Hacker News: usgroup

Snakes and Ladders: A Statistical Analysis

usgroup — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:29:14 +0000

Article URL: https://emiruz.com/post/2026-01-04-snakes-and-ladders/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722349

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by usgroup in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

usgroup — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 13:01:11 +0000

https://awesomeclaude.ai/ralph-wiggum

Explainable Query Tagging (NLP)

usgroup — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:52:37 +0000

Article URL: https://emiruz.com/post/2026-01-17-qu-tagger/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46694188

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by usgroup in "Two Concepts of Intelligence"

usgroup — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:42:05 +0000

Well that would be extra information. Wherever you find the edge of your information, you will find the "problem of induction" as presented above.

New comment by usgroup in "Two Concepts of Intelligence"

usgroup — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:19:23 +0000

yes, if you decide one of them is much more likely without reference to the data, then it will be much more likely :)

New comment by usgroup in "Two Concepts of Intelligence"

usgroup — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 12:45:58 +0000

This issue happens at the edge of every induction. These two rules support their data equally well:

data: T T T T T T F

rule1: for all i: T

rule2: for i < 7: T else F

Explainable Unsupervised Query Tagging

usgroup — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 08:02:44 +0000

Article URL: https://emiruz.com/post/2026-01-17-qu-tagger/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676118

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:31:27 +0000

SWI Prolog is just fine, and you'll find it to be batteries included unlike many other choices. The first thing to learn is the "Prolog state of mind", or how to express your intentions in Prolog without trying to turn it into a functional or imperative programming language.

Prolog will show you another way of thinking. If it does not then you are doing it wrong.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:27:40 +0000

Personally I don't like the Standard ML based mash-ups.

I think Curry is an interesting take on logic programming. A sort of Haskell meets Prolog.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:25:54 +0000

I can recommend "Simply Logical". I also suggest Advent of Code as a nice way to cut your teeth with expressing thoughts with Prolog.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:24:21 +0000

Generally speaking, Prolog syntax is ridiculously simple and uniform. Its pattern matching is the most universal of any programming language partly because of this.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:20:46 +0000

Yeah that sounds like me too. Prolog became a fetish a few years ago. I used it intensely for 2 years, wrote a lot about it, until it became a part of me. Its intangible what it does to you, but its the dual of what you might expect.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 18:17:20 +0000

No, datalog is a decidable subset of Prolog. That changes everything.

New comment by usgroup in "My Gripes with Prolog"

usgroup — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:49:21 +0000

I think this article is problematic because Prolog is truly a different paradigm which requires time to understand. Laments about no strings, no functions and "x is confusing" read like expectations of a different paradigm.

Prolog is also unusual in a sense that it is essential to understand what the interpreter does with your code in order to be able to write it well. For vanilla Prolog, that's not so hard. However, when constraint programming and other extensions are added, that becomes much harder to do.

Snakes and Ladders: a short statistical analysis

usgroup — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 22:06:40 +0000

Article URL: https://emiruz.com/post/2026-01-04-snakes-and-ladders/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46492795

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

PyEvidence: Practical Evidence Theory for Python

usgroup — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:41:36 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/emiruz/pyevidence

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46464639

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

Pyevidence: Practical Evidence Theory

usgroup — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 14:09:41 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/emiruz/pyevidence

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454250

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Alias Method

usgroup — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 22:36:33 +0000

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

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438911

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by usgroup in "Israel used Palantir technologies in pager attack in Lebanon"

usgroup — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:23:56 +0000

evil(x) -> not(do(x)) which equates to not(evil(x)) or not(do(x)).

The negation would be evil(x) and do(x) by DeMorgan's law.

If what you mean is all(x), evil(x) -> not(do(x))

then the negation would be exists(x), evil(x) and do(x).

New comment by usgroup in "Dempster-shafer and reasoning about sets"

usgroup — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 09:04:33 +0000

Thanks for this reference; I found this paper interesting, but it is a satisfiability solver. Inherently it cannot quantify the probability of a subset of events, but it can find a probability assignment given a set of constraints. I.e. prove possibility. More usefully it can show that no such assignment is possible.