Hacker News: yellowflash

New comment by yellowflash in "The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing"

yellowflash — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:13:34 +0000

Kernel is a bad analogy, if you understand how it behaves you can understand how its built. LLMs don't have that, their behaviour is not completely defined by how they are built.

Every abstraction is leaky, its not like I have 1 in every 100 tickets I work on needs understanding of the existence of filesystem buffers, it's in the back of my mind, it's always there. I didn't read linux kernel source, but I know it's existence. LLM output doesn't have that.

New comment by yellowflash in "AI Perfected Chess. Humans Made It Unpredictable Again"

yellowflash — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:20:07 +0000

Today I learned, Stockfish moved to neural network on 2023. I knew that it was just a minmax with alpha beta pruning and a really good eval function. Now its not.

New comment by yellowflash in "Fixpoints to think clearly"

yellowflash — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 15:36:49 +0000

Very good question. This is totally dependent on the starting point of the search. The entire domain is not a contraction in such cases, there are sub sets of domains where it is a contraction and as whole it's not. Like multiple pieces where we can apply Banach theorem.

New comment by yellowflash in "Fixpoints to think clearly"

yellowflash — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 11:09:20 +0000

Sorry, can you check now?

Fixpoints to think clearly

yellowflash — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 10:19:19 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yellowflash.in/posts/2026-03-03-fixpoints-for-clarity.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47230482

Points: 16

# Comments: 5

New comment by yellowflash in "Conversation with Claude on Reasoning"

yellowflash — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:17:48 +0000

I was wondering if I could get a different way of thinking about reasoning machines as such. Reasoning models are trying to just externalize the reasoning through chain of thought or fine-tuning on reasoning focused dataset.

They all seem very hacky and not really reasoning. I wanted to see if there are alternative fundamental ways to think about reasoning as end by itself.

New comment by yellowflash in "Conversation with Claude on Reasoning"

yellowflash — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:05:46 +0000

I am trying to get a better understanding of what reasoning could possibly mean. So far, I am thinking that more we are able to compress knowledge more it's an indicator for reasoning. I would like to understand more about these, please tell me where my understanding is lacking or point me what I should learn more regarding this.

Conversation with Claude on Reasoning

yellowflash — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 17:05:46 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yellowflash.in/posts/2025-09-23-singularity-claude-conversation.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45349867

Points: 2

# Comments: 3

Carefully Reading Programming Bitcoin

yellowflash — Thu, 29 May 2025 09:32:24 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yellowflash.in/posts/2025-05-29-programming-bitcoin-handwaved.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44124397

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by yellowflash in "Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?"

yellowflash — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 06:07:54 +0000

I think observable notebooks like Pluto.jl is something like his vision though not exactly. It's just more general and useful ?

New comment by yellowflash in "The mental Universe (2005) [pdf]"

yellowflash — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 16:04:57 +0000

"Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know that he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things"

New comment by yellowflash in "The mental Universe (2005) [pdf]"

yellowflash — Tue, 23 Aug 2022 08:11:40 +0000

My understanding is rudimentary, but it doesn't alter the system. But it fixes what state the system should have to produce the given observation, retroactively. Which is counterintuitive in lot of ways. It can be thought as if the observation caused the determination of past state. Do I make sense or I am just talking absolute non-sense.

New comment by yellowflash in "Time for Army Corps of Engineers to investigate moving water West?"

yellowflash — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:11:25 +0000

One of them is per family and other per person (family of size 1). Is it even comparable? I am not saying it is lesser, it's pretty high, probably 200% not 560% if I am right.

New comment by yellowflash in "Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?"

yellowflash — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 03:25:42 +0000

That's how mongodb geospatial indexes work IIRC

New comment by yellowflash in "Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?"

yellowflash — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 03:19:22 +0000

Very interested in your idea. How does concurrent updates work with the augumented trees? I have been thinking about the same for a while something like CouchDB but segment aggregations (monoid) augumented so we can do interval queries over time too. But the only thing bothering is augumented trees are notorious of contention on concurrent updates. Do you have any ideas on merging back if we have multiple versions of augumented trees.

New comment by yellowflash in "Similarity join (Min-hash)"

yellowflash — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 10:00:35 +0000

The probability of the `b` being chosen for A is 1 (No other choice) and for B it is 1/2. The probability of `b` being chosen for both (The only common token), is |{(b,b)}| / |{(a, a), {(a, b)}| = 1/2 which is jaccard's similarity |{b}|/|{a, b}|

I could have explained that a bit better I suppose.

Similarity join (Min-hash)

yellowflash — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 04:37:14 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yellowflash.in/2022/05/24/similarity-join.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31857854

Points: 60

# Comments: 9

Similarity joins on large datasets – Minhash

yellowflash — Tue, 24 May 2022 09:41:55 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.yellowflash.in/2022/05/24/similarity-join.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31489927

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by yellowflash in "Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?"

yellowflash — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 10:04:23 +0000

It would be Graham Hutton's Programming in Haskell. That one little chapter on parser combinators was totally worth it.

If I can include this functional pearl "A play on regular expression", Not a book though.

These two showed how composition and simple abstraction could make the solution super beautiful.

New comment by yellowflash in "Lunar Eclipse: An Email to a Daughter and Son-in-Law"

yellowflash — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 13:40:53 +0000

True, it's just he loosened the notion of real and virtual to an extent that's unfamiliar to people.

Anyway nice profile name. :D