Hacker News: rprenger

New comment by rprenger in "OpenAI is connecting ChatGPT to bank accounts via Plaid"

rprenger — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:29:15 +0000

Didn't Matt Levine tell a story about Masayoshi Son doing that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427688

New comment by rprenger in "Avoiding Trigonometry (2013)"

rprenger — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:58:46 +0000

Also, while we're getting rid of angles, can we please get rid of cross products and just use geometric algebra tools?

New comment by rprenger in "Show HN: Lights Out: my 2D Rubik's Cube-like Game"

rprenger — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:29:58 +0000

And you can do that at any board state, so if it starts with like 16 white squares you can make one or two greedy moves to minimize white squares, then do your memorize trick.

New comment by rprenger in "Translating a Fortran F-16 Simulator to Unity3D"

rprenger — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:26:11 +0000

I felt a similar way when I moved from Chuck Yeager's Air Combat to (I think) F15 Strike Eagle 3. Yeager was the perfect mix for me. I remember rarely even seeing the enemy planes I was firing at in newer games.

New comment by rprenger in "A recent chess controversy"

rprenger — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:51:59 +0000

I think if Kramnik accuses someone of cheating it might actually drop the posterior probability that they cheated.

New comment by rprenger in "Our narrative prison"

rprenger — Wed, 14 May 2025 18:15:12 +0000

One thing about horror movies is that even though they usually pretty much follow a three act structure they at least usually have to have a prologue to set the mood before the "regular life" part. But recent ones I've noticed that don't follow the structure closely are

"Skinamarink" and "I Saw the TV Glow"

New comment by rprenger in "Go east from Seattle"

rprenger — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 22:28:16 +0000

Yeah as soon as I saw the "answer" I was like "yeah sure blah blah blah, you can make a trick question, but what IS the country that you'll actually hit if you walk East from Seattle". I was guessing England, but the right answer is France.

New comment by rprenger in "Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search"

rprenger — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:12:41 +0000

This is pretty close to how AlphaZero works.

https://medium.com/applied-data-science/alphago-zero-explain...

New comment by rprenger in "Sorry you feel that way: why passive aggression took over the world"

rprenger — Tue, 28 Nov 2023 18:23:53 +0000

I think it's like:

Passive: Uh, your code looks great! Aggressive: Your code is garbage! Assertive: Your code is broken. Passive-Aggressive: It's great that you think your garbage code is great!

New comment by rprenger in "Lean4 helped Terence Tao discover a small bug in his recent paper"

rprenger — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 17:08:19 +0000

You can have both! LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15626 (shameless plug)

New comment by rprenger in "DreamCraft3D: Hierarchical 3D Generation with Bootstrapped Diffusion Prior"

rprenger — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:58:28 +0000

I believe Zero123++ gives you the ability to generate consistent images from multiple camera views, where as DreamCraft3D seems to output 3D models with geometry and textures if I'm understanding it right. Like I could take the output of DreamCraft3D (if I had the code) and drop the result into Blender for example.

New comment by rprenger in "Web components will outlive JavaScript frameworks"

rprenger — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 16:32:01 +0000

I kind of hoped the long term result of htmx, instead of just being a Javascript library, was to become a standard in a newer version of HTML itself. The constraints of only forms being able to do POSTs, and the only way to handle the response is to rewrite the entire page seems arbitrarily limiting. If htmx were just HTML6 or whatever, it'd outlive all the Javascript frameworks.

New comment by rprenger in "AI will save the world?"

rprenger — Tue, 06 Jun 2023 18:22:04 +0000

The printing press.

New comment by rprenger in "Against longtermism (2021)"

rprenger — Thu, 11 May 2023 19:54:10 +0000

I think the "weight" here is weight as in mass and "convolutions" here is as in folds. The size/weight and folds of Einstein's brain have been the subject of studies, and the quote was from 1980.

New comment by rprenger in "Quantum physics falls apart without imaginary numbers"

rprenger — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 16:56:27 +0000

This Scott Aaronson lecture I really liked is relevant. It's like a "why quantum mechanics probably had to do the weird probability amplitudes (which can be negative and complex) instead of just normal probabilities even without experimental results" lecture: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html

New comment by rprenger in "Real-Time Brain-to-Image Reconstructions"

rprenger — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 18:18:04 +0000

I generally agree with the assessment that the limiting factor in quality is the signal from the MRI. Just one slight correction to the description of previous projects. We first built models that predict the voxel responses from images using ML. Then recorded the fMRI response on a new image. Then we ran many many images (not just those previously seen that have an fMRI response) through the voxel models and picked the top N images with predicted responses close to the actual response. Basically we used the big list of images as an approximate "natural image prior". Then we'd often show the average of that top N images so you get one picture (which destroys interesting multi-model stuff, but we didn't have good stable diffusion models of images back then that could do a gradient search on or something).

If you wanna see what the reconstructions look like without fancy image priors (to get a better idea of how little signal there is) check out this figure from one of the early papers: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19778517/#&gid=article-figur...

New comment by rprenger in "The fraudulent claims made by IBM about Watson and AI (2021)"

rprenger — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 08:02:28 +0000

We put this in our ASR based keyboard app back in 2016. Basically kept the ASR decoders beam search candidates around and could use their differences and relative scores to suggest replacements. I would've assumed newer keyboard apps would have a similar option, but I haven't checked: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/03/baidus-new-talktype-keyboa...

New comment by rprenger in "Every day, I commit a new and more complicated version of some simple code"

rprenger — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 22:48:04 +0000

It should output the result of a GPT-stlye transformer fine-tuned on data set of 1,000,000 instances of "Hello World"

New comment by rprenger in "LaMDA is not sentient"

rprenger — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 17:39:38 +0000

Dr. Sbaitso! https://oneweakness.com/dr-sbaitso-online

New comment by rprenger in "Teaching GPT-3 to reverse words"

rprenger — Mon, 16 May 2022 21:10:22 +0000

I don't think a larger vocab would help. All the individual letters are in the ~50k token vocab already, but the word "alphabet" will still not get tokenized to [a, l, p, h, a, b, e, t]. Using a larger vocab like PaLM's 256k vocab would have the same issue.