Hacker News Reader

kevinventulloon US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

I thought charter schools and public schools received the same $/student.

What’s funny is the jerky animation actually communicates so much more than the smooth animation.

kevinventulloon A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

I attended high school in the US in the early 00’s and cell phones were absolutely banned from classrooms. You could keep them in your locker and use them between classes, but that was it.

I attended college in the late 00’s, and I don’t think I took a single digital exam. Quizzes, sure, but for final exams even CS was pencil and paper (or a final project, which admittedly will have issues in the post-LLM era).

kevinventulloon Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

FWIW there is a new-ish kind of intermediate genre between classic LAN/ranked multiplayer and single player, which is the whole “survival” genre. Generally speaking, they can be played as single player games, but also allow for small-scale co-op, synchronously or asynchronously. So even if you and a buddy have different schedules, you can make progress separately but still occasionally play together.

Valheim, Grounded, Ark, Satisfactory are a few among many others.

kevinventulloon IBM and AMD to work on quantum-centric supercomputing

Basically anything that requires a massively parallel computation on undeterminable states that are only clear in hindsight.

From https://scottaaronson.blog/ :

“If you take nothing else from this blog: quantum computers won't solve hard problems instantly by just trying all solutions in parallel.”

kevinventulloon The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years

What’s the best choice of free desktop PDF Viewer/Editor these days (any OS)?

On Windows I’ve been using PDF-XChange for a decade or so now, but curious if better alternatives have cropped up.

kevinventulloon 4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC

“Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos”

kevinventulloon Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover

That’s a fair point. But it greatly limits the scope of human-introduced error. I think already for FLT, the surface area for error in the kernel and in axiom translation is substantially smaller than the entirety of the literature which Wiles’s proof recursively depends on.

kevinventulloon Sixteen bottles of wine riddle

You need at least 45 guesses since 2^44 < 16!

kevinventulloon Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover

I contend it is the only way to move forward on the goal of “automating” mathematics. Although we’ve seen natural language approaches do well at IMO, the human effort required to verify higher level proofs is too great with hallucinations being what they are. With something like Lean, you don’t need a human verifier.

kevinventulloon DINOv3

Caveat: I am not an expert, so this is a semi-educated guess.

I imagine it would depend on whether DINOv3 captures the information of whether a given person is in the image, which I think is really a question about training data. So naively, I would guess the answer is yes for celebrities and no for non-celebrities. Partially for data/technical reasons, but also maybe due to the murkier legal expectation of privacy for famous people.

kevinventulloon DINOv3

To elaborate, this is a foundation model. This basically means it can take an arbitrary image and map it to a high dimensional space H in which ~arbitrary characteristics become much easier to solve for.

For example (and this might be oversimplifying a bit, computer vision people please correct me if I’m wrong) if you’re interested in knowing whether or not the image contains a cat, then maybe there is some hyperplane P in H for which images on one side of P do not contain a cat, and images on the other side do contain a cat. And so solving for “Does this image contain a cat?”becomes a much easier problem, all you have to do is figure out what P is. Once you do that, you can pass your image into DINO, dot product with the equation for P, and check whether the answer is negative or positive. The point is that finding P is much easier than training your own computer vision model from scratch.

kevinventulloon Gemma 3 270M: Compact model for hyper-efficient AI

Perhaps you can do some pre-processing before the LLM sees it, e.g. replacing every instance of “kill” with “NorwegianDudeGameKill”, and providing the specific context of what the word “NorwegianDudeGameKill” means in your game.

Of course, it would be better for the LLM to pick up the context automatically, but given what some sibling comments have noted about the PR risks associated with that, you might be waiting a while.

kevinventulloon What's the strongest AI model you can train on a laptop in five minutes?

As I understand it, the most effective small models are synthesized from larger models.

kevinventulloon Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

The rejection might also be random and out of your control. E.g. if they already filled the position or the higher-ups decided to save costs by taking back open headcount. Frustrating for sure, but not actionable.

From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.

kevinventulloon Man develops rare condition after ChatGPT query over stopping eating salt

Is anyone else getting tired of these articles?

“Area man who had poor judgement ten years ago now has both poor judgement and access to chatbots”

kevinventulloon The Anti-Pattern Game

In some sense, the program itself is a ~512 byte compression of an infinite stream of bytes.

kevinventulloon How AI conquered the US economy: A visual FAQ

The benefits have just not been that wide ranging to the average person

I think you might be underestimating how many non-technical people are using LLM’s daily.

kevinventulloon How AI conquered the US economy: A visual FAQ

Won’t you get margin called if the stock goes up in the meantime?

kevinventulloon New executive order puts all grants under political control

Is anything stopping private philanthropy from funding science today? Generally speaking it is in the government’s interest to support fundamental scientific research.

kevinventulloon GPT-5

I think “PhD level knowledge” is probably a more meaningful and accurate phrase.

kevinventulloon GPT-5

Key developers being the leading term doesn’t exactly help the AGI narrative either.

kevinventulloon Cognition CEO offers buyouts to let workers flee 'extreme' work culture

“In the zone” is I think the most analogous piece to the CEO/Founder mindset. When I was in grad school I worked 12 hour days because I wanted to. Not because of an advisor or out of fear or anything, I just thought the material was fascinating and I wanted to learn as much as I could.

As a founder, I think there’s a similar incentive to work all day every day, not just because of the potential payoff, but also because you love it and it is your life. It is unrealistic to expect the same intrinsic passion from employee #30, much less employee #300. They don’t have the ownership, both financially and spiritually. It’s not their baby.

kevinventulloon Coffee-shop pitch change helped founder unlock traction for laptop campers

15 years ago Peet’s Coffee enforced this on me, killing the WiFi after an hour despite the fact that I was the only person in the store. Haven’t been back since.

The best model I’ve seen is to just have some tables marked as “no laptop”.

kevinventulloon Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

I think what the person you’re responding to meant was that you can generate a fandom for the content that was generated for you. So, you can get the feeling of being in a fandom despite there being no actual other humans that know what you’re talking about.

kevinventulloon NASA's Curiosity picks up new skills

There is much more personally impactful shame and alienation associated with being a loud idiot and/or jerk IRL.

kevinventulloon NASA's Curiosity picks up new skills

I care about consequences, not about feeling smarter than other people. I care about policies, not candidates. In particular I believe that policies like “Defund the NSF” are bad, actually.

kevinventulloon Palantir is extending its reach even further into government

Pretty sure Tao’s had one or two new ideas.

kevinventulloon NASA's Curiosity picks up new skills

If only there was some kind of major indicator of overall public sentiment, conducted nationally, say every four years, which might allow one to draw conclusions about the portion of the population who is either ignorant or malicious. Surely the data would show the vast majority of my countrymen are rational, thoughtful people.