Hacker News: shonenknifefan1

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Meta VR Glasses"

shonenknifefan1 — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:35:36 +0000

I sometimes wish that I could read a book like that. But I think the reality is that it would make me tired and fall asleep.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats"

shonenknifefan1 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:23:45 +0000

> While combing through the raw DNA sequence near the RT, the agent exclaimed: “[The DNA next to the RT] is spectacular: I can see by eye a tandem repeat array … that's a CRISPR-like … repeat array?!”

I love that with AI discoveries, we can relive the discoveries from agent transcripts like this.

I'm sort of imagining future histories involving notable AI events peppered with direct quotes like these.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The Fish Who Could Not Imagine Air"

shonenknifefan1 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 22:31:45 +0000

Since this contains an anthroporphized fish, does that make this a fable rather than a parable?

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Vinod Khosla to Buy Seattle Seahawks for $9.6B"

shonenknifefan1 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:30:27 +0000

NFL teams might even be a better investment than European soccer teams since they have a monopoly over professional football in a region, and are not susceptible to significantly decreased valuation that might result from being relegated to a lower league.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "God created the real numbers"

shonenknifefan1 — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:26:09 +0000

I think this is right. Any measurement will have finite precision, so while we might be able to discover some maximum precision that the universe uses eventually, we won't ever be able to prove that the universe has infinite precision representations from finite precision measurements.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "ChatGPT spends 'tens of millions of dollars' on 'please' and 'thank you'"

shonenknifefan1 — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 01:55:51 +0000

A 'thank you' that might otherwise end a conversation will trigger a response by the model that will generate additional tokens. So the inclusion of the pleasantries could increase tokens beyond the pleasantries themselves.

Gravity from Entropy

shonenknifefan1 — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 19:42:11 +0000

Article URL: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.111.066001

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43293658

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

Laser excitation of Th-229 nucleus

shonenknifefan1 — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 21:51:25 +0000

Article URL: https://phys.org/news/2024-04-laser-nucleus-classical-quantum-physics.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40204544

Points: 44

# Comments: 5

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "I built a plane spotter for my son in minutes"

shonenknifefan1 — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 15:49:56 +0000

Given that LLM content is generated with some randomness, and assuming that published LLM content is filtered to be useful for humans, then even in the case where no content is being generated by humans, I would expect the published content to contain new information that is generated by humans.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Can Vines Speed Urban Cooling? – UC Davis"

shonenknifefan1 — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 21:40:56 +0000

How do vines attached to a building affect fire risk for that building?

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The electron is so round that it’s ruling out potential new particles"

shonenknifefan1 — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 13:20:06 +0000

preprint is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.11841

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?"

shonenknifefan1 — Fri, 27 Jan 2023 03:56:26 +0000

Great game! Thanks for posting!

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Realistic computer-generated handwriting"

shonenknifefan1 — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:07:26 +0000

Hmm, it looks like some ASCII characters are missing from the hard-coded alphabet here: https://github.com/sjvasquez/handwriting-synthesis/blob/mast...

alphabet = [ '\x00', ' ', '!', '"', '#', "'", '(', ')', ',', '-', '.', '0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', ':', ';', '?', 'A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N', 'O', 'P', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'Y', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'y', 'z' ]

That seems to explain why it fails on capital X/Q and doesn't fail on lowercase x/q.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Degenerate matter: How reality deals with uncertainty"

shonenknifefan1 — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 02:11:50 +0000

This is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which is the foundation of quantum mechanics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle?wprov=sf...

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "A Paradox of Robust Bayesian Inference and Belief Functions [pdf] (2005)"

shonenknifefan1 — Sun, 25 Dec 2022 16:22:12 +0000

Jaynes has a good chapter on the topic of the distinction between randomness and ignorance within the Bayesian framework [1] in "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science".

The distinction between the two is that in the context of ignorance your belief state is very unstable and susceptible to change with the injection of new information. On the other hand, in the context of a "random" event like a coin flip, your belief state is very stable and unsusceptible to change with the injection of new information.

Whereas you may initially apply the same probability to both a coin flip and the outcome of a wrestling match, those probabilities will evolve in very different ways as you acquire new information such as inspecting the coin/combatants. The probability of the outcome of the coin flip is unlikely to change at all, whereas the probability of the outcome of the wrestling match could change substantially.

This can be modeled by assigning the probability of an outcome to a continuous rate parameter, and assigning a probability distribution to that rate parameter. The entropy of that probability distribution can describe how ignorant your belief state is, and hence how susceptible it is to change.

[1] http://www-biba.inrialpes.fr/Jaynes/cc18i.pdf

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The US National Archives’ preservation plans for 600 file formats"

shonenknifefan1 — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 02:01:46 +0000

It looks like the CAD file formats are specified here:

https://github.com/usnationalarchives/digital-preservation/b...

which includes X3D, STEP, PDF/E, U3D, PRC

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "Rammstein Get Restraining Order Blocking Viagogo from Reselling Concert Tickets"

shonenknifefan1 — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 01:07:13 +0000

If demand is comparable to supply at the price at which the tickets were initially purchased by scalpers, then the fair market value on the secondary market would be about the same as the initial price, at which point the scalpers would have lost money on the deal (after accounting for secondary market fees), and customers would end up paying about the same price as they would have if they had purchased them directly from the venue/promoter.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The Caves of Mars (2019)"

shonenknifefan1 — Sat, 09 Apr 2022 16:08:13 +0000

> Types of cave entrances identified in the catalog include lava tube skylights, deep fractures, Atypical Pit Craters (APCs), and other void spaces in karst-similar terrains.

The cave candidates that they displayed in the image were all in the Tharsis Montes surrounding the major martian volcanos in the most volcanic region of Mars, so I suspect that those ones are largely lava tubes.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The user experience problems of quadratic voting"

shonenknifefan1 — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 22:23:40 +0000

I had assumed when reading this that the voting credit budget would be allocated per question rather than across the entire ballot. However I don't think the article gave an example of a ballot with multiple questions.

I'd be interested to learn which way this being implemented in practice for multi-question ballots.

New comment by shonenknifefan1 in "The Greedy Doctor Problem"

shonenknifefan1 — Fri, 19 Nov 2021 15:21:54 +0000

> To cure health care, give your care-givers a clear incentive to keep you well. Make sure that when you lose, they lose, and just as much. Buy lots of life and disability insurance from your care-givers, and have a third party, unable to act against your life or health, pay you to be the beneficiary.