Hacker News: not2b

New comment by not2b in "America.gov"

not2b — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 03:34:22 +0000

I did check it by asking "who won the 2020 presidential election?" It answered

Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Official Electoral College results (National Archives):

Biden: 306 electoral votes Donald J. Trump: 232 electoral votes 270 needed to win Federal Election Commission official popular-vote totals:

Biden: 81,268,924 (51.31%) Sources:

2020 Electoral College Results | National Archives Official 2020 Presidential General Election Results (FEC PDF)

New comment by not2b in "U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve Falls to Lowest Level Since 1982"

not2b — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 04:01:07 +0000

That isn't why he did it, it was not "to balance the budget". It was to make up for the panic after Putin invaded Ukraine. US gasoline prices soared, going up to $4.84 per gallon in June 2022. Releasing the oil caused it to drop. It wasn't given away, it was sold. The reserve was on the way back up in 2024, through when Biden left office. Furthermore, the government turned a large profit: they sold oil when it soared in price, and bought it back at a lower price.

New comment by not2b in "MicroLLM Lab – Try 7 tiny LLM's in the browser"

not2b — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:48:27 +0000

Amusingly limited: I asked SmolLM2 360M Instruct

"What is the population of California?"

It replied

"California is the third-largest state in the United States, with a population of around 153 million people. It is also the most populous state in the United States, with a population of around 325 million people. The state is also the most populous in terms of GDP, with a GDP of $1"

But very fast, despite the lack of a decent GPU.

New comment by not2b in "Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face"

not2b — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:49:14 +0000

I wonder how much of this attack had precedents in text that had been previously published to the web, for example, in hacking contests. In particular, tricks for doing more than expected when you're only allowed to make GET requests. Finding material like that might have helped the agents discover the trick faster.

New comment by not2b in "Airbnb Preventing the Use of BnB"

not2b — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 07:42:56 +0000

They chose BnB to suggest "bed and breakfast", a common term for a small hotel that was typically just an old house where the owners lived and would host, as we all know. So we know what the right result will be. But since it's a giant corporation versus a person with no resources, we may get the wrong result.

New comment by not2b in "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026"

not2b — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:49:59 +0000

They seem to be mixing together things that are actually harmful to the public, with things that are merely harmful to their business model (which is their claim that they can grab whatever data that they want regardless of the wishes of the owners of the data and use it to improve their models, but competitors can't do that to them).

New comment by not2b in "GNU Radio in the browser"

not2b — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 00:44:19 +0000

It is the same on Android.

New comment by not2b in "GPU World"

not2b — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:23:26 +0000

So demand quadruples if they are always on, and doubles if they are on 1/3 of the time. Either way, too much.

New comment by not2b in "Terence Tao explains 6 essential mathematical concepts [video]"

not2b — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:59:29 +0000

Even before LLMs were a thing, it wasn't this way: rapidly generating code was not the most valuable skill. As you say, it's much more important that the code can be confidently modified and extended, and reused, not just now, but then. In a mature product, the initial writing of the code will be the least of the work; maintenance is much more expensive. Ideally, design decisions should appear only once in the code when this can be achieved, because then there's one place to fix or one place to modify, instead of dependencies on some detail that appear all over the code. It's too easy with auto-generated code to wind up with redundancy and code duplication, resulting in a brittle mess.

New comment by not2b in "GPU World"

not2b — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 05:49:01 +0000

Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.

New comment by not2b in "NP-overrated"

not2b — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:28:53 +0000

For traveling salesman that's more than good enough. But in many cases an O(n^3) algorithm can't be used because n is in the billions. I remember interviewing a candidate who asserted that register retiming in digital circuits was a non-problem, so they were surprised that we were still working on improvements, because they had learned that the Leiserson-Saxe algorithm gives an optimal solution in O(n^3) time. But because real circuits are so large that that approach can't be used. Polynomial time often isn't good enough; even quadratic time often isn't tolerable.

New comment by not2b in "NP-overrated"

not2b — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 23:21:26 +0000

I spent my career in electronic design automation, where practically every interesting problem is NP-hard, but we have to solve them, or approximately solve them at least, and because real-life problems often have structure, with the right approach very large problems can be solved exactly despite the theoretical complexity, and when exact solutions can't be found a decent bound can often be found that is an acceptable solution.

Sales people still have to plan their trips even though finding the optimal solution is NP-hard (to give one example). No matter; there are decent heuristic methods.

New comment by not2b in "Who's afraid of Chinese models?"

not2b — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 01:10:57 +0000

It's been common in electronic design automation tools to have license terms like that (forbidding use to create a competing product). However, competing companies have often found workarounds, either by finding loopholes or just breaking rules and hoping not to get caught.

New comment by not2b in "But Nothing Has Changed on Our Side"

not2b — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:26:17 +0000

In many cases, I found that when colleagues said "we didn't change anything" they mean "we didn't change anything relevant" which winds up meaning "we didn't change anything we think could be relevant to this issue" and then "whoops, turns out it was relevant after all".

New comment by not2b in "A brief tour of the PDP-11, the most influential minicomputer of all time (2022)"

not2b — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 03:26:15 +0000

It was the preferred lab computer in the mid to late 1970s and into the 80s. I got my first job because I knew PDP-11 assembly language, and worked with both DEC's operating systems for them (RT-11 and RSX-11) and later Unix (the lab I worked with had some machines running Version 6, though Version 7 was the first that I used seriously. It had a very clean and symmetric instruction set that used the program counter as if it were another general purpose register. I had an LSI-11 board (the single-board version of the machine) with 4K 16-bit words of core memory and a paper tape punch with a tiny loader in ROM to read in the tape and peek and poke memory, and I'd sometimes initialize the core memory to a known state by running the one-instruction program

mov -(pc), -(pc) or 014747 in octal. It would fill all of memory with 014747.

New comment by not2b in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

not2b — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 03:59:59 +0000

I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.

New comment by not2b in "Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)"

not2b — Fri, 29 May 2026 02:19:38 +0000

Yes, it looks just barely significant. Results that are on the edge like that often aren't reproducible.

New comment by not2b in "Google employee charged with $1M Polymarket insider trading bet on search term"

not2b — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:54:47 +0000

Cool. So we benefit by prediction markets surfacing insider information about Trump's plans in the Iran conflict, and unknown insiders making hundreds of millions on that information with massive trades minutes before each announcement benefited the people watching prices in the oil market? That doesn't seem right.

New comment by not2b in "Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)"

not2b — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:27:34 +0000

If the result is statistically significant, it just barely makes it. 84.8% isn't that much higher than 80.8% and they had only 250 prompts, if I'm reading this right.

New comment by not2b in "Linux gaming is faster because Windows APIs are becoming Linux kernel features"

not2b — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:22:56 +0000

Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".