Hacker News: the_origami_fox

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes"

the_origami_fox — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 09:12:13 +0000

Wow, again I am dismayed by the antizionism and anti-Israel sentiment. The popularity of this short, weak article on this website, and the vitriol and hate in the comments is unreal. Can't you all go to Reddit?

In 2016 the UK based Cambridge Analytica was blamed for Trump's win in 2016. Then he won again in 2024 without them. Meanwhile both USA parties invested heavily in social media campaigns.

In my country local government elections are in a few months and political parties are already flooding my social media with rage bait (primarily Instagram and Facebook).

This short article is about a private company, not linked to the government, that may or may not have been retained by locals, that may or may not have breached foreign interference laws, and that certainly did not lend its targeted candidates an overwhelming advantage (Mamdani was the most popular candidate in the NYC mayoral election). But because it is about Israel everyone goes crazy.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "World Capitals Voronoi"

the_origami_fox — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:41:25 +0000

South Africa is split into 4 segments. Johannesburg is not a capital. Otherwise South Africa has 3 capital cities - administrative (Pretoria), legislative (Cape Town) and judicial (Bloemfontein) - but Pretoria is informally considered the "main" capital.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "The desperation of NYTimes"

the_origami_fox — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:56:57 +0000

The article I am referring to is https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/11/business/media/bari-weiss.... I don't have access to this anymore. I remember the tone as bitter.

The article argued her success was due to her own style of grievance reporting.

At the Free Press she spoke often about values, and you can still see this in her CBS press releases. I believe this contributed more.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "The desperation of NYTimes"

the_origami_fox — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:13:43 +0000

On the technology side, I haven't wanted to unsubscribe from them entirely, but I have found it easy and useful to unsubscribe from specific various columnists and topics, especially as the paper has gotten larger and busier.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "The desperation of NYTimes"

the_origami_fox — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:32:12 +0000

As an alternative, the Free Press is honestly much better. I joined it because of the NY Times' bitter hit piece on Bari Weiss, who left them to found the Free Press. I wanted something that wasn't woke. I've stayed because of the excellent quality of reporting, varied points of view, and well researched investigations.

I was upset when Weiss announced she was leaving the Free Press to head a big American news agency because I was worried it would affect the Free Press. That's how much I like it. Thankfully it hasn't much, just mostly her personal reporting - which was great - isn't there anymore.

The Free Press has its own biases. But it's much more varied and inquisitive than other news sites. Sometimes I get to the end of an article and I'm annoyed that the author didn't make more of a stand and then I realise, that's the point.

Some articles are just super interesting. Their indepth investigation into the Free Birth Society wasn't a big story, but it made a profound and personal impact on me.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

the_origami_fox — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 07:09:09 +0000

That's a cool map.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report"

the_origami_fox — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:10:10 +0000

Unfortunately this article and the conversation here is taken in the context of the entirety of Israel is bad, the whole military war against Hamas and its patrons was bad, and that there is a genocide in Gaza. It leaves little room to have meaningful conversations about difficult conditions in the war and whether soldiers acted incorrectly or not and if they should be tried or not with regards to this single incident.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Top UN legal investigators conclude Israel is guilty of genocide in Gaza"

the_origami_fox — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:22:45 +0000

There are many issues raised with the report, including it omits the invasion by the government of Gaza, Hamas, on 7 October 2023 entirely, and it omits that the Israeli army is fighting the army of Gaza, the Qasam brigades, who had 40,000 salaried fighters (pre-war), have fired thousands of missiles, developed hundreds of kilometres of tunnels specifically for urban warfare, and subverted public and private infrastructure for urban warfare. For such a serious allegation, it is important to consider and address all aspects and not simply omit them.

I would like to add, I don't think this topic is appropriate for Hacker News.

DeepSeek's Multi-Head Latent Attention

the_origami_fox — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 07:42:05 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/machine-learning/2025/02/22/mla.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43239248

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by the_origami_fox in "One Genius' Lonely Crusade to Teach a Computer Common Sense (2016)"

the_origami_fox — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 07:35:45 +0000

2016

Micrograd.jl

the_origami_fox — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 07:24:42 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/machine-learning/2024/07/27/micrograd-1-chainrules.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41376893

Points: 154

# Comments: 49

Covering All Birthdays

the_origami_fox — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 09:44:32 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/mathematics/2024/07/09/birthday-covering.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41085471

Points: 42

# Comments: 22

Covering All Birthdays

the_origami_fox — Sun, 14 Jul 2024 11:29:41 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/mathematics/2024/07/09/birthday-covering.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40960290

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Generative transformer from first principles in Julia

the_origami_fox — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:26:01 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/coding/2024/03/23/transformers-gpt.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39939592

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Radix Tree in Julia"

the_origami_fox — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:37:42 +0000

Author here. While researching this topic I came across this article https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/compressed-tries/ by GeeksForGeeks (compressed trie is another name for radix tree). Currently it is one of the top results on Google for this topic. Generally I've found GeeksForGeeks to be a good resource, but this article is especially poor. The code is bizarre and makes no sense:

- It defines properties like 'bitNumber', 'leftChild' and 'rightChild' which have nothing to do with this type of tree.

- The search function search(k) calls an overloaded version of itself search(root, k) that is (1) illegal in these languages and (2) not defined.

- The insert function does not account for all scenarios.

And more.

I'm fairly convinced this was written with the assistance of a LLM. That would be a logical explanation to all those illogical choices.

Radix Tree in Julia

the_origami_fox — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:34:58 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/coding/2024/03/21/radix-tree.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39788540

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Show HN: Name That Nation"

the_origami_fox — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 08:14:58 +0000

The pictures come straight from Wikipedia. From the picture for North Korea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea): Territory controlled by North Korea shown in dark green; territory claimed but not controlled shown in light green.

The Weiler-Atherton polygon clipping algorithm

the_origami_fox — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 11:55:25 +0000

Article URL: https://liorsinai.github.io/mathematics/2023/09/30/polygon-clipping.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37869579

Points: 28

# Comments: 2

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)"

the_origami_fox — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 06:54:48 +0000

And if you choose b=x/10, x/100, x/1000 ... then each iteration will add the exact decimal point.

New comment by the_origami_fox in "Pythagorean Theorem found on clay tablet 1k years older than Pythagoras (2009)"

the_origami_fox — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 10:17:13 +0000

For anyone wondering how they got the approximation sqrt(2)=1+24/60+51/60^2+10/60^3.

It's based on the simple idea that:

     Z = (a + b)^2 = (a^2 + (2a+b)*b)
  => (2a+b)* b < Z-a^2

Given an initial estimate "a", we need to find the largest "b" such that the term on the left is less than the term on the right. Therefore our estimate will always be slightly less than the actual answer and we can repeat the process to get slightly closer.

For the first iteration, Z=2 and a=1. We choose b=x/60:

  (2+x/60)*x/60 < 2-1^2
  120x + x^2 < 3600
  x = 24 ... 3456 < 3600
  x = 25 ... 3625 > 3600

So our first term is 24/60.

Repeat with a=1+24/60 and b=x/60^2:

  (2(1+24/60)+x/60^2)*x/60^2< 2-(1+24/60)^2
  10080x+x^2 < 518_400
  x = 51 ... 516_681 < 518_400
  x = 52 ... 526_864 > 518_400

Repeat multiple times.

Writing this in code I can easily get: 1;24,51,10,7,46,6,4,44,50,28 = 1.4142135623730951

This whole process can be codified into the long division algorithm for square roots which works quite neatly with base 10.

Edit: formatting