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thearn4

Re:'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us on Thursday September 24, 2026 @09:44AM (#49830484)
In a similair boat with my 11 y/o. My observations leave me still optimistic that what comes out the other side is generally positive, despite a lot of reasonable dread that a lot of us also (justifiably) feel about the current era surrounding generative models.
Re:Truncated SVD on Monday September 14, 2026 @05:45PM (#49704564)
A bit of a blast from my PhD studies past, I used to think a lot about the SVD and application to discrete integral operators.

FWIW, on the author's footnote: if anyone is interested truncated SVD and applications to low-rank approximations to convolutions, here's a very outdated paper of mine on exactly that! :)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01689...

Re:Can AI design circuit boards yet? on Friday September 04, 2026 @04:31PM (#49569871)
I've gone through this same workflow and had success all the way through DRC ruleset passing with JLCPCB-based settings, ordering, fab, and use. Board was ordered with PCBA (they did assembly of the stock components) and I did SMD for just the oddball module/ICs they don't stock. Works exactly to design.

My boards are for hobby use and are ridiculously simple though compared to anything professional (breakout boards for specific components in FPV drone video transmission subsystems). That's probably an important detail. I think its like anything else in AI right now. It can do it 90% of the time but that 10% can be really rough and if its a task you can't do or verify yourself, you won't know the difference.

Re:I hate soldering existentially on Tuesday May 12, 2026 @06:49AM (#48106440)
I became significantly better at electronics soldering by learning to do glasswork (stain glass fixturing, etc). It wasn't intentional and it isn't even the same solder chemistry, but having to do broad asthetics on large pieces meant I "got it" better for the small scale electronics connections.
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026) on Monday May 11, 2026 @02:23PM (#48098693)
Good old fashioned machine learning (GOFML?) Using mixes of different sensor data from industrial 3d printing processes to production quality. Not as fashionable as LLMs at the moment but there's new innovations to make in the space, so it's honest work.
Yeah I had the same question. I suppose you could put the project+plan text into the commit message?
Re:Tell HN: Happy Thanksgiving on Friday November 28, 2025 @10:07AM (#46079275)
12 years here, agree that this is one of the best communities still active. Thank you HN team!
I feel seen

> Your profile reads like a 'Hacker News Bingo' card: NASA, PhD, Python, 'Ask HN' about cheating, and a strong opinion on Reddit's community. The only thing missing is a post about your custom ergonomic keyboard made from recycled space shuttle parts.

Re:An autostereogram ("Magic Eye") solver on Wednesday May 21, 2025 @04:44PM (#44056143)
I worked on this about a decade ago, but just updated it in order to learn to use Gradio and HF as a platform. Enjoy!
Re:OpenAI Codex Review on Tuesday May 20, 2025 @03:10PM (#44044843)
I end up asking the same question when experimenting with tools like Cursor. When it can one-shot a small feature, it works like magic. When it struggles, and the context gets poisoned and I have to roll back commits and retry part of the way through something, it hits a point where it was probably easier for me to just write it. Or maybe template it and have it finish it. Or vice versa. I guess the point being that best practices have yet to truly be established, but totally hands-off uses have not worked well for me so far.
Another reason why the idea of AI agents for science hasn't made much sense to me. Research is an extremely collaborative set of activities. How good would a researcher be who is very good at literature review, but never actually talks to anyone, goes to any conferences, etc?
Voynich is one of my favorite unsolved puzzles. This approach looks fascinating, so thanks for sharing your work here!

Show HN: Interactive Cellular Automata Demo

https://huggingface.co/spaces/thearn/Game-of-life

Going back to a very old school notion of "AI" : just updated a demo I did a few years back on efficiently computing cellular automata forward steps using convolution operations. Added a huggingface demo too. https://github.com/thearn/game-of-lifefor fun, I let users swap rules dynamically in the app, try letting it run Conway for a short bit, pause the simulation, switch to Maze and start from...

( Read More... | no comments | on HN )
You and I have matching stories, unfortunately. I've made a point of sending my sons to public school for this reason. Now, of course this also means that I shopped for a district that aligned with my expectations. But would never want a repeat of my own experience.

I think being accountable for your work to a person who isn't in your family is actually an important thing to learn. It also turns out, parents aren't really qualified to be teachers just because they believe that they are.

This is still how the aeronautics portion of NASA operates. Though since it is the direct successor to NACA, I think its unsurprising.
Re:200-Year-Old Math Opens Up AI’s Mysterious Black Box on Tuesday February 28, 2023 @09:30AM (#34969663)
In my area, every controls engineer says "we can just use a PID".

99% of the time it seems they're not wrong, despite control engineering being a pretty large area of research.

I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.

But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.

I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?
Re:US Marines Defeat DARPA Robot by Hiding Under a Cardboard Box on Wednesday January 25, 2023 @08:55PM (#34526814)
Interestingly, ChatGPT seems capable of predicting this approach:

https://imgur.com/a/okzZz7D

Re:Ask HN: Google spam filter getting worse? on Friday January 20, 2023 @01:22PM (#34457359)
I absolutely had this issue most of last year, but the Gmail spam filter seems to be catching things more effectively for me in the last two months.
Re:My MacBook Pro had over 10k USD in repairs on Wednesday August 25, 2021 @02:46PM (#28305351)
My 2011 MBA needed a new battery a few years ago, but still works amazingly well as a daily-driver computer for my wife
Re:Hospital exec says employees are walking off the job on Thursday August 05, 2021 @12:22PM (#28075881)
> But the majority of harmful errors happen in handing over patient care from one provider to another

I've heard this claim before, but this seems like a communication problem more than anything else. Keeping insane work schedules as a means to address it seems really suspect to me.

> Don't bullets also "expire" after a certain period of time?

Modern powder and primers (and thus an assembled ammunition cartridge) easily last decades, almost indefinitely if stored well.

My dad used to be a security guard at the Cleveland Museum of Art. What's funny is that often guests would ask him and the other guards about specific pieces or artists as if he was a subject matter expert (although he has always been an art enthusiast, he doesn't have a professional art background). Eventually, he started doing his own background reading, because he really enjoyed these conversations.

After years of viewing exhibits (both permanent and temporary), many on the non-curator staff do end up with a substantially deep view of the art that they protect. This exhibit should be really fascinating.

Re:Why Build Toys on Monday July 12, 2021 @05:03PM (#27815105)
I think this is related to why I got into stain glass window making as a pandemic hobby. As everything I was working on felt ephemeral and physically disconnecting, it was refreshing to take on something both creative and tangible.
Re:Show HN: I made a new kind of Bible app on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @02:33PM (#27595355)
Congrats on launching. I'm not Christian, but this does remind me a bit of the Sefaria project, which aims to bring together a library of Jewish texts for scholarship, and has a great mobile app. This project also seems to have a deep scholarly focus, so it might be worth having a look at as well for some ideas.

https://www.sefaria.org/

Re:How many flies are in my apartment? on Friday June 18, 2021 @09:01AM (#27549830)
Great read!

In comparison, I have to wonder why the "intelligence estimates" were so bad/severe over estimates.

Re:The Fourier transform is a neural network on Thursday April 29, 2021 @09:19AM (#26980779)
I've come to internalize the Fourier transform as a type of sparse matrix algorithm. I.e. something that implements a particular matrix-vector product without requiring explicit construction of said matrix.

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