Hacker News: v64

New comment by v64 in "The Wolfram S Combinator Challenge"

v64 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:54:28 +0000

as far as I understand it, turing completeness is a weaker property than combinatory completeness, which Craig's theorem is addressing. The nonexistence of a singleton combinatory basis doesn't necessarily imply the nonexistence of a turing complete combinator.

New comment by v64 in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

v64 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 02:30:34 +0000

Looking forward to hearing about how you're using Opus 4.5, from my experience and what I've heard from others, it's been able to overcome many obstacles that previous iterations stumbled on

New comment by v64 in "Show HN: Cobble – A hard daily word game"

v64 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 03:58:04 +0000

your score is the length of your two words plus the space

New comment by v64 in "A Lean companion to Analysis I"

v64 — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 17:45:00 +0000

Formalization of many of the ideas from HoTT are currently happening in the Agda community. [1] It's out of my wheelhouse, so I don't know the exact motivations, but Agda is apparently a better way to formalize those ideas than in Lean.

Also, there's a new textbook coming out later this year that's a more modern update to the original HoTT book [2] which also has an Agda formalization. [3]

[1] https://martinescardo.github.io/HoTT-UF-in-Agda-Lecture-Note...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/introduction-to-homotop...

[3] https://github.com/HoTT-Intro/Agda

New comment by v64 in "A Hyper-Catalan Series Solution to Polynomial Equations, and the Geode"

v64 — Mon, 05 May 2025 00:48:50 +0000

Earlier comments found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43869093

From my brief reading of it, it seems like the interesting bit here is the development of the Hypercatalan numbers as the coefficients of the infinite sums of roots of polynomials. Some partial results for special cases of the Catalan numbers and roots had been found in the past, but the full understanding of the structure they call the Geode enabled generalization of the previous findings.

New comment by v64 in "Suno v4.5"

v64 — Fri, 02 May 2025 16:23:07 +0000

Have been using Suno over the last few iterations and can vouch for this; steering the final product with style tags is a lot better now and I can use more natural language rather than trying to come up with what the genre specific "wordings" for certain styles of music would be. Good to know the tip about the brackets in lyrics too.

Some examples of style descriptions I've used that generated results close to what I had in mind are "romantic comedy intro music, fast and exciting, new york city" (aiming for something like the Sex and the City theme) and "mature adult romance reality tv show theme song, breakbeats, seductive, intimate, saxophones, lots of saxophones" which did indeed produce cheesy porn music.

New comment by v64 in "The VTech Socratic Method"

v64 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:17:04 +0000

I had one of these as a kid; the slow way it drew the graphics onto the screen [1] for a new activity was an aesthetic in itself, like a coloring book being drawn and colored in before your eyes, a perfect loading screen for kids.

Wikipedia notes: The system will "draw" images by filling in areas of the screen with color one line at a time; it is not known whether this is an effect employed for the student's enjoyment or if it is due to the slow processing time of the system.

[1] https://youtu.be/r71ejYkkmDY?t=64

New comment by v64 in "Noise"

v64 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 17:50:19 +0000

moving around on the noise site, you can get it to resemble parts of loud pipes, especially at around 2:35 [1] with the repeated upward bits

https://youtu.be/64liF2VuLxI?t=155

New comment by v64 in "U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction"

v64 — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 17:03:10 +0000

I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.

The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.

New comment by v64 in "Confirmed: Reflection 70B's official API is a wrapper for Sonnet 3.5"

v64 — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 02:55:31 +0000

link does not work for me, discussion is here https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1fc98fu/confirm...

New comment by v64 in "Cardinal – Virtual modular synthesizer plugin"

v64 — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 21:00:53 +0000

Programs like this and VCV Rack are great ways to get started on the road to building your own modular synthesizer [1]. Many of the modules in the program are based on real hardware, and while the hardware versions of these modules can cost hundreds of dollars, the software versions are using the exact same firmware. Whether you stay virtual or go out and build the hardware equivalent of your rack, it's a great way to experiment and learn the basics at a lower cost than in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer

New comment by v64 in "Show HN: I've open sourced DD Poker"

v64 — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 21:50:24 +0000

Thank you for taking the time to clean this up and release it. I've never played DD Poker, but have experienced the loss of other games when servers go down and the software stops being updated.

I realize source releases aren't always possible, so it's a great gift to the community when one can make it happen and they put in the effort to do so.

New comment by v64 in "What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images"

v64 — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 21:38:22 +0000

> I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets my experience apart from others.

I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in my head quite well (with verification of this through being a musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.

New comment by v64 in "What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images"

v64 — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 21:36:20 +0000

Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.

New comment by v64 in "Ask HN: What underrated open source project deserves more recognition?"

v64 — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 06:40:04 +0000

https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth

BespokeSynth takes the concept of a modular synthesizer and expands it so that the application is less just a synth and more a complete modular DAW. I've used it to create MIDI/audio workflows that I couldn't get exactly the way I wanted in Ableton or FL Studio. It also has a module for doing livecoded audio processing in Python that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of.

Video from the creator covering I Feel Love in BespokeSynth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzYUgPMMpts

New comment by v64 in "6174"

v64 — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:11:18 +0000

Relevant reading: What Are Mathematical Coincidences (and Why Does It Matter)? by Marc Lange [1]

[1] https://philosophy.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/122/2013...

New comment by v64 in "Cicero: The first AI to play at a human level in Diplomacy (2022)"

v64 — Fri, 24 Nov 2023 20:24:24 +0000

Interesting video from a pro Diplomacy player playing against multiple instances of Cicero and giving commentary during the game [1]. I can see how there would be people that observe AIs engaging in this kind of strategic planning and extrapolate that to how they may behave if they were to cooperatively make plans against us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5192bvUS7k

New comment by v64 in "DALL-E 3 Is So Good It's Stoking an Artist Revolt Against AI Scraping"

v64 — Fri, 03 Nov 2023 18:34:55 +0000

A dated stereotype at this point. The latest versions of Dalle, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc. are much better at this. Generation of words (e.g. making signs that say specific things and not gibberish) has also improved.

New comment by v64 in "Ask HN: Do you upvote? Why or why not?"

v64 — Tue, 17 Oct 2023 17:49:38 +0000

I upvote things that I learned from or gave me a new perspective on. Reading the comment was a net positive use of my time. This can include comments I disagree with.

Similarly, I downvote things that I don't perceive as a positive use of time for me or for anyone else. Spam, grossly incorrect information, deliberately inflammatory comments meant to elicit a certain reaction, etc.

If a comment was a waste of time for me personally, but I can see how someone else might benefit from seeing it, I'll do nothing.

New comment by v64 in "Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?"

v64 — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 21:05:16 +0000

Thanks for sharing this! I also knew the Airplane reference, but assumed it was some kind of non-sequitur or a joke about a Turkish stereotype I was unfamiliar with.