Hacker News: mjn

Show HN: Snowfall Progress

mjn — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:29:11 +0000

Client-side app that pulls NWS data to attempt to show progression when you're in the middle of a major snowfall event.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750722

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by mjn in "Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak"

mjn — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 22:35:12 +0000

I've also started doing this, and it's surprisingly enjoyable to both do and even to read. The end result is often more readable to me than using a 3rd-party JS visualization library, because I only need to know standard HTML/CSS concepts to understand what's going on. And a side benefit is smaller pages with less bitrot due to being able to skip the dependencies.

ArXiv AI/ML Catch-Up

mjn — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:02:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kmjn.org/arxiv-speedrun/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46459665

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by mjn in "Nvidia Becomes Most Valuable Public Company, Topping Microsoft and Apple"

mjn — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 21:57:15 +0000

Besides growth, Nvidia also has much higher profit margins. In Q1 2024, Apple's margins were 42% gross, 26% net, versus Nvidia's 78% gross, 57% net. May or may not be sustainable, but for now Nvidia's basically printing money.

New comment by mjn in "Nature retracts paper that claimed adult stem cell could become any type of cell"

mjn — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 20:03:41 +0000

In practice, wrong findings that aren't due to misconduct and aren't very recent are usually not retracted though. It's just considered part of the history of science that some old papers have proofs or results now known to be false. It is pretty common in mathematics, for example, for people to discover (and publish) errors they found in old proofs, without the journal going back and retracting the old proof. A famous example is Hilbert's (incorrect) sketch of a proof for the continuum hypothesis [1].

[1] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/272028/hilberts-alleged-p...

New comment by mjn in "Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95"

mjn — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:48:35 +0000

I think the flags have more been because of the poor sourcing of the actual death. It seems various people and groups heard that he died and are posting their obituaries and remembrances, but there's no real factual confirmation or details (e.g. one thing that was briefly on the front page here [1] was a link to an unsourced, now-deleted tweet from Momentum UK).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721271

New comment by mjn in "Linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky dies at age 95"

mjn — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:47:53 +0000

Yes, this article doesn't appear to have any independent sourcing, it just cites the Jacobin one that you link: "de acordo com a revista norte-americana Jacobin" ("according to the North American magazine Jacobin").

Message Does Not Exist

mjn — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 01:01:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kmjn.org/notes/message_existence.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39365052

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mjn in "Exponentially faster language modelling"

mjn — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 16:14:07 +0000

"Unfit for deployment" or "not intended for deployment" is semi-standard wording for research models that are just raw language models with none of the safety/bias/offensiveness filtering that is usually desired for product applications. For example, if you deploy it as a customer-service chatbot, it might tell your customers to kill themselves, or call them racial slurs.

It doesn't mean that there's anything technically wrong with the language model per se as a model of language, just that there has been no effort made to ensure it's fit to be deployed as-is for any given generative-AI use case, and the model authors would prefer you didn't do that.

New comment by mjn in "US Treasury unit proposes stepping up scrutiny of crypto mixers"

mjn — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 23:18:00 +0000

I submitted the Reuters article as a summary, but here are some primary sources as well:

FinCEN's press release: https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-proposes-ne...

The actual proposed rule: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/10/23/2023-23...

US Treasury unit proposes stepping up scrutiny of crypto mixers

mjn — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 23:15:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-treasurys-financial-crimes-unit-proposes-cracking-down-cryptocurrency-mixers-2023-10-19/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37971355

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Toronto lost its wild 100-year war with raccoons

mjn — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 23:40:53 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thestar.com/interactives/how-toronto-lost-its-wild-100-year-war-with-raccoons/article_acd38b8a-56ff-11ee-ac9d-1310728e9d61.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37806510

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New Sources on Sputnik (2017)

mjn — Wed, 04 Oct 2023 21:19:13 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/new-sources-sputnik

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37771946

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mjn in "Translating Latin demonology manuals with GPT-4 and Claude"

mjn — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 23:23:42 +0000

> DeepL and Google Translate definitely also make things up

I think what they make up is different, but this is a good point. They have a particularly odd tendency to either do something like autocorrect where it wasn't appropriate (translate a different word that is similar in spelling to the requested word), or to make up false friends, doing something like transliterate + then autocorrect in the target language.

One example, which I blogged about 5 years ago but is still mistranslated, is the word "ribbit" (what a frog does): https://www.kmjn.org/notes/google_translates_ribbit.html

In 2018, if you translated it to Greek with Google Translate, it gave you κουνέλι (kouneli), which is Greek for rabbit. A word that is one letter away from ribbit but not close to a similar meaning. When I tried it just now, it translates it to ραβδί (rabdi), which means stick and is completely unrelated to the correct answer, but I guess starts with similar letters as ribbit?

New comment by mjn in "A basic guide to using Asian names"

mjn — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 18:06:40 +0000

Same situation in Greece. Formal documents like identity cards, university diplomas, and even mailboxes, generally put the surname first, while in running text, like a news article, the given name is first. Some formal documents also list the patronymic, in the order: Surname Given Patronymic.

In some situations it is less clear which convention applies. For example most of my older relatives use surname-first for their Facebook account name, which is less common with younger people. I have also seen both orders on business cards. I think most Greeks would not expect foreigners to be familiar with or follow these conventions though.

Go to Immirica

mjn — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 22:19:14 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n18/dinah-birch/go-to-immirica

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37562891

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

mjn — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 21:32:40 +0000

Article URL: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/americas-advanced-manufacturing-problem-and-how-to-fix-it/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37538914

Points: 189

# Comments: 293

The Suspicion Machine

mjn — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 22:40:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/welfare-state-algorithms/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37489586

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

America's advanced manufacturing problem and how to fix it

mjn — Sat, 26 Aug 2023 17:53:07 +0000

Article URL: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/08/americas-advanced-manufacturing-problem-and-how-to-fix-it/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37275139

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mjn in "Job Corps: free, residential training and education for low-income young adults"

mjn — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 18:05:07 +0000

Retirement savings are in fact excluded from parents' assets for the purposes of FAFSA, at least if they are in some kind of account legally recognized as a retirement account (401k, 403b, IRA, traditional pension, annuity, etc.). Details of what is included and excluded from parental assets: https://studentaid.gov/2324/help/parent-investments