Hacker News: universa1

New comment by universa1 in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

universa1 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 09:56:55 +0000

The oral exams scale better than one might expect, at least if you're not just doing multiple choice exams and you have to actually grade the exam. The time spent on grading the exam could have also been spent on an oral exam... For bachelor level it's usually 15-20min (usually quicker for the well prepared students), and for master courses it is 30min.

Usually you know after a few minutes if it's going to be a fail, and then otherwise you only need to figure out where on the passing scale the student ends up.

New comment by universa1 in "Solving 20 Erdős Problems with 20 Codex Accounts Running in Parallel"

universa1 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:15:33 +0000

This looks interesting. I am not really familiar with lean, etc... Could I use this to formalize/verify a proof from a paper?

New comment by universa1 in "Ditching Zotero for a Text File"

universa1 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 14:17:11 +0000

Mostly yes, you still need to check capitalisation of special words... But this should be independent of the actual citation style.

New comment by universa1 in "New AI tutor achieves 0.71-1.30 SD effect size in Dartmouth course [pdf]"

universa1 — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:11:38 +0000

there was a pen that used special paper to directly record your notes (15-20years ago)... should be possible nowadays to directly transfer this to a connected device and have it feed it to an llm.

and after looking it up, it appears they are still available: https://www.livescribe.com/landingpage/ls3_onenote/

New comment by universa1 in "Steam Machine launches today"

universa1 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:01:07 +0000

I think the actual solution is closer to, you buy a team specific ticket/option: if your team advances you get the ticket, if some other team advances their fans get the tickets.

New comment by universa1 in "VibeThinker: 3B param model that beats Opus 4.5 on reasoning with novel SFT+GRPO"

universa1 — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 05:47:46 +0000

A 10 year old definitely,and 5year old is close, but not unrealistic, To drive a car you don't need to be able to read... To drive a car on the road with other people is a whole other story :-)

New comment by universa1 in "Framework Laptop 13 Pro"

universa1 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 09:02:07 +0000

if you count all parts, bottom, keyboard, cover, battery its more like 500 to 600.

New comment by universa1 in "John Deere to pay $99M in right-to-repair settlement"

universa1 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:16:20 +0000

The attachment mechanism is usually standardized, so you can just switch between brands.

Nowadays a larger factor might be how close the next dealership/repair shop is. Some things are time critical, and when it breaks in this time, then you don't want to drive hours to have it fixed/get a part/ have a mechanic available.

There are some differences between the brands... And you can always be Clarkson and get a Lamborghini, even when it makes no sense ;-)

New comment by universa1 in "Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview"

universa1 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:28:43 +0000

i am curious: is the performance gap between x86 cpu inference and apple silicon, or, a imho more apples-to-apples comparison, e.g., amd strixpoint halo vs apple silicon?

i would expect the "pure" cpu inference to be behind, but an approach like strix halo/dgx spark to be much closer?

New comment by universa1 in "Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies"

universa1 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:45:49 +0000

I am fully on your side, but tests are not 100%: False positives and false negatives.

The way out is obviously better tests and not less tests :-)

New comment by universa1 in "Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm"

universa1 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:57:48 +0000

What one has to keep in mind as well, that even though tractors are really heavy they spread that weight across a large area (using low tire pressures and having massive tires to begin with). So, iirc, the per area impact is even lower then a human. It impacts a lot larger area, though!

Plowing vs tilling is also very much about soil erosion and depends very much of the location you are in.

New comment by universa1 in "Prism"

universa1 — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 07:01:04 +0000

you can use git with overleaf, but from practical experience: getting even "mathematically/technically inclined" people to consistently use git takes a lot of time... which one could spend on other more fun things :-)

New comment by universa1 in "TerabyteDeals – Compare storage prices by $/TB"

universa1 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 07:12:55 +0000

Not affiliated, but for Germany I'd check https://gh.de ... For technical products you can filter for mostly any relevant detail... At least most German shops are there, and only a few not.

I am always curious why there doesn't seem to be something similar everywhere?

New comment by universa1 in "AMD GPU Debugger"

universa1 — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:46:37 +0000

try it with ramalama[1]. worked fine here with a 7840u and a 6900xt.

[1] https://ramalama.ai/

New comment by universa1 in "Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure"

universa1 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 15:00:34 +0000

As payment is very much a "relative" problem, giving everyone else more, means essentially giving train drivers less.

New comment by universa1 in "Two guys hated using Comcast, so they built their own fiber ISP"

universa1 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:58:28 +0000

The fiber installing crews around here go street by street and usually do one street section per day/or two.

New comment by universa1 in "Generate autounattend.xml files for Windows 10/11"

universa1 — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:25:17 +0000

Hmm, I've a deja-vu... My mind tells me I've read these three comments before on a different topic... If I don't forget, I'll have to check tomorrow on a real PC.

New comment by universa1 in "More than 40% of postdocs leave academia, study reveals"

universa1 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:30:54 +0000

Hmm this doesn't sound like what I experienced a professor doing... But this probably depends on the location and the discipline... Or well at least here in Germany you can more or less pick what you want to do: more being a people / project manager or more own research, or a mix of that... The uncertainty/low chances of getting a tenured position are not different though... And though it might suck, this is something you know, at the latest, after your PhD.

New comment by universa1 in "Deadline looms: Google Workspace mandates OAuth by September 30"

universa1 — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 01:43:44 +0000

Thunderbird supports the oauth flow for quite a while now :-)

New comment by universa1 in "Cosy Computing"

universa1 — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 11:29:17 +0000

Hmm... You might be able to build one out of a remarkable [1], as that runs linux, has support for external keyboard and might only be lacking in the battery life department, when actively used.

[1] remarkable.com