Hacker News Reader

vsliraon Coq will be renamed into 'The Rocq Prover'

It doesn’t seem so, but by a slight majority on overall respondents it seems like changing the name was favored.

From the post it seems that anglophones were significantly (as in statistically) more likely to change the name for exactly the reason one can imagine

vsliraon America's 60-Year-Olds Are Staring at Financial Peril

I does not make sense to rely on an employer to guarantee your retirement income. Ideally you want it to be managed by an organization that is heavily regulated and specializes in this activity, instead of being a cost center (and a financial temptation) for a generic company.

vsliraon Workbrew

As a user of Homebrew I'm glad and rooting for the team to find financial sustainability for such an important piece of software.

vsliraon Algorithmic fitting of Japanese candy

A couple of months ago I tried using z3 to create an itinerary for my honeymoon. It seemed like a very straightforward implementation of a TSP with a few extra restrictions. It's 2024 and I had an M2 - which is basically alien tech for the period when these problems started being solved - so I figured that in 5 minutes' time I'd have the perfect walking trip in Rome. To quote TFA, how hard could it be?

The whole story might become a blog post some day, but the punchline is that Moore's law ain't got nothing on NP-hard problems

vsliraon From grep to SPLADE: a journey through semantic search

Just wanted to share a fun experience I had when visiting Pompeii last month: we were walking around the city (the archeological park, that is) and I wanted to see one of those roman public bathrooms. So I googled "pompeii latrine" and got for search results links for how to find the bathrooms (as in, the guest facilities). I was initially confused as to why such a clear query got me the completely wrong answer, until it hit me that bathroom and latrine are semantically similar, but not in my context.

At least that's my headcanon, who knows. And it seems like the cool preserved latrinae were in herculanum anyway. Still, fun to think about

vsliraon How much of a genius-level move was binary space partitioning in Doom? (2019)

One of the first "hacker" breakthroughs in my first startup was due to following citations on a paper kind of related to my problem until I got to a paper from '61 implementing the exact algorithm I was needing at the time. Numerical approximations to a gnarly probabilistic problem that would make any engineer proud. Worked like a charm and, in a hardware thousands of times faster than it was designed to run, it was crazy efficient.

vsliraon Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal

I think I've said this before on this forum, but it bears repeating: if there's one thing that I'll never forget from my Industrial Engineering degree is that all processes can be designed around long waits, but it's the variance that kills you.

vsliraon Show HN: B-field, a novel probabilistic key-value data structure (`rust-bfield`)

Great work, thanks for sharing!

In a somewhat tangent note, does anyone have a good resource for designing probabilistic data structures? At a high level, I'm looking for something that helps me understand what is and isn't feasible and, given a problem and constraints, how would I go on to design a specific DS for a problem. Doesn't need to be all that general, but something that is more than an analysis of existing structures

vsliraon Quaternion Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2019)

I'm not nearly smart enough to state this confidently, but doesn't [1] imply that exotic embeddings can always be replaced by larger Euclidean embeddings?

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

vsliraon Show HN: Budget Kanban – Visually manage finances in Kanban boards

Loved the idea! Admit I should use for a while because it's unclear if it's really ergonomic, but overall super interesting. Congratulations on the launch!

vsliraon Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out

Not to be a skeptic or anything, but how do we know normal maps etc weren’t enriched into the datasets by the image gen companies?

I understand this paper links to open source model where that can be verified, but maybe this is one secret sauce of these more advanced models?

vsliraon Generalized K-Means Clustering

Any reason to pick DBSCAN instead of HDBSCAN*?

vsliraon YouTube strikes again, it seems

For the life of me I don't know how people don't think twice about subscribing to Netflix and others while consider it unreasonable to subscribe to YouTube. It's easily 10x the value.

vsliraon Using linear programming to assess spatial access

PSA: Scipy has been offering a MILP and regular LP solvers for a few versions now. Very simple to use, was a delight to find out I didn’t need extra packages for a problem at work

vsliraon Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?

https://blog.vslira.net

Great initiative :)

vsliraon TSMC faces $70M ransom demand following lockbit cyberattack

> When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply replied, ‘Because that's where the money is.’

vsliraon How to create a game using hyperbolic geometry? (2020)

Slightly off topic: does anyone have good intros to hyperbolic geometry? I was imitating drawn by applications related to hyperbolic embeddings in NLP, but I’m having a hard time understanding why, in what ways and how it could be “better” than euclidean etc

Fun fact: just this week I asked gpt3.5 examples of concrete applications of hyperbolic geometry and it suggested designing transportation networks. When I asked how so, the explanation was that subway lines could make sharper turns in hyperbolic geometry.

vsliraon GitHub Copilot X – Sign up for technical preview

A bit sad that they’ll go the price discrimination route instead of improving Copilot

Gotta pay for those H100 I guess

vsliraon Most data work seems fundamentally worthless

If you’re a data professional in a company where data quality is low or non-existent, then improving the quality of data in the organization is absolutely part of your job, most likely the most important one

It’s less cool and flashy than the real time online machine learning model you want to build, or the multi-level bayesian model to determine causality between revenue and an obscure event, but that data dictionary and table/db catalog really needs to be built before everything else

Then document the essential reports to the extent that a high schooler should be able to produce/maintain them

Then adjust the reports so that the metrics indicate what management actually needs to learn from them (if you don’t know what’s important for them and for the business, then finding out is part of the job, too)

All these things are extremely important, and it’s silly to suggest your work is meaningless just because it’s not fun or interesting. There are no tv series about civil engineers building sewage networks but public sanitation saves more lives than medicine. Data work works the same

vsliraon The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation

He who controls the training data selection and the human feedback guidelines controls the universe

vsliraon AI Hyperopia

These AI tools are not static. They are products with well funded teams behind them constantly iterating to make them better.

I don’t dismiss them, but I do put a low weight on arguments of the form “AI is not there yet” give how far it has come in the last 5 years. By 2030, I can see a product understanding the context of a system from multiple repos and, given an intent, producing code and deployment infra that adds new features respecting constraints

This is good. A single dev will be able to do the work of a full team and then every small business will be able to develop software that suits their specific needs with a couple of dedicated employees

vsliraon Scala isn't fun anymore

ANSI C and SML probably qualify, though I hope you don’t need utf-8

vsliraon Using Stable Diffusion's img2img on some old Sierra titles

Is there any service offering user-friendly access to open source DL models? Paid is fine.

vsliraon My Criteria for Picking Startup Ideas

But getting engagement on HN, even criticism, is marketing :)

vsliraon Should GitHub be sued for training Copilot on GPL code?

On your tangential note: I always assumed many in the FLOSS side are actually against most cases of copyright as applied to software, but since it is the regulatory standard, they put a strong emphasis on making it work for their purposes, thus the somewhat ironic “copyleft”. It’s a “don’t hate the player hate the game” situation for them

vsliraon Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less

I agree, there’s no single tweak that would “fix democracy”. I’m just assuming that something like this could improve voting expressiveness in exchange for just a little bit of complexity.

vsliraon Ranked-Choice Voting Is More Democratic, Not Less

Hey, I recently wrote a post about an idea on this: https://blog.vslira.net/2022/05/negative-voting.html?m=1

What do you think? Basically second round stays the same, but on 1st you can either vote for or against a candidate, “against” votes simply deduct from their “for” votes

vsliraon Parmigiano Reggiano makers embedding tiny trackers in rind to fight cheese fraud

I’d be pretty mad if I found that there was no fungi in my cheese

vsliraon Ashton Kutcher’s non-profit, Thorn, supports EU plans for CSAM scanning

I said it once, I’ll say it again and I’m willing to het someone else in this same thread already vented the same opinion: Big Content (Copyright holders of all sorts) are probably salivating at the possibility of a content blocklist that you can’t turn off on your devices

vsliraon Ask HN: What is the most compelling reason young people should learn to program?

Learning to break a complex task into simpler steps and reasoning about the input and output of those steps is a necessary skill in any leadership and management position. Programming teaches people to think in this mode