Hacker News: minihat

New comment by minihat in "Automating myself out of development"

minihat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:39:03 +0000

It is harder to solve a sudoku than verify a solution's correctness. I find similar benefits occasionally when coding with LLMs.

New comment by minihat in "Fusion Power Plant Simulator"

minihat — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:34:35 +0000

Some fusion reactions release their energy almost entirely as fast moving charged particles.

You can slow down those particles against an electric field and harvest the energy as electricity directly. No steam turbine. No Carnot limit.

New comment by minihat in "A Pascal's Wager for AI doomers"

minihat — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:10:28 +0000

It's currently socially/politically unpalatable for authors to admit superintelligent AI is a possibility. I frequent some writer forums. As a group, they are 1) clearly feeling angry/threatened 2) in denial about LLM capabilities.

Folks working in software can more readily track progress of the frontier model performance.

New comment by minihat in "Meta Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest is being discontinued"

minihat — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:47:14 +0000

I met some of my best friends in VR, and had life-changing social interactions in some VR games on the Oculus platform... Especially EchoVR. I'm still a true believer in VR as a medium. It'll go mainstream one day, and there will be a Meta-sized company built upon it.

They had lightning in a bottle and somehow lost it. Honestly it might have been hiring Carmack that sent them down this path. Moving away from PCVR expanded the market, but it also killed the magic. Now the quest store is a wasteland of what look like low budget mobile apps.

New comment by minihat in "Advancing AI Benchmarking with Game Arena"

minihat — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 23:20:01 +0000

This is a legitimate strategy for the werewolf, no?

New comment by minihat in "'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40"

minihat — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 13:19:52 +0000

I think the comic achieves something deeper than a lecture. The humor might reconnect us with a sense of awe we often lose as adults.

New comment by minihat in "Show HN: Dlog – Journaling and AI coach that learns what drives wellbeing (Mac)"

minihat — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 03:12:59 +0000

You may enjoy the 2024 Hugo winning short story, "Better Living Through Algorithms": https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_05_23/

New comment by minihat in "MusiCoT, a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique for music generation [pdf]"

minihat — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 13:21:15 +0000

How is it possible that text-to-score/notation is lagging text-to-audio in music generation? Generating audio seems wildly more complicated!

Since you are working in this space, I wonder if you could comment on my pet theories for why this is true: 1. Not enough training data (scores not available for most songs), or 2. Difficulty with tokenization of musical notation vs. audio

New comment by minihat in "How far neuroscience is from understanding brains (2023)"

minihat — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:42:51 +0000

I hoped neuroscience, as a field, was on the cusp of a physical theory of learning and memory. I dreamt of an intersection of information theory, neuroscience, and ML.

Alas, state of the art in neuroscience / neural engineering is closer to bloodletting than a mechanistic theory of learning and memory.

New comment by minihat in "How far neuroscience is from understanding brains (2023)"

minihat — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 14:51:30 +0000

This is exactly right.

I started a PhD in 2017 studying neuroscience + ML. I thought studying the brain would help me understand ANNs better. I was wrong. Ended up applying ML to analyzing EEG, MRI and similar.

New comment by minihat in ""Big 3" science fiction magazines including Asimov's and Analog acquired"

minihat — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 23:40:51 +0000

You can subscribe to Asimovs and/or Analog on their website today and they give you a download link for PDF, epub every other month.

New comment by minihat in "Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code"

minihat — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 18:59:31 +0000

Grok 3 with thinking is comparable to o1 for writing complex algorithms.

However, Grok sometimes loses the context where o1 seems not to. For this reason I still mostly use o1.

I have found both o1 and Grok 3 to be substantially better than any Claude offering.

New comment by minihat in "LLMs all fail this NumPy indexing example"

minihat — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:34:48 +0000

Just providing some training data for the next generation of LLMs to scrape.

New comment by minihat in "Grok3 Launch [video]"

minihat — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:32:28 +0000

Another take is that the base models are now good enough that spending more money for more intelligence is viable at test time. A threshold has been crossed.

LLMs all fail this NumPy indexing example

minihat — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:18:24 +0000

When mixing basic slicing with an advanced index, NumPy moves the advanced index's subspace to the front, so in the example, A[0, :, B] produces a shape of (4, 2) rather than (2, 4).

  import numpy as np
  A = np.random.rand(1, 2, 2)
  B = np.array([0, 1, 0, 1])
  C = A[0, :, B]
  print("C.shape:", C.shape)

So far every LLM I've tried (Grok 3, o1, Gemini Pro) all predict (2, 4) and can't be persuaded otherwise.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43093855

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

New comment by minihat in "Reverse engineering Call of Duty anti-cheat"

minihat — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 06:03:20 +0000

His steam library was not restricted, just the game in which he was accused/banned.

New comment by minihat in "People who are good at reading have different brains: study"

minihat — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 20:16:47 +0000

Reading speed might follow a normal distribution near the middle ranges, but I'd expect non-trivial deviations in the tails due to dyslexia, ADHD on the one side and trained speed readers on the other. Perhaps this individual just falls on the far tail of that distribution?

During my graduate coursework I sometimes read 100-200 pages of technical material in a day while cramming for an exam, and was able to retain it for a day or two. I'd believe it if some people exist who could comprehend and retain all of that long-term. Alas, 'tis not I.

New comment by minihat in "Popular Science Magazine Archives, May 1872-March 2009"

minihat — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:05:15 +0000

I unsubscribed from Scientific American a few years back when they became a venue for political commentary instead of science. The opinion pieces try to masquerade as soft science. It's an insult to the actual scientists in their readership.

If you're looking for a replacement, I picked up MIT Tech Review. It's not a stand-in replacement for what SciAm used to be, but scratches the same itch for me.

New comment by minihat in "Ask HN: How close are we to replace animal models with software?"

minihat — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 13:56:35 +0000

Not close. This might be the best whole-animal sim available, and it is a for a worm: https://openworm.org/

New comment by minihat in "The AI Scientist: Towards Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery"

minihat — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 04:34:30 +0000

Clarkesworld sci-fi magazine temporarily closed submissions due to low quality AI spam. I'm sure the irony will not be lost on them if ML journals are the next victims.