us-merul
Re:I Don't Understand Quantum Physics (2018)
on Sunday October 25, 2026 @03:38PM (#50235299)
https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec9.html
“Now, what happens if you try to come up with a theory that's like probability theory, but based on the 2-norm instead of the 1-norm? I'm going to try to convince you that quantum mechanics is what inevitably results.
Let's consider a single bit. In probability theory, we can describe a bit as having a probability p of being 0, and a probability 1-p of being 1. But if we switch from the 1-norm to the 2-norm, now we no longer want two numbers that sum to 1, we want two numbers whose squares sum to 1.”
Re:MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Researc...
on Thursday August 27, 2026 @12:34PM (#49467521)
To clarify, I am pro-university. I'm just saying that institutions do not always behave in ways that are purely for educational benefit, such as with legacy admissions or grade inflation. I don't think the blame falls solely on students for viewing university degrees as a necessary step for something else. I would sure bet admissions committees will use AI to screen applicants, if they aren't doing so already.
Re:MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Researc...
on Thursday August 27, 2026 @11:20AM (#49466294)
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
Re:MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Researc...
on Thursday August 27, 2026 @10:50AM (#49465809)
I think this has been going on well before AI or LLMs: "A fundamental danger, as we’ve discussed, is that AI can allow students to bypass learning. Equally concerning is that students may internalize a transactional model in which assignments are outputs, teachers are evaluators, peers are optional, and knowledge (or an MIT degree) is an optimizable commodity to be acquired or produced as efficiently as possible."
Re:A faster way to calculate the day-of-the-week
on Thursday August 20, 2026 @06:53AM (#49372907)
The French tried this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
Re:Super Mario 64 – 1996 Developer Interviews
on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @08:40PM (#49280452)
I came across this while trying to find context around the “trip” move in Super Mario 64. Although I’ve been playing the game since it first came out, I only just found out that when you crouch and hit the punch button, Mario does a sweeping kick. (You can run, crouch, and punch to enter into a slide, too.) A developer in this interview says the move was meant to counter short enemies, but those never made it into the game.
This article was previously submitted 10 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558589
Show HN: Project ESPAÑOL: Find level-appropriate Spanish-language poems
https://dmerullo.github.io/project-espanol/
I made this application while taking Spanish lessons to find texts that used verb forms I was learning (present, past, future, subjunctive, etc.). First, I scraped ~10,000 Spanish-language poems from the web that are in the public domain. Then, I built a conjugation dictionary for the 550+ most common verbs, using rules to generate regular verbs, and scraping irregular verbs from the web. From...
Re:Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin ast...
on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:59AM (#49082517)
I was referring to this bullet under Lessons Learned: "Manuscript translation is feasible but rough. A 14th-century Sephardic manuscript hand is readable at ~70–80% accuracy. The output is a useful rough draft, not a polished translation. Plan for a longer discrepancy report and more editorial review." Some of the samples I looked at had question marks or original Hebrew text throughout, which I took to mean marked uncertainties.
Re:Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin ast...
on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @07:44AM (#49082400)
I think there's more to it than that. It's a combination of extracting the text from the PDFs, resolving persistently tricky issues (especially numbers), and flagging issues for human review at scale. You can view lessons from the author on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/sweisman/translation-pipeline
Show HN: Surfacing gaps in neuroscience and narrative insights in Final Fantasy
https://dmerullo.github.io/crystal-pipeline/
I made this knowledge extraction pipeline to produce a graph of concepts from scientific papers, surfacing connections across fields that might otherwise go unnoticed. I tested this on a pilot set of papers from the neurobiology of vocal learning and sensorimotor learning (my doctoral/post-doctoral research area), and right away found some insights that seem valuable.Interestingly, the same...
Re:HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 7...
on Monday June 29, 2026 @09:05AM (#48718801)
I entered an interview with a hiring manger where they had received a "summary" of my resume that contained information blatantly not in my experience. The recruiter claimed they mixed my name up with another applicant, but the summary the hiring manager showed me had parts that were correct.
HD189733B: A hot Jupiter that rains molten glass
Re:Show HN: Rip.so – a graveyard for dead internet things
on Wednesday April 29, 2026 @06:53AM (#47946561)
Awesome site. I wonder how much of this is tied to the pre-mobile, desktop era. I never really thought of it that way, but I guess that’s where a lot of early Web nostalgia comes from.
Re:MacBook Neo and How the iPad Should Be
on Thursday April 23, 2026 @06:38AM (#47874117)
The difference for me has been the Apple Pencil. Now I don’t view the iPad as trying to replicate the mouse and keyboard experience, because it’s something different. For notes, brainstorming, research ideas—something where I don’t want a keyboard—the iPad with Pencil has been excellent.
Re:Books Are Not Remotely Too Expensive
on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @10:06AM (#47863868)
I'm not sure this is the best defense of the publishing industry. That $35 ticket price for a hardcover can be avoided by buying used, renting, or an ebook (if cheaper). It's true that a physical copy grants you perpetual ownership, but the general public doesn't seem to value this that much, especially for a new copy. With the barriers to editing, formatting, promotion, and distribution never being lower, publishers need to make a better case for their form of the product other than "it's not that expensive historically."
Re:Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
on Friday April 17, 2026 @10:50AM (#47806565)
Yes that’s true, but I was referring to the line where it said he was making more money as a writer, which was before he became a tenured professor. In any case, we’re both addressing the point that he did have an academic career aside from writing.
Re:Isaac Asimov: The Last Question
on Friday April 17, 2026 @10:38AM (#47806454)
I looked this up on Wikipedia. It seems that he was working as an instructor (not a professor) of chemistry; since he was making more money as a writer during that time, he slowed down or stopped his research. Doesn’t seem to have been an intentional choice so much as how things happened to turn out.
Re:Billion-Parameter Theories
on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @02:17PM (#47326892)
I think this also creates a vulnerability where, the more time and effort is spent to craft the “correct” solution, it becomes easier to dismiss topics out of hand. Even if our modeling tools have changed, emotions and the human mind have not.
Re:Obsidian Sync now has a headless client
on Saturday February 28, 2026 @02:08PM (#47199018)
Re:Reading English from 1000 Ad
on Saturday February 28, 2026 @08:41AM (#47195256)
There isn’t one singular “German.” Sure, there’s a standard form in the country Germany, but the language family is more diverse than that. My point is that the English terminology fuses the language family with the modern country of Germany.
Re:Reading English from 1000 Ad
on Friday February 27, 2026 @09:41AM (#47181024)
For a while, I mistakenly thought that “Germanic” meant related to German specifically. Old English makes more sense if you’re aware of Frisian, Dutch, and other non-Scandinavian Germanic languages, since that’s the area it originated from. German and Spanish make this distinction explicit (Deutsch/Germanisch and Alemán/Germánica).
Re:First Website
on Wednesday February 25, 2026 @09:44PM (#47161175)
There’s a page “Robert’s comments on Tim’s MIT trip” that says:
“I hope this does not offend Brewster, but I hope, probably in vain, that the commercialists will stay out of the Web world. Selling information is like selling air and water to me, though of course you need to pay the people who provide the information. Your comment already points out some of the bad side-effects of selling per access, or worse, tariffs per type of information or per item! Like: today's newspaper is 10CHF because there is this item in it which everyone wants to know about.”
Interesting too that an article on the front page the other day was about microtransactions for news.
Re:Data Poems
on Wednesday February 04, 2026 @06:54PM (#46893656)
The language family constellation is especially beautiful. I’m surprised the author didn’t make a tree of life as well. That would work here too.
Every Enemy from Super Mario 64, 3D Printed [video]
Re:Publish (On Your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
on Saturday January 03, 2026 @08:52AM (#46476621)
You can write your posts in Markdown, use Obsidian to sync them across devices, and render the pages in Quarto. This might not let you publish from mobile, but you can at least write them anywhere you want.
Re:Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy
on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @03:52PM (#46062183)
I saw a comment recently that described the shift to a "consumer economy." Relative to boomers, millennials have increased access to goods and services like high-definition televisions, computers, international travel, and luxury foods (e.g., avocado toast). But in terms of wealth and assets, millennials have reduced or less feasible access to things like home ownership or college degrees (not to mention childcare or healthcare), compared to boomers. Though the causes of this shift are up for debate, it does seem that boomers had an easier path to ownership or growth, while millennials and beyond face more rent-seeking obstacles.
Telescope in Chile captures new picture of a cosmic butterfly
Re:AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
on Friday November 14, 2025 @09:32AM (#45927040)
This is a great summary! I've joked with a coworker that while our capabilities can sometimes pale in comparison (such as dealing with massively high-dimensional data), at least we can run on just a few sandwiches per day.
Re:You are the scariest monster in the woods
on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @10:28AM (#45593147)
"Humans will do what they’ve always tried to do—gain power, enslave, kill, control, exploit, cheat, or just be lazy and avoid the hard work—but now with new abilities that we couldn’t have dreamed of." -- A pretty bleak, and also accurate, observation of humanity. I have to hope that the alternative sentence encompassing all of the good can lead to some balance.