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hoyd

225 karma · joined February 10, 2019

Communication and projects at Andøya Space Education.
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hoyd··on Discovery Loop
«Jeff Dean's PIN is the last 4 digits of pi.»

I had not read this before, but told many students the same about my PIN code and I a quiz about the last digits. Love it.

hoyd··on I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned
«Keep the web weird and interesting.»

This made me smile and I agree.

hoyd··on Becoming a dad changes men's brains
Songs too.
hoyd··on Becoming a dad changes men's brains
With four kids, I think I have grown more patient with people in general. Also one who got more sentimental.
hoyd··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I would not so much, perhaps look for spelling errors. For me writing the sermon is the goal, diving into the deep and exploring the topic, passage and such. If I preach it, it is kind of a bonus, or a driver to begin with :-)
hoyd··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I could, but I would most likely print out a copy from the pdf export or bring a tablet. ;-)
hoyd··on Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI?
I have made a TUI tool for organizing and authoring sermons written by myself. It also has a third mode for reading one or two bible versions in parallel. I love the interface and keep adding features to make it easy to navigate in and something that actually helps me to organize and write sermons. Some features are to have notes at specific places in the bible, summaries, notes, exports to html/pdf, metadata for each sermon and autofocus on widgets when changing between the three modes. Happy to work in the terminal this way. :-)
hoyd··on Frontier AI has broken the open CTF format
«That feedback loop is breaking. If the visible scoreboard is dominated by teams using AI, a beginner is pushed toward using AI before they have built the instincts the AI is replacing. That is an anti-pattern. It prevents active learning, and active struggle is the bit that actually teaches you. It is also completely demotivating to put in real effort and see no visible progress because the ladder above you has been automated.»

This stands out to me, and speaks perhaps broader than the article itself? I’m sure this has been in the spotlight before, but well put for many areas I think.

hoyd··on Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found
Perhaps the doctor meant for these to be lost and not found, or that the daleks was afraid of them?
hoyd··on Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
This is what the internet is about, finding blogs and stumbling over pages like this with such content. Thanks!
hoyd··on Hackers (1995) Animated Experience
Sounds like something I would do too. Awesomeness
hoyd··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://blog.hoyd.net
hoyd··on Mistral OCR 3
Voynich manuscript next :-)
hoyd··on Bot vs. Bot: Will the Internet Soon Be a Place Without Humans? (2018)
Interesting to read this article again now, after the raise of LLMs. The bot vs. bot then could perhaps be read as llm vs. llm today?

"The paradox is that this bot glut could eventually push most human interaction offline again; news (real news, that is) will be shared by talking, jobs will be found through connections, and friends will discover major life updates about one another at events and reunions. This is the best case. Another option is that we will have bot-free zones online."

"As more components of our lives become automated, we may want to give some extra thought to which of our routine human interactions are ok to reduce to a bot, and which are worth doing the old-fashioned way, with our own voices, hands, and eyes."

hoyd··on Unusual distribution of steps needed to reach Kaprekar's constant (6174)
In the distribution of the number of steps needed to reach Kaprekar's constant (6174), I observe an unexpected distribution pattern, with three steps being the most common number of steps required. I cannot think of why this is the case. Has anyone done some though about this phenomenon?
hoyd··on Ask HN: Unusual distribution of steps needed to reach Kaprekar's constant (6174)
Sure, here is a translated post:

Title: Distribution of the Number of Steps to Kaprekar's Constant

We are trying Kaprekar's routine.

I choose a four-digit number with at least two different digits: 2345. We find the largest possible variant 5432 and the smallest possible variant 2345 from the digits and begin the routine...

5432 - 2345 = 3087 8730 - 0378 = 8352 8532 - 2358 = 6174

We have arrived at Kaprekar's constant: 6174 after 3 steps.

This is fine. If I now do this on all possible four-digit numbers, the number of steps required before 6174 is reached is distributed as follows:

The diagram showing the distribution of steps: https://earth.hoyd.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/kaprekars_...

This distribution seems a bit strange and not entirely intuitive. I immediately feel that the distribution should have been more evenly distributed.

Perhaps not evenly, but I think that one step to 6174 should be rarer than seven steps, shouldn't it? It has to do with the calculation i guess. There are a limited number of combinations where the result is 6174 on the first attempt. It feels a bit obvious and matches the diagram above. It slowly rises towards seven steps, is that to be expected?

What I find most strange is that three steps tops all others. Why is that? Why is there such a large presence of three? What does it mean? I would very much like to find an explanation for this.

hoyd··on Ask HN: Unusual distribution of steps needed to reach Kaprekar's constant (6174)
Sorry about that. The post itself isn't relevant, it's just the plot from it I refer to.
hoyd··on Knitting Your Parachute
On the side, from the title I was picturing actual knitted parachutes, which isn't the first time. At work, we had a student cansat team who did just that. To everyone's surprise, it worked better than regular ones. Here is a video where she explains it.

https://www.esero.no/prosjekter/cansat/ https://vimeo.com/866239028

hoyd··on Some terminal frustrations
Same
hoyd··on VS Code Pets
Reminded me of that too.
hoyd··on Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free, but raising the price of Workspace
Do you happen to have a link for that comic?
hoyd··on Classic Computer Magazines
Of computer magazines today, I can only think of Hello World. Not a gaming magazine, but still.
hoyd··on Three hundred words you can spell on a calculator [pdf]
This was right up my alley, and inspired by this post, I had to check against the norwegian scrabble dictionary: https://earth.hoyd.net/posts/ord-du-kan-stave-med-en-kalkula...
hoyd··on Do Penguins Have Knees? (2019)
What a lovely question! I enjoyed reading the answer too.

It reminded me of the childrens book "Did Jesus Ever See a Penguin?"

hoyd··on Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
Reminded me of pointerpointer.com and for some reason new kids on the block.
hoyd··on Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
:-)
hoyd··on Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
I'm currently only using Premiere Pro and InDesign from the Adobe Creative Suite and Inkscape and Gimp from old habit. Never god around to use Photoshop and Illustrator to be honest. I'm planning to end up with this suite:

Premiere Pro -> Davinci Resolve

InDesign -> Affinity Publisher

Illustrator -> Inkscape

Photoshop -> Gimp

hoyd··on ICQ will stop working from June 26
Is the essay somewhere online?
hoyd··on Thinking out loud about 2nd-gen email
What about Wave?
hoyd··on Veo
I can see what you mean, and that the video is somewhat not what it would be like in real. I have lived in northern Norway most of my life, and watched Auroras a lot. It certainly look green and link for the most time. Fainter, it would perhaps sorry gray I guess? Red, when viewed from a more southern viewpoint..

I work at Andøya Space where perhaps most of the space research on Aurora had been done by sending scientific rockets into space for the last 60 yrs.

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