Hacker News: pepinator

New comment by pepinator in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

pepinator — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:33:30 +0000

I'm not saying humanity is impossible to describe (on the contrary!). your physics example is too different to what happens in social sciences, it's not a good analogy. you can largely control the conditions under which you throw the balls, while if you're, for instance, studying the recent socio political events in the USA, things are given and then you need to rely on similar past event to understand current ones. even in fields like psychology it's too difficult to even measure initial conditions and outputs. that's why you rely on qualitative analysis.

New comment by pepinator in "European Alternatives"

pepinator — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:24:38 +0000

no, but we're talking about Europe on general. and the initial claim is surely false in countries like Spain, France, Poland and Belgium

New comment by pepinator in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

pepinator — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:06:06 +0000

I agree with what you say, but that doesn't make social sciences the same as astrology. their conclusions, even if qualitative, can be valid and useful.

New comment by pepinator in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

pepinator — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The problem is that there are no two equal situations in social sciences, so you won't ever have the same set of initial conditions. I don't know why they call them sciences, but the scientific method is intrinsically incompatible with social phenomena.

New comment by pepinator in "European Alternatives"

pepinator — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 08:56:43 +0000

I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!

However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.

New comment by pepinator in "European Alternatives"

pepinator — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:23:31 +0000

> Your average European speaks at least three

ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate

New comment by pepinator in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

pepinator — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:18:47 +0000

how do you falsify a hypothesis in social sciences?

New comment by pepinator in "Scientists used the same data, but their politics predicted the results"

pepinator — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:18:18 +0000

saying that social science is astrology at best is quite extremist. serious people work in those fields

New comment by pepinator in "Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy"

pepinator — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 17:11:41 +0000

it surprises me how many people simply don't get the point. they say "they make more money this way, so it's ok". no big picture at all.

New comment by pepinator in "1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long"

pepinator — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 19:39:23 +0000

mmmh I don't think so. I've read several papers on cellular automata and I don't recognize the terms

New comment by pepinator in "95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend"

pepinator — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:31:28 +0000

That's an awfully simplistic way of seeing things. It always surprises me how disconnected from reality Americans are.

New comment by pepinator in "Ask HN: What trick of the trade took you too long to learn?"

pepinator — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 04:59:33 +0000

This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.

New comment by pepinator in "Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI"

pepinator — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 16:31:46 +0000

Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).

And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.

New comment by pepinator in "Nvidia CEO criticizes Anthropic boss over his statements on AI"

pepinator — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 16:05:47 +0000

This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.

New comment by pepinator in ""The Illusion of Thinking" – Thoughts on This Important Paper"

pepinator — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 10:05:50 +0000

We call it breakthrough. And it's just math and code. We've had many of those.

New comment by pepinator in "A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization"

pepinator — Tue, 20 May 2025 18:53:23 +0000

The notion of being uniformly distributed has a very specific meaning in mathematics [1]. If you don't believe me, maybe you believe Tao [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equidistribution_theorem

[2] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2020/01/25/equidistribution-o...

New comment by pepinator in "A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization"

pepinator — Tue, 20 May 2025 05:41:47 +0000

Irrational rotations of a torus are uniformly distributed and closely resemble the image from the blog. The images you linked, on the other hand, are random sequences with positive entropy (which are also uniformly distributed). Confusing these two things is what happens when someone without the necessary expertise tries to sound smart.

New comment by pepinator in "Mathematicians just solved a 125-year-old problem, uniting 3 theories in physics"

pepinator — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 05:08:51 +0000

Peer review is important for checking the correctness of the results, among other things. It's not uncommon to find big errors; small mistakes are everywhere.

New comment by pepinator in "Part two of Grant Sanderson's video with Terry Tao on the cosmic distance ladder"

pepinator — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:43:21 +0000

That's a highly biased opinion. The Newtonian conception of physics is trivial for us, and we can say that most people could come up with the ideas by their own, but that's because our world conception is based on those ideas; it's already implicit in how we understand the world. That's why Newton was so important, there was a shift in the whole conceptualization of the physical world. With Maxwell's equations is similar. The interpretation as waves, the fact that the equations are Lorentz symmetric but no Newton symmetric, etc. All that is free for us, and it is not obvious at all.

New comment by pepinator in "South Korean regulator accuses DeepSeek of sharing user data with ByteDance"

pepinator — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 23:49:06 +0000

Yes, exactly, what the guy above was saying is that they're just looking for excuses to keep people from using the Chinese thing.