Hacker News: qbit42

New comment by qbit42 in "Can you see three trees?"

qbit42 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 14:12:52 +0000

I think shade is a big factor here. Trees can really cool down a neighborhood.

New comment by qbit42 in "Vivaldi 8.0"

qbit42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 12:36:44 +0000

I found replacements for the Chrome extensions I was using and switched to Zen, which builds off of Firefox and closely resembles Arc (RIP).

It might not be the best security idea to rely on a relatively obscure browser like this, but I find it very pleasant to use.

New comment by qbit42 in "Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals"

qbit42 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 07:12:14 +0000

Round brackets are standard in the US but that notation is used in France and some other places.

New comment by qbit42 in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

qbit42 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 15:27:32 +0000

I think there is still an implicit restriction on the complexity of the operator for this to be interesting. Otherwise you could design an operator which accepts a pair x,y and performs one of 2^k elementary binary operations by reading off the first k bits of x and applying the specified operation on the remainder of x and y. (This is kind of like how real-valued computational models become too powerful for complexity theory to work if you allow bitwise operations.)

New comment by qbit42 in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

qbit42 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:09:58 +0000

There are certainly no other causal factors...

I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.

New comment by qbit42 in "2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews"

qbit42 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:17:34 +0000

The choice was to review using AI or not, they can just say no? And review like we’ve done for years without AI tools.

Are you objecting to ICML’s reciprocal reviewing policy?

The alternative as I see it would be to charge for submissions and pay reviewers. There are pros but also clear cons when it comes to fairness.

New comment by qbit42 in "2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews"

qbit42 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:28:52 +0000

What? Why is that a false choice? The only way you got caught here is if you literally gave an LLM the PDF and used its response verbatim.

And they didn't give a permanent ban or anything, these authors can just resubmit to another conference, of which there are many.

New comment by qbit42 in "2% of ICML papers desk rejected because the authors used LLM in their reviews"

qbit42 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 11:24:01 +0000

Banned for life is a stretch but the actual response is completely fine. They can just resubmit to the next conference.

Words mean something, if you promise to uphold a contract and break it, there are consequences. The reviewers were free to select the policy which allows LLM use.

New comment by qbit42 in "Prism"

qbit42 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:31:43 +0000

Loads of researchers have only used LaTeX via Overleaf and even more primarily edit LaTeX using Overleaf, for better or worse. It really simplifies collaborative editing and the version history is good enough (not git level, but most people weren't using full git functionality). I just find that there are not that many features I need when paper writing - the main bottlenecks are coming up with the content and collaborating, with Overleaf simplifying the latter. It also removes a class of bugs where different collaborators had slightly different TeX setups.

I think I would only switch from Overleaf if I was writing a textbook or something similarly involved.

New comment by qbit42 in "Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries"

qbit42 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:19:40 +0000

Our democracy is clearly disfunctional. I believe corporate money has played a big role to make it worse.

New comment by qbit42 in "Which AI Lies Best? A game theory classic designed by John Nash"

qbit42 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:14:34 +0000

https://noambrown.github.io/papers/22-Science-Diplomacy-TR.p...

New comment by qbit42 in "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout"

qbit42 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:29:38 +0000

I see. You seem quite sure that Iran is not doing this - do you have some local source of information? My friends there said the government does shut down the internet at times (but I am not currently in communication with them...)

New comment by qbit42 in "Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout"

qbit42 — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:20:10 +0000

They did shut down the Internet. I cannot communicate with some Iranian friends right now.

New comment by qbit42 in "Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use"

qbit42 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 10:37:12 +0000

You think many are built without any assistance for coding? My impression was that people were mostly concerned about game assets like graphics and music

New comment by qbit42 in "Mathematicians don't care about foundations (2022)"

qbit42 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:13:40 +0000

It is nicer to state theorems that hold for all vector spaces, so mathematicians like to invoke AoC. However, in any applications that are practically relevant, you can obtain a basis without invoking AoC.

New comment by qbit42 in "Paramount launches hostile bid for Warner Bros"

qbit42 — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:32:07 +0000

Netflix wasn't buying CNN.

New comment by qbit42 in "Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions"

qbit42 — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:16:37 +0000

I don’t think many researchers take peer review alone as a strong signal, unless it is a venue known for having serious reviewing (e.g. in CS theory, STOC and FOCS have a very high bar). But it acts as a basic filter that gets rid of obvious nonsense, which on its own is valuable. No doubt there are huge issues, but I know my papers would be worse off without reviewer feedback

New comment by qbit42 in "Wolfram Compute Services"

qbit42 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 16:06:56 +0000

That is a fair assessment. By and large it is used for the former. It is super handy in the exploratory phase of certain kinds of mathematical research.

New comment by qbit42 in "“Boobs check” – Technique to verify if sites behind CDN are hosted in Iran"

qbit42 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 21:40:17 +0000

I don't want to have to create an account to view the full context.

New comment by qbit42 in "What is a manifold?"

qbit42 — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 23:05:26 +0000

Sometimes statistical rates for empirical risk minimization can be related to the intrinsic dimension of the data manifold (and noise level if present). In such cases, you are running the same algorithm but getting a performance guarantee that depends on the structure of the data, stronger when it is low dimensional.