Hacker News: tr352

New comment by tr352 in "European Nations Decide Against Acquiring Boeing E-7 Awacs Aircraft"

tr352 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:07:16 +0000

The EU needs China. No green deal without Chinese batteries, solar cells and rare earth metals.

New comment by tr352 in "Five Kinds of Nondeterminism"

tr352 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:31:57 +0000

And then then the different kinds of the latter: angelic (locally or globally) and demonic.

New comment by tr352 in "AVX Bitwise ternary logic instruction busted"

tr352 — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 19:32:40 +0000

So does the 74181 ALU.

New comment by tr352 in "The History of Windows 95"

tr352 — Mon, 04 Sep 2023 15:22:56 +0000

In early 1995 I ran Windows 95 release candidate 1. I got it on CD-R from a friend. I had to spend my savings on extra RAM in order to get it running. For a brief period of time I was the coolest kid on the block.

New comment by tr352 in "MSX-DOS"

tr352 — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 12:59:56 +0000

Many of the later MSX models had a disk drive built in and came with MSX DOS. I was running MSX DOS on a Philips VG8235. I remember playing around with CP/M software such as Turbo Pascal and Wordstar.

New comment by tr352 in "Ask HN: What happened to fuzzy logic?"

tr352 — Fri, 26 May 2023 09:13:43 +0000

> For example, in Bayesian logic: x AND y is xy, x OR y is x + y - xy

No it isn't. P(x AND y) = P(x)P(y) only in the special case where x and y are independent. Unlike fuzzy logic, probabilistic logic is not truth functional.

New comment by tr352 in "Ask HN: What happened to fuzzy logic?"

tr352 — Fri, 26 May 2023 09:06:14 +0000

In addition to the other replies here, one fundamental difference between probabilistic and fuzzy logic is that fuzzy logic is truth functional and probabilistic logic isn't. Truth functional means, for instance, that if we know the (numerical) truth values of the propositions A and of B then we also know the (numerical) truth values of the propositions (A and B), (A or B), and so on. In probabilistic logic this does not hold. That is, P(A and B) is not fully determined by P(A) and P(B). If A and B are independent, we have P(A and B) = P(A)P(B), but in general we only know that P(A)+P(B)-1 <= P(A and B) <= min(P(A),P(B)). I also believe there's no generally accepted notion of conditioning in fuzzy logic, whereas conditioning is crucial in any probabilistic approach, see e.g. Bayes' theorem.

New comment by tr352 in "The “Sold-Out” Effect"

tr352 — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 13:45:09 +0000

> P.S.: I only have 1 spot left in 2021 for personalized evidence-based recommendations.

Yeah right :)

New comment by tr352 in "Biases in AI Systems"

tr352 — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 13:57:57 +0000

Can you given an example of a bias that is correct?

New comment by tr352 in "The Consciousness of Invertebrates"

tr352 — Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:51:36 +0000

This study was discussed in the article.

New comment by tr352 in "Sneakerheads have turned Jordans and Yeezys into an asset class"

tr352 — Sat, 27 Feb 2021 10:54:35 +0000

More like Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument#The_...

New comment by tr352 in "Bitcoin surpasses $50K as major companies jump into crypto"

tr352 — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 23:33:50 +0000

ThemePark Corona edition.

New comment by tr352 in "Ranked programming: Probabilistic programming without probabilities"

tr352 — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 21:31:02 +0000

Ranks represent subjective degrees of belief but they do not, like subjective probabilities, nicely map to relative frequencies. So compared to probabilities, ranks are indeed limited in this regard. For instance, you can learn probabilities from data but there's no obvious way to learn ranks from data.

But for subjective belief they're still useful. Consider the problem of diagnosing a system with components that fail in rare cases. However we have no idea about failure probabilities. We can then use ranks. A diagnosis for some observed behaviour would then be the least surprising (i.e., lowest ranked) failure state that explains the observed behaviour. This is also the reason for least-surprising-first execution: the most important prediction or hypothesis is the most likely one and thus the least surprising one. There are some concrete examples in the paper which demonstrate this.

I am currently thinking about combining probabilities with ranks so that you can reason about both kinds of uncertainty in the same model. This could be implemented using a programming language that supports both ranked choice statements and probabilistic choice statements.

New comment by tr352 in "Ranked programming: Probabilistic programming without probabilities"

tr352 — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 11:52:02 +0000

Author of this work here (and a bit surprised to find this on hacker news).

I don't disagree with your point about probability. However, there are various alternatives to probability which can be more appropriate for certain applications. For instance, with degrees of surprise (or ranks as they are called) you do not need to know exact probabilities, although the price you pay is that the scale is more coarse grained. If you reason about events that are either very probable or very improbable, then degrees of surprise are easier to work with than probabilities.

There's also a computational benefit. Execution of a ranked program is done much like a non-deterministic program where choice points execute "least surprising first". Compare that with the sampling techniques necessary in probabilistic programming that do not even provide exact results.

New comment by tr352 in "Z80 CPU User Manual (2016)"

tr352 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 22:28:34 +0000

> I also wrote code for a Z8000[0] in the 80's which is quite different.

The Z80000 seems to have been a very obscure microprocessor. Even more so than the Z8000. What was the Z80000 system you worked with?

New comment by tr352 in "Sega Master System Architecture: A Practical Analysis"

tr352 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 22:06:57 +0000

The TMS9918 is as simple as it is beautiful. A couple of years ago I wrote an MSX emulator in Java for fun. A pretty accurate TMS9918 emulator took just a couple of hours to write with the original technical handbook at hand, in 561 lines of Java code.

https://github.com/tjitze/TMSX

New comment by tr352 in "Airbnb Pulled Back from the Brink"

tr352 — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 19:58:52 +0000

Wouldn't count on it. Most people want to fly as cheaply as possible, also after corona. So airliners will keep on maximising seats per plane. Moreover, decreasing seats per plane will increase emission per passenger, so it also makes no sense from an environmental perspective. So it's more likely that you're going to pay more for the same "stuffed into a tube like cattle" experience.

New comment by tr352 in "Removing Holocaust Denial Content"

tr352 — Mon, 12 Oct 2020 15:12:11 +0000

This seems to be one of those things where the arguments pro and con have already been so endlessly hashed out that it’s simply become a matter of choice which camp you’re in.

New comment by tr352 in "Formal Models for Ethics"

tr352 — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 11:54:33 +0000

Not sure we’re talking about the same thing here. I was replying to your claim that nothing in philosophy (apart from mathematics) can be formalized. The role of logic is not to solve the metaphysical problem of infinite regress.

New comment by tr352 in "Formal Models for Ethics"

tr352 — Sun, 04 Oct 2020 10:39:23 +0000

> It turns out you can't formalize anything that doesn't have proofs -- in other words, it basically only works for what we'd call "mathematics" or "pure logic". You can't formalize literally anything else in philosophy, at all.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is a wealth of logics that have been developed and studied within philosophy, that aim to formalize various philosophical concepts. See modal logics, deontic logics, logics about knowledge and belief, and so on.