Hacker News: mobeets

New comment by mobeets in "US bans differential privacy in Census data"

mobeets — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:23:17 +0000

Thank you for writing a much more thoughtful reply to this comment than I was drafting

New comment by mobeets in "Behavioral timescale synaptic plasticity rewires the brain after an experience"

mobeets — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:40:23 +0000

Good point, this is probably the author assuming a little more context on the reader’s part. The cases where you can record from neurons in humans are very rare (basically only in treatment resistant epilepsy), and most of the work on hippocampus uses rodents

New comment by mobeets in "Points on a ring: An interactive walkthrough of a popular math problem"

mobeets — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:24:27 +0000

This approach implies the probability doesn’t depend on N. It only happens to be 1/2 for N=4 (the article goes into this). The trick is that you don’t know beforehand which semicircle all the points can land in, but your unwrapping step assumes you do.

New comment by mobeets in "In Defense of Matlab Code"

mobeets — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 12:37:42 +0000

Matlab is annoying for many reasons. But to me the main advantage of using Matlab over Python is the plotting.

Plotting in Python is still a pain. Notebooks help, but they still don’t let you add to a plot piece-by-piece; and 3D plots are possible but nowhere close to as simple as it is in Matlab.

New comment by mobeets in "Every mathematician has only a few tricks (2020)"

mobeets — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 13:38:21 +0000

One surprise of reading this thread was learning that Terry Tao is an active user of Math Overflow!

New comment by mobeets in "The Anti-Pattern Game"

mobeets — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 11:34:15 +0000

I was confused also. My guess was that maybe a “sequence” has to be 4 or more pebbles?

New comment by mobeets in "The Article in the Most Languages"

mobeets — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:35:51 +0000

I totally agree but unfortunately it really is one of the fundamental laws of wikipedia. To me this becomes especially silly when editing math wiki articles, where you might be tempted to connect mathematical concepts (eg with a few lines of algebra), but writing this yourself in a wiki article is not allowed unless you can find a link to an external source making the same derivation!

New comment by mobeets in "I avoid using LLMs as a publisher and writer"

mobeets — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 12:30:07 +0000

I’m with you—-I think you did a good job of summarizing all the places that LLMs are super practical/useful, but agreed that for prose (as someone who considers themselves a proficient writer), it just never seems to contribute anything useful. And those who are not proficient writers, I’m sure it can be helpful, but it certainly doesn’t contribute any new ideas if you’re not providing them.

New comment by mobeets in "Getting a paper accepted"

mobeets — Thu, 22 May 2025 12:35:03 +0000

I was surprised to see the author claim that citations in the Introduction are a bad thing. I do think ML papers are generally pretty bad at acknowledging other relevant literature, but this makes me think it’s an active decision somehow

New comment by mobeets in "Inside ArXiv"

mobeets — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 19:35:50 +0000

I have no idea (but wish I knew). I’m embarrassed to admit it took me years to even notice that it wasn’t being updated anymore

New comment by mobeets in "Inside ArXiv"

mobeets — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 11:21:56 +0000

Scihub hasn’t been updated since 2020! But anyway arxiv has a lot of important features specifically for academic papers (eg quality control, categories, browsing, issuing dois, etc)

New comment by mobeets in "The Chaos in Higher Ed Is Only Getting Started"

mobeets — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 03:54:34 +0000

without paywall: https://archive.is/eu8te

The Chaos in Higher Ed Is Only Getting Started

mobeets — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 03:49:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/01/trump-nih-pause-higher-ed/681468/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42819316

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by mobeets in "Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth"

mobeets — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 03:37:33 +0000

Wowwww I had no idea this was a thing. Thank you for sharing, this is perfect

New comment by mobeets in "Shmøergh Hog – The making of a simple analog synth"

mobeets — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 14:27:41 +0000

This is amazing and super inspiring. I love how such a professional looking enclosure is actually a repurposed Ikea flowerpot—-brilliant.

Does anyone know how one would print the black text on the flowerpot? I have an acrylic enclosure from a project but could never figure out how to get text printed on it.

New comment by mobeets in "World’s oldest tree? Genetic analysis traces evolution of iconic Pando forest"

mobeets — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 12:21:12 +0000

The fact that Pando is a single organism is so confusing to me. I’m guessing there are more forests like Pando that are also a single organism? Is this something unique to this particular species?

New comment by mobeets in "Number 16 (spider)"

mobeets — Thu, 23 May 2024 17:08:22 +0000

Probably this (awesome) paper: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2019/hash/e98741479a7b9...

New comment by mobeets in "The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search"

mobeets — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:43:26 +0000

This paper was published in this year’s issue of sigbovik, the best satirical academic journal you (may) have never heard of: https://sigbovik.org/2024/

New comment by mobeets in "ASCII Theater"

mobeets — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 17:00:07 +0000

Can anyone explain how this works? I made this app that converts video to emojis (https://gifmoji.github.io/) and would love to know if I could somehow do a similar thing over ssh (so with emojis rather than ascii art)

Tropes related to falling and/or landing

mobeets — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 12:09:32 +0000

Article URL: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FallingAndLandingIndex

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38999907

Points: 1

# Comments: 0