Hacker News: salviati

New comment by salviati in "Sticky alpine flower confirms Darwin's 150-year-old carnivorous plant prediction"

salviati — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:36:54 +0000

I thought a "prediction" was something about the future. But Darwin, if I understand correctly, classified the plant as carnivorous. As it is the title makes you think the plant turned carnivorous since Darwin made his prediction; and make you think Darwin said "This plant will soon become carnivore". But what happened is that his statement has been confirmed, not that the plant changed.

New comment by salviati in "Denmark set to allow return of 'physical force' in school"

salviati — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 06:55:03 +0000

No, I don't know what I mean. And I don't think you understand what TFA is talking about:

> Since 1967, teachers could only physically intervene with students if their safety or that of others was at risk. Starting in August 2027, they will be allowed to 'hold a student, keep them in place, or take them to another room' if the student disrupts the class.

New comment by salviati in "Time Travel in Braid (2015)"

salviati — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 13:57:09 +0000

I just recommended lena [0], a short story from the same author, to a friend. I really liked it. He liked it too. I recommend looking around on that website a bit.

[0] https://qntm.org/lena

New comment by salviati in "Google breaks promise to provide 10 years of updates to Chromebooks"

salviati — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 13:13:29 +0000

Directly after the passage you quote:

> Google promised 10 years of updates for all Chromebooks, and it’s now breaking that promise for anyone buying a Chromebook between now and whenever the last Chromebook rolls off the production line

So, they're changing the promise from now on, and not breaking it for past users. Doesn't sound like they're breaking their promise to me.

New comment by salviati in "Claude Sonnet 5.5"

salviati — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:24:06 +0000

Price going down on each release

New comment by salviati in "Made by Mechanical Means"

salviati — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:34:50 +0000

I'd love that too, but I don't see that happening.

Fan fiction is not easy legally [0]. I expect if it happens it will be found on much more underground places than IMDb.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_fan_fiction

New comment by salviati in "Made by Mechanical Means"

salviati — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:46:44 +0000

I loved the finished work. I'm looking forward to more art in the world.

Agents allow you to produce more, even the silly ideas you can't put too much effort into.

I really loved the Herzog parody, the overall taste and the parts I explored (I'm sure there's more). Well done!

New comment by salviati in "Made by Mechanical Means"

salviati — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 09:21:01 +0000

One small correction: Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" in February 2025, a year after leaving OpenAI for the second time. He joined Anthropic in May 2026.

New comment by salviati in "Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen)"

salviati — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 08:06:55 +0000

Memoization trades compute time for memory: you reduce CPU cost by 90% _at the cost_ of some memory. The author measured one, but it doesn't look like they measured the other.

It's an important detail to take into account. I'm sure this optimization makes sense, and the size of additional memory is not that big, but I believe it's good to "measure, not assume" as some load bearing model might say.

New comment by salviati in "Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?"

salviati — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:28:01 +0000

Thanks! I was confused, thinking "Is it Satie, or is this a case of Muphry's law?". I wanted to learn more about this Satre composer I never heard of.

Tell HN: Gmail can mark legit mail from google.com as spam

salviati — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 14:38:20 +0000

I received a legit email from googledevelopers-noreply@google.com to my gmail.com account.

It landed in the spam folder.

It happened to me already, in 2012. I filled in a form at a conference to some Google recruiter, and the follow up email they sent ended up in my spam folder.

Is it common?

For work I need to deal with gmail marking some messages from my mail server as spam, and it's not fun. I wonder how much of a priority it is for them to improve on this.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49465624

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by salviati in "More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding"

salviati — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 06:43:23 +0000

> Assuming you don't just make them up, they're trivial to manipulate to generate the headline you want.

well encapsulated in the quote popularized by Mark Twain "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...

One of my favourite jokes: 93 % of statistics are made up on the spot, and 61 % of people believe them. Bonus points for changing the figures every time you retell the joke.

New comment by salviati in "GitLost: We Tricked GitHub's AI Agent into Leaking Private Repos"

salviati — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:08:40 +0000

You can write your code so SQL injections are not possible.

You can't do the same with prompt injections.

New comment by salviati in "OpenWiki: CLI that writes and maintains agent documentation for your codebase"

salviati — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:21:41 +0000

I recently noticed people think "wiki" is a set of deeply interlinked documents. But to me it means ability to edit without logging in.

New comment by salviati in "Opening up 'Zero-Knowledge Proof' technology to promote privacy in age assurance"

salviati — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:16:52 +0000

> You can also fake it by letting someone else solve it for you.

Fair enough, that's true. But there is no solution that could ever prevent this, right?

New comment by salviati in "Previewing GPT‑5.6 Sol: a next-generation model"

salviati — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:29:49 +0000

Reading your comment made me realize that I love that the position of the FSF is held by someone, in the interest of stretching the Overton Window to that side.

New comment by salviati in "Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities"

salviati — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 08:35:42 +0000

If you have openrouter do this little experiment: Go to https://openrouter.ai/chat. Select a few models, but customize them to have an empty system prompt.

Then ask: "你是什么模型?" ("What model are you?" in Mandarin).

My result after trying only three times: Sonnet 4.6 says it's DeepSeek, while Opus 4.8 says it's Qwen. The second time around Sonnet said it was Anthropic Claude.

Are Chinese companies currently complaining about Anthropic distilling their models?

New comment by salviati in "Mechanical Watch (2022)"

salviati — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:36:20 +0000

If the HN commentariat knows of similarly excellent educational work that uses intuitive visual to explain software concepts, please do share.

I have not gone through it yet, but this explanation of how transformers work is in the same class as Ciechanowski's work IMO: https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

Worse Is Better

salviati — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 06:10:13 +0000

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

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48551200

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by salviati in "I analysed 20 years of my chats"

salviati — Thu, 28 May 2026 12:12:34 +0000

I'm not sure if it needs to be said, but one thing that is possible only if you keep your old chats is the analysis TFA made.