Hacker News Reader

mklon Symbolica 2.0: Programmable Symbols for Python and Rust

Past discussion (2 years ago, 119 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40297423

This software does symbolic maths, and it's commercially licensed. The site still seems to be lacking comparisons to other computer algebra systems.

The project is unrelated to this other Symbolica that does symbolic code execution, despite the similar sounding brief descriptions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443587

mklon Ask HN: Why is the HN crowd so anti-AI?

A lot of people on HN are anti-overhyping, which comes across as being opposed to the thing being overhyped. It was similar when cryptocurrency overhyping was popular.

mklon Aging and Eye Problems

I'm in my mid 40s and I'm now switching between three different pairs of glasses for different distances. Bifocals and progressive lenses wouldn't help given the things I need to focus on are usually directly in front of me. Changes have been happening rapidly.

mklon Aging and Eye Problems

Interesting. Research results seem mixed, and I wonder if ASD comormidity is affecting them. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7369237/ has a reasonably large sample size and finds an effect for ASD but not ADHD.

mklon Aging and Eye Problems

May be a timing coincidence - I'm in my mid 40s and my eyes are changing rapidly and getting much less flexible in terms of range. I'm switching between three different pairs of glasses for different distances, and need new prescriptions every year.

mklon New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

The brine is waste, and the dehydrated salt is also waste. Maybe dry waste is better, but it's still waste.

mklon New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste

> without waste

...except for the huge piles of salt.

If the salt was not waste, surely people would already be extracting it from the brine and the existing methods would also be "without waste".

mklon Show HN: AI Simulaionen Based on FEP

All I get is a German login form - no info and nothing visible without signing up?

"Simulaionen" seems to be German for "simulations", and "FEP" is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

I don't really understand. What is the goal of this project?

mklon Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers

Decoding this so it's readable: 6^2 = (2*2*3)*3 = 2*(2*3*3).

(You can escape * with \: \*)

mklon Creatine raises brain energy levels and slows cognitive decline: study

The only other pages I can find talking about this supposed follow-up study seem to be AI slop and similarly fail to include it in their references.

mklon 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices

The white paper says "mean-active memory pressure down to 1.95 GB for 1-bit Bonsai Image 4B and 2.38 GB for Ternary Bonsai Image 4B". Storage is on the linked page, and is about half that.

mklon I found a seashell in the middle of the desert

Land lower - Alps and Carpathians hadn't formed yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paratethys and its predecessor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethys_Ocean

mklon MCP is dead?

Older than that, as it implies GPT-4o is current.

mklon An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

> > Only a rare few new theorems in mathematics nowadays have direct real world applicability.

> I am no mathematician and very naïve about this, but in a world that is rapidly becoming extremely calculation and network dependent that sounds hard to believe.

I am a mathematician. It is true. The key is we're talking about new theorems, and direct, current real world applicability. Some theorems that have no applicability now may in the future, as theory often precedes applications by a long way and the usefulness is likely to come from other things built on top of the new maths, and a lot of pure maths will never have direct real world applications but contributes to our overall understanding.

mklon SANA-WM, a 2.6B open-source world model for 1-minute 720p video

2.6B, but then:

> A dedicated 17B long-video refiner sharpens texture, motion, and late-window quality on top of the long-rollout backbone.

mklon Fecal transplants for autism deliver success in clinical trials (2019)

100% is common. Stanford was paid hundreds of millions by Google over the years for the use of the patented PageRank algorithm, invented by Google's founders while Stanford students, and therefore owned by Stanford.

Most universities have IP policies giving them ownership of most of the IP their academics create, and student IP may or may not be included. Some exceptions are Duke and Waterloo.

mklon Accelerando (2005)

No, it was Clawdbot, then Moltbot, then OpenClaw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenClaw. It had the "claw" related lobster theme from early on.

mklon As researchers age, they produce less disruptive work

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

mklon Googlebook

If you keep on shaking the mouse, the pointer just keeps getting bigger and bigger. You can certainly find it when it is enormous.

mklon Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

You don't need a fake extended vocabulary. Just communicate directly and honestly. Underlining spelling errors as you type has been a standard feature of email software for nearly three decades.

mklon StarFighter 16-Inch

Data only in one place is bad no matter how big the drive is. Sync it to a NAS, PC, online, external drive, other laptop, or multiple of those.

mklon Do_not_track

> This flag is sent by my browser when I connect to SOMEONE ELSE’s SERVER.

No, it's set in your command shell (e.g. bash) and tells CLI programs that support it to not connect to a server. It has nothing to do with browsers or ads. This is all very clear in the article.

mklon Kimi K2.6 just beat Claude, GPT-5.5, and Gemini in a coding challenge

Multiple providers of the same model. That means competition for price, reliability, latency, etc. It also means you can use the same model as long as you want, instead of having it silently change behaviour.

mklon Vera: a programming language designed for machines to write

> Go – very little hidden, everything in text on the page, LLMs are great. Java, similar. But writing Haskell, it's pretty bad, Erlang, not wonderful. You need much more of a mental model for those languages.

I don't think that follows. It could just be that there is way more Go and Java code to train on than Haskell and Erlang. Haskell's terseness and symbol-named operators probably don't help either.

mklon Zed 1.0

AI tab completion and agentic edits are often derivative works.

mklon We need a federation of forges

Projects are more than code. This doesn't solve the problem of issue trackers, pull requests, CI, etc.

mklon Ghostty is leaving GitHub

20-25 years ago it was fairly common, and it never stopped, just faded gradually.

mklon HardenedBSD Is Now Officially on Radicle

> Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git. Unlike centralized code hosting platforms, there is no single entity controlling the network. Repositories are replicated across peers in a decentralized manner, and users are in full control of their data and workflow. - https://radicle.dev/

There seems to be no way to get this kind of information from the radicle.network link in this article. Clicking the logo in the top left takes you to a page that just says "A public node run by the Radicle team", which is totally uninformative.

mklon Three constraints before I build anything

I think one of the biggest constraints is not directly visible to users, but its effects are: HN is built in Arc, a small LISP dialect that for a long time didn't have great performance. Some info here: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/hacker-news-now-runs-on-...