Hacker News Reader

kevinventulloon 'Once in a Century' Proof Settles Math's Kakeya Conjecture

Joking aside, I feel like a variation of this could make a good Project Euler problem…

It's not just researchers. Engineers at Google get to spin up products and throw spaghetti at walls, too.

This might have been true 10-15 years ago. I assure you it is not the case today.

kevinventulloon Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening

Agreed. I actually don’t think removing old content is strictly necessary for a pleasant experience. Looking at friends’ or even my old posts on conventional social media is one of the more enjoyable/less toxic experiences.

In fact, on the topic of posting less, I know first-hand that the introduction of the ephemeral “story” format in conventional social media was done precisely in order to reduce friction in getting people to post more.

kevinventulloon Arranging invisible icons in quadratic time (2021)

I think it depends heavily on the software.

kevinventulloon Arranging invisible icons in quadratic time (2021)

I feel like this is the one type of thing grinding leetcode would prevent.

kevinventulloon Establishment of the strategic Bitcoin reserve and US digital asset stockpile

“…the United States Government shall not acquire additional Stockpile Assets other than in connection with criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings or in satisfaction of any civil money penalty imposed by any agency without further executive or legislative action.”

kevinventulloon Europe's most wanted man plotted my murder and that of my colleague

Winners create the 5-second infotainment TikTok historical summary.

kevinventulloon Should Managers Still Code?

One important distinction to make is the difference between a manager who started out as an IC on the project (esp. the case when they actually built the thing from the ground up) versus a manager brought in from the outside. I think the former is more likely to be hands-on and generally speaking the expert in the room. But, sometimes you need the latter. It can be challenging (even counterproductive) for the latter person to try to be technically relevant, when they are often the least technically knowledgeable person in the room when they join.

I say this as someone who has been in both roles!

kevinventulloon Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar

I think Nintendo figured this out years ago. Their games are not graphically cutting-edge, but they still sell like crazy.

kevinventulloon A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

It may hurt if the only way to solve problems is to take away power from bad actors. In a democracy, one can only do that by winning voters. In 2025, it turns out that voters respond positively to strongmen who do indeed begin their conversations by derailing, dehumanizing, and attacking their opponents.

So, if you want to win in the court of public opinion, maybe go for the throat in Round 1. Sadly, respectful dialogue is not en vogue.

kevinventulloon Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working

That’s a horrible idea. I very much like driving on straight wide roads without speed bumps, even if I’m going 25mph.

kevinventulloon Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working

Do their models show that the median quality of life in the US has increased in the last 20 years? Honest question.

kevinventulloon A DOGE staffer appears to be posting DOGE work on his public GitHub

What makes you think that problems will be solved by de-escalation?

kevinventulloon Fast Exact Integer Roots

This is a sequel to a blog post I wrote a few years ago, using some ideas from number theory to develop an algorithm for computing kth roots of integers quickly. Open to feedback, and apologies for any sloppiness!

kevinventulloon If you believe in "Artificial Intelligence", take five minutes to ask it

These are very crisp simple examples. The problem is when you get into fuzzy complex subject matter and they hallucinate references or make string together plausible sounding sentences that are not even wrong.

kevinventulloon They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)

This may come as a shocker to you, but there are people in this country who are driven by morals, not money. It’s true! Real life people, who vote and everything, who genuinely care for the poor and needy.

kevinventulloon DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL

This recent paper is relevant: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769

kevinventulloon DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL

Meta’s AI org does a heck of a lot more than produce LLM’s. R&D on ads targeting and ranking more than pays for itself.

kevinventulloon The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

Am I crazy or is “conversion to base 15” very much a numeric method/operation?

Like sure the API itself may have string input/output, but under the hood there’s no way it’s not doing integer divisions and modulos.

kevinventulloon A very Chicago gamble

I’m a white guy who lived in Bronzeville for 3 years because I went to IIT… which is in Bronzeville. Was I also a gentrifier?

kevinventulloon PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory

Ironically, on Facebook itself I am only friends with people I actually know in real life. So, most of the stuff I see in my feed is from them.

kevinventulloon [dead]

I mean if the left wanted to play as dirty as the right, could they just have a token candidate running with Obama as VP, who makes it clear they will resign the presidency to the VP on day one?

kevinventulloon 417-megapixel Andromeda galaxy panorama took over a decade to make

Seems like there should be a library that does this fairly efficiently for ultra large images.

kevinventulloon Staffers unload on Amazon 'leadership' after return-to-office for desk shortage

It’s not middle management pushing for this. It’s clueless upper management.

kevinventulloon Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

This presumes that proto-bees had stingers that killed them before being super organisms

I don’t know where you got that. It seems perfectly plausible that the stingers evolved in the superorganism, and that the selective pressure was something like “drones protect the hive via stingers which kill them” versus “drones can’t sting at all”.

kevinventulloon Why do bees die when they sting you? (2021)

My understanding from the article and the general theory of Superorganisms is that it’s not exactly true that “dying when stinging confers fitness”. Rather, dying when stinging is just not a huge penalty when you’re talking about non-reproducing members of a colony. So, while it may be a good thing for bees to evolve the ability to survive stinging, the selective pressure is not as large as one might intuitively expect.

Maybe a better title for the post would be something like, “Isn’t it weird that bees die when they sting? Shouldn’t they have evolved away from that?”

kevinventulloon What if no one misses TikTok?

Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are already trying to replace TT and failing. They really are nowhere near as good.

kevinventulloon What if no one misses TikTok?

Apolitical is an interesting choice of description. My understanding is that the real motivation of banning TikTok is precisely the political influence it wields on the youth’s malleable minds.

kevinventulloon Portrait of the Hilbert Curve (2010)

If I remember right, one of the key guarantees of the Hilbert curve is that if you specify a number N=6 say, then given any rectangle of vertices, you can cover it by no more than N sequential sub-curves of the Hilbert curve without “overshooting” by too much. More precisely, there is a constant C (depending only on N) such that your cover will never be no more than C times larger than the original rectangle.

And then as you let N grow, C tends to 1.

I believe the same is true for Morton, though the constant is larger. However, I think it is false for the zig-zag curve, with a counter-example being a long strip orthogonal to the usual direction of the zig-zag.