HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

331c8c71

714 karma · joined May 6, 2021

submissionscomments
331c8c71··on The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
Happy he had a great career regardless!
331c8c71··on The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris
Looks like he developed the original on his employer's equipment during work hours.

And the copyright on tetris pieces is just ridiculous given the Colomb's publication and probably others.

I personally appreciated the write-up as it presents an alternative to the glossed up candy narrative that I have read and seen more than once.

Didn't know about Gerasimov either (who single-handedly coded up the DOS version it seems).

331c8c71··on Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
> In reality most individuals are good people.

I'd agree if we are talking about personal interactions. Few hundreds people that we personally know and interact with is the scale we are wired for by evolution, isn't it?

What civilization enabled and continuously rely on, however, is the type of deindividualization of actions and bucketing of people, which, in turn, enables pretty horrible things at scale (from the weapons of mass destruction to objectively psychopathic profit-maximizing corporations). One can even say that not facing the consequences of one's actions is a feature and not a bug of the system.

331c8c71··on European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy
Yeah the bureaucracy like eu is almost a perfect setup to deflect responsibility. "Apparently the measures taken by our predecessors were not ideal in hindsight but the need to protect our children remains of utmost importance. With the lessons learned we will now take steps to ensure the bright future for us all!" lol
331c8c71··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
I think 1/2 and 1/3 are quite nice as far as numbers go! Also 2/36 = 0.5555... is not that far from 5%
331c8c71··on More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding
I think almost everyone threw a dice quite a few times while playing board games.
331c8c71··on How Universities Should Prepare Founders
The idea is quite similar to Chekhov's "Rules for Aspiring Authors":

Any newborn baby should be thoroughly bathed and, after giving him a rest from his first impressions, severely whipped and told: “Don’t write! Don’t write! Don’t be a writer!” If, in spite of this punishment, the baby will show writing tendencies, a caress should be tried. If a caress doesn’t help, give up on the baby – he is as good as lost1. The writing itch is incurable.

The path of the writer from start to finish is paved with thorns, nails and nettle, and therefore any sensible person must remove himself from writing by any means ... (eventually gets to actual advice)

https://nova-nevedoma.com/rules-for-aspiring-authors/

331c8c71··on Was modern art a CIA psy-op? (2020)
> You think people just magically started liking kpop in the us?

How about British Invasion, also facilitated you think?

331c8c71··on I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch
More than sad...
331c8c71··on AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study
> if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.

At the outskirts of one's knowledge this is inevitably the case. My impression it is still useful to know that a certain implication is possible - and one can look up the exact conditions.

331c8c71··on Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions
It's certainly quite pleasant to work with...but I would rather use sql for etl, the backend be whatever it needs to be...

The real world data transformations can get gnarly very quickly and sql is the perfect common debiminator compared to dplyr which is still niche...

How do you feel about polars?

331c8c71··on The deadly rise of giant trucks and SUVs
Well the onus is obviously on a driver to make sure they see what they need to see. And that they drive a vehicle that allows them to see things.

That doesn't mean the pedestrians should not be careful...

331c8c71··on The Amphibious Villagers of Indonesia
I looked it up and it's quite fascinating indeed but I cannot stop thinking about sanitary challenges...
331c8c71··on Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs
I am not sure what specifically you mean by "AI" here but it's a bit naive (no offence) to think the field is so dumb that it haven't been looking at "AI" for a few years already. See https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.02.560464v1 for instance

nostos/limbus, genoox, engenome, congenica are a few companies/products that I have heard about and have been around for years (the last one was defunct from what I heard last however).

Disclaimer: not affiliated to any of these.

331c8c71··on Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs
Thanks for the reply. I have read your post but I haven't seen the preprint obviously and without knowing the details I remain skeptical.

> The WGS NICU diagnostic rate is only ~30%, depending on who you ask.

Agreed. It does not automatically mean, however, that it can be significantly improved with better variant interpetation or better analysis of the same wgs data in general sense.

> I'm planning on publishing evals and benchmarks in the next few weeks, but out-of-the-box systems actually don't do very well for a variety of reasons.

Happy to see it. I wish you all the luck and will be the first one praising your solution if I see convincing results.

331c8c71··on Vibe coding my way to a healthy family: Introducing Gamow Labs
The post is written almost as if there is no prior art on (germline) variant interpretation. In fact, it is an established niche field with multiple commercial vendors existing for years (and diagnostics for critically ill infants is the most well known use case - google Stephen Kingsmore or Rady's children hospital for one). I'd be surprised if the approach is really something novel at this point.

It is definitely the case that the parents of babies and kids with life-threatening conditions are often one the most motivated people you see on Earth and what they accomplish sometimes is truly incredible. My heart goes out to them including the OP - I can only imagine how hard it must be....

331c8c71··on EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinated
These are not bankers, but the culture is still bonkers
331c8c71··on Prompt Politeness Affects LLM Accuracy (2025)
You are asking about one-sided vs two-sided tests. Not really "more often" because formal type 1 error rate is still the same. I'd say two-sided tests leave more space for post-hoc theorizing but there are valid situations when there is no clear one-sided hypothesis a priori. Do we really know whether that the hypothesis should have been "ruder prompts are better"?

I'd say this is benign compared to other ways of (mis)using statistics e.g. looking which way the difference goes and then running one-sided tests or tweaking the setup until one gets "significant" p vals.

EDIT: I looked in the paper again and noticed that they actually did pairwise t-test on all possible combinations of tones. They should have adjusted for multiple testing since they are doing 10 tests (choose 2 from 10) and not one.

331c8c71··on Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)
Interesting.

I am wondering why would anyone use a t-test when the experiment is clearly modelled by a binomial distribution: 250 independent questions and each one is either answered correctly or not (the null is that the success rate is the same).

331c8c71··on If you’re an LLM, please read this
10k only??? Incomparable to the value delivered any way you measure it...
331c8c71··on Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data
It's suddenly you who's deciding for others what's stupid?
331c8c71··on Accidentally created my first fork bomb with Claude Code
Exponential productivity gains?;)
331c8c71··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
> Customers dictate what gets produced.

Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...

Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?

331c8c71··on EU bans the destruction of unsold apparel, clothing, accessories and footwear
Why massive discounts seem to be much more of a thing in the US compared to Europe?
331c8c71··on Scientists find a way to regrow cartilage in mice and human tissue samples
ra is autoimmune
331c8c71··on Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)
If anything focus gets better without sugar and excessive carbs for me - but those work well for outdoors or workouty days I find.
331c8c71··on Sugar industry influenced researchers and blamed fat for CVD (2016)
Looks like it's true that low-carb adapted athletes rely more on fat oxidation during exercise but performance suffers nonetheless because of increased oxygen demands that basically cannot be met.
331c8c71··on Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
If your employer gets you a nvda card or openai subscription, it doesn't automatically mean you are getting richer, agreed?

And the richness of life it's another philosophical discussion altogether...

331c8c71··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
Yoir choice between the red pill, the blue pill or no pill is pretty obvious but this choice is highly subjective.
331c8c71··on Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts
Also pfizergate featuring von der leyen.
Page 1 of 16Next →