Hacker News Reader

v64on Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos

Not a comment on this link in particular, but just a general observation from my experience.

One should be skeptical of the demos they initially see at model release, as there have been instances of some being called out as AI generated video or work that took days and millions of tokens and not a one shot as claimed.

The first few days Astra was out, I attempted to reproduce a few of the demos I saw on twitter, and it was clear Astra had a distinctive style and certain limitations when working in short sessions with tools like Blender that could distinguish genuine demos from bs for retweets.

People putting out these demos should share their sessions to really show what was going on, and I invite people to test models and try to replicate what they see and draw their own conclusions.

v64on Federal judge orders Texas to air condition all prisons by the end of 2029

The US Constitution has a whole bit about forbidding cruel and unusual punishments.

v64on Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026

The circumstances under which they were able to get the synthesized DNA this way would not work in the general case [1]

>Multiple IGSC member companies detected the ordered sequence and determined the order to be legitimate as defined in the 2023 guidance. Specifically, the orders were placed on behalf of SecureBio, an organization known to IGSC member companies given the role played by SecureBio in the SecureDNA project, an effort to build a DNA synthesis screening system. In addition, the name on the orders was an individual who has co-published multiple times with Esvelt, an individual well known to IGSC companies to work in viral evolution and who is known to have access to laboratory facilities sufficient to work safely with the ordered material.

>In short, the system worked as designed: a legitimate individual ordered DNA sequence that, by itself, posed no risk of misuse, for delivery to a company associated with legitimate scientific contributions directly relevant to the sequence that was ordered.

[1] https://thebulletin.org/2024/06/why-a-misleading-red-team-st...

v64on Finite time blowup for an averaged three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equation (2014)

This is going around due to rumors and baseless speculation on Twitter [1] right now that Anthropic has solved the Millennium problem related to Navier-Stokes [2]

[1] https://x.com/AndrewCurran_/status/2096062392442724805 for example

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_existenc...

v64on Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

I have visual aphantasia but not aphantasia of any other senses, so I can assure you it's not a semantic misunderstanding. I play piano and can hear tunes in my head and use what I hear to play it out on the piano, like playing by ear but without actual sound. And I simply don't have this same ability with visualization.

However, I do visualize in my dreams, so from my own experience, I suspect that aphantasia is not a complete inability to visualize, but rather an inability to visualize intentionally. When I'm very sleep deprived or on psychedelics, my ability to conjure mental images changes, not necessarily to full visualization, but at higher levels than in normal life.

v64on OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21)

The evidence is Anthropic's own reporting [1]. You may doubt that they're telling the truth, but that's what they're reporting.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...

v64on Aaron Rodgers secretly funded his town's Flock-style cameras

You have to pay to read the rest of the article, which says:

>In August 2024, the town of Cedar Grove held a routine city council meeting. There, they discussed raises for their crossing guards and the purchase of a new truck for the local waterworks.

>The last item on the agenda was whether to accept a donation of new automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras for the town’s police department.

>“We’ve received a generous donation of new ALPR cameras … a very generous donation that the police department is receiving,” the town’s manager said. “These are very heavily used tools in the law enforcement toolkit, so it’s good to add more to our belt.”

>The total monetary value of the donation was $37,004. In the approved resolution, the town detailed its provenance: an LLC based out of Encinitas, California.

>It just so happens to be the same LLC that property records list as the owner of a $9.5 million mansion in the town.

>The address for the LLC is also used for a number of other businesses, investment ventures, and a charity. All of which have the exact same manager.

>Aaron Rodgers.

Supporting documents:

https://cedargrovenj.org/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1065

https://www.bizapedia.com/tx/pantheraleo-investments-llc.htm...

v64on In Memory of My Wife, Elise Cawley, with Thanks for 36 Wonderful Years

Memento mori

v64on Waymo in Dallas

I live here and use Dallasian myself

v64on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies

Those problems are because of the tobacco. Zyn packets et al are just nicotine, and nicotine itself has not been shown to be a carcinogen.

v64on What appear to be biochemical processes may be a natural feature of geology

On 1 February 1871 Charles Darwin wrote about these publications to Joseph Hooker, and set out his own speculation that the original spark of life may have been in a "warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts,—light, heat, electricity &c present, that a protein compound was chemically formed". Darwin explained that "at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm_little_pond

v64on Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence

And that video game is called Gambonanza [1]

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/

v64on Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence

> Makes you wonder why they never added any rng into chess, ya know, to keep the player base "engaged"

arguably this is why Chess960 was created

v64on The Wolfram S Combinator Challenge

as far as I understand it, turing completeness is a weaker property than combinatory completeness, which Craig's theorem is addressing. The nonexistence of a singleton combinatory basis doesn't necessarily imply the nonexistence of a turing complete combinator.

v64on Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

Looking forward to hearing about how you're using Opus 4.5, from my experience and what I've heard from others, it's been able to overcome many obstacles that previous iterations stumbled on

v64on Show HN: Cobble – A hard daily word game

your score is the length of your two words plus the space

v64on A Lean companion to Analysis I

Formalization of many of the ideas from HoTT are currently happening in the Agda community. [1] It's out of my wheelhouse, so I don't know the exact motivations, but Agda is apparently a better way to formalize those ideas than in Lean.

Also, there's a new textbook coming out later this year that's a more modern update to the original HoTT book [2] which also has an Agda formalization. [3]

[1] https://martinescardo.github.io/HoTT-UF-in-Agda-Lecture-Note...

[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/introduction-to-homotop...

[3] https://github.com/HoTT-Intro/Agda

v64on A Hyper-Catalan Series Solution to Polynomial Equations, and the Geode

Earlier comments found at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43869093

From my brief reading of it, it seems like the interesting bit here is the development of the Hypercatalan numbers as the coefficients of the infinite sums of roots of polynomials. Some partial results for special cases of the Catalan numbers and roots had been found in the past, but the full understanding of the structure they call the Geode enabled generalization of the previous findings.

v64on Suno v4.5

Have been using Suno over the last few iterations and can vouch for this; steering the final product with style tags is a lot better now and I can use more natural language rather than trying to come up with what the genre specific "wordings" for certain styles of music would be. Good to know the tip about the brackets in lyrics too.

Some examples of style descriptions I've used that generated results close to what I had in mind are "romantic comedy intro music, fast and exciting, new york city" (aiming for something like the Sex and the City theme) and "mature adult romance reality tv show theme song, breakbeats, seductive, intimate, saxophones, lots of saxophones" which did indeed produce cheesy porn music.

v64on The VTech Socratic Method

I had one of these as a kid; the slow way it drew the graphics onto the screen [1] for a new activity was an aesthetic in itself, like a coloring book being drawn and colored in before your eyes, a perfect loading screen for kids.

Wikipedia notes: The system will "draw" images by filling in areas of the screen with color one line at a time; it is not known whether this is an effect employed for the student's enjoyment or if it is due to the slow processing time of the system.

[1] https://youtu.be/r71ejYkkmDY?t=64

v64on Noise

moving around on the noise site, you can get it to resemble parts of loud pipes, especially at around 2:35 [1] with the repeated upward bits

https://youtu.be/64liF2VuLxI?t=155

v64on U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction

I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.

The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.

v64on Confirmed: Reflection 70B's official API is a wrapper for Sonnet 3.5

link does not work for me, discussion is here https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1fc98fu/confirm...

v64on Cardinal – Virtual modular synthesizer plugin

Programs like this and VCV Rack are great ways to get started on the road to building your own modular synthesizer [1]. Many of the modules in the program are based on real hardware, and while the hardware versions of these modules can cost hundreds of dollars, the software versions are using the exact same firmware. Whether you stay virtual or go out and build the hardware equivalent of your rack, it's a great way to experiment and learn the basics at a lower cost than in the past.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer

v64on Show HN: I've open sourced DD Poker

Thank you for taking the time to clean this up and release it. I've never played DD Poker, but have experienced the loss of other games when servers go down and the software stops being updated.

I realize source releases aren't always possible, so it's a great gift to the community when one can make it happen and they put in the effort to do so.

v64on What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

> I'm wondering if aphantasia is merely the inability to induce sensory hallucinations at will.

I have aphantasia and this is how I'd define it for myself. I have visual dreams and sometimes when I'm tired or on certain drugs I experience visualizations, but not being able to call these visualizations to mind deliberately I feel is what sets my experience apart from others.

I only have visual aphantasia though and can imagine sounds in my head quite well (with verification of this through being a musician and being able to play by ear), so the effect is definitely not universal and can be limited to certain senses.

v64on What happens in a mind that can't 'see' mental images

Studies have shown that GMs have better mental recall of actual board positions, but if you set the pieces randomly on the board in ways that may be illegal or nonsensical, their recall falls to average. It may be that they're not directly interacting with the visualization, but some mixture of it combined with their knowledge of the position to reconstruct the details.

v64on Ask HN: What underrated open source project deserves more recognition?

https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth

BespokeSynth takes the concept of a modular synthesizer and expands it so that the application is less just a synth and more a complete modular DAW. I've used it to create MIDI/audio workflows that I couldn't get exactly the way I wanted in Ableton or FL Studio. It also has a module for doing livecoded audio processing in Python that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of.

Video from the creator covering I Feel Love in BespokeSynth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzYUgPMMpts

v64on 6174

Relevant reading: What Are Mathematical Coincidences (and Why Does It Matter)? by Marc Lange [1]

[1] https://philosophy.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/122/2013...

v64on Cicero: The first AI to play at a human level in Diplomacy (2022)

Interesting video from a pro Diplomacy player playing against multiple instances of Cicero and giving commentary during the game [1]. I can see how there would be people that observe AIs engaging in this kind of strategic planning and extrapolate that to how they may behave if they were to cooperatively make plans against us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5192bvUS7k