cool. Curious: what is the minimum and maximum weight MacBook's trackpad can reliably measure this way?

Datadog acquires Eppo, a feature flagging and experimentation platform

mikpanko — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:49:00 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/05/datadog-acquires-eppo-a-feature-flagging-and-experimentation-platform/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43897027

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Why Datadog bought Eppo for $220M, and what it means for experimentation

mikpanko — Sun, 04 May 2025 16:18:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.statsig.com/blog/datadog-acquires-eppo

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43887599

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

AI Guesses Your Accent

mikpanko — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:54:20 +0000

Article URL: https://start.boldvoice.com/accent-guesser

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42392088

Points: 222

# Comments: 262

Promotion times and rates in data science and analytics

mikpanko — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 16:30:41 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/mikpanko/status/1841117358620099058

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710658

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

Are LinkedIn links shadow banned on HN?

mikpanko — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 16:13:46 +0000

My colleague and I tried posting LinkedIn links and while we could see our own posts, we couldn't see each others and we couldn't see them in the incognito mode.

Can't find rules about this.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41710382

Points: 3

# Comments: 0