Hacker News: pizza

Learning Pseudorandom Numbers with Transformers

pizza — Sun, 03 May 2026 07:21:50 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26792

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47994307

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

Objects of Categories as Complex Numbers (2002)

pizza — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:29:03 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0212377

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47905221

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

To Dissect a Mockingbird: A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus (1996)

pizza — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:03:20 +0000

Article URL: https://dkeenan.com/Lambda/index.htm

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47828492

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by pizza in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

pizza — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 06:42:16 +0000

For most tasks, at some future date, isn't there going to be some ambient baseline of capabilities you can get per $/tok, starting at ~0 for OSS models, such that eventually all tooling gets trivially transferable?

All elementary functions from a single binary operator

pizza — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 01:49:32 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.21852

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47746610

Points: 858

# Comments: 298

New comment by pizza in "Entropy as a Measure of Surprise"

pizza — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:51:13 +0000

OP is correct; surprisal is outcome-dependent and entropy is distribution-dependent

- entropy is E_p[informativeness of measuring outcome x]

- take n outcomes, then a distribution over them lives on the simplex \delta ^ (n - 1). you can lift this to R^n via the log odds map p_k -> x_k = log p_k -- now x \in R^n can describe a histogram with n-1 degrees of freedom

- in log odds space, measurement is literally a linear functional from vector space of log probability onto the index of the outcome k.

- imo surprisal of some p(x) is best understood as "the length of a pointer", entropy "the rarity-weighted average length of a pointer", and collision entropy "how specific you would have to be to describe witnessing a specific outcome"

and in the same way, a single molecule of water, you might get by, calling dry

New comment by pizza in "GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano"

pizza — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:22:02 +0000

I meant in the sense of - you have benchmarkers and trainers. If you publicize your evaluation, trainers may likely have their models 'consume' it, even if only indirectly: another person creating their own benchmark from scratch may be influenced by yours, even if the new question sets are clean-room. That, and the rule of thumb that benchmark value dissipates like sqrt(age) [0]

So there is a definite advantage to never publicizing your internal benchmark. But then, no one else can replicate your findings. You should assume that the space of benchmarks that are actually decent at evaluating model performance is much larger and most of the good ones, the ones that were costliest to produce, are hidden, and might not even correspond very well with the public ones. And that the public expensive benchmarks are selective and have a bias towards marketing purposes.

[0] https://www.offconvex.org/2021/04/07/ripvanwinkle/

New comment by pizza in "GPT‑5.4 Mini and Nano"

pizza — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:38:24 +0000

There’s a Dark Forest problem for evals. As soon as they’re made public they start running out of time to be useful. It’s also not clear how to predict how the model will perform on a task based on an eval. Or even whether, given two skills that the model can individually do well on in the evals, it still does well on their composition. It might at this point be better to be scientific in unscientific approaches, than to attribute more power to relatively weakly predictive evals than they actually have

New comment by pizza in "UBI as a productivity dividend"

pizza — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:34:41 +0000

In Singapore it seems 80% of people live in public housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore though I can't speak as to what the effect is on its housing market

New comment by pizza in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

pizza — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 04:28:57 +0000

I mean. Sounds like the guy had existing long term goals, needed to overcome an activation threshold, and used AI as a catalyst to just get started. Seems like, behaviorally, AI was pivotal for him to learn things, even if the things he learned came from elsewhere / his own effort.

New comment by pizza in "10% of Firefox crashes are caused by bitflips"

pizza — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:20:51 +0000

“never go to sea with two chronometers, take one or three”

New comment by pizza in "Ghostty – Terminal Emulator"

pizza — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:12:54 +0000

here-doc usage has probably 100x-ed in the last year

Levallois Technique

pizza — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:18:47 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levallois_technique

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201543

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Masakhane

pizza — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 04:59:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.masakhane.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190661

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pizza in "Loops is a federated, open-source TikTok"

pizza — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:58:57 +0000

Why?

CADRE: Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration

pizza — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 08:06:57 +0000

Article URL: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/cadre/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109251

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pizza in "SkillsBench: Benchmarking how well agent skills work across diverse tasks"

pizza — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:44:41 +0000

The more general question of how to evaluate the quality of a given skill file is quite interesting to me. A skill may prime a model's responses in a way that a prompt alone may not. But also models aren't good at judging what they are or are not capable of.

Just asking a model "how good is this skill?" may or may not work, possibly the next laziest thing you could do - that's still "for cheap" - is asking the model to make a quiz for itself, and have it take the quiz with and without access to the skill, then see how the skill improved it. But there's still many problems with that approach. But would it be useful enough to work well enough much of the time for just heuristically estimating the quality of a skill?

New comment by pizza in "Monosketch"

pizza — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 19:00:09 +0000

The possibility of intelligent machines undergoing transformative regeneration actually dates back to a party hosted by one Charles Babbage where, in attendance, was one Charles Darwin, who only thereafter published On the Origin of Species

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage%2527s_Saturday...

DOE Genesis Mission List of National Science and Technology Challenges

pizza — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:51:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.energy.gov/documents/genesis-mission-science-and-technology-challenges

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006261

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by pizza in "Claude Composer"

pizza — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 03:46:18 +0000

I think you're mistaking the .wav as the final product, whereas instead it's really the .html blog post and this discussion.