Hacker News Reader

Jabbleson With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now

Sounds like we're not far off an AI that can play Civilization

Jabbleson Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden

Note that the red area on the map in the article is Härjedalen, which has an area of 11,405 km^2, 1.1M hectares, 2.8M acres.

The purchased forest (15k hectares, 37k acres) is therefore ~1.3% of the region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4rjedalen

Jabbleson Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked

What is the meaning of the numbers?

> Weighted mean detector score 0.5307

Does it mean that that passage would be rated a 53% chance of being watermarked? So you would need a passage 10x as long to be reasonably sure of providence?

Jabbleson Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

I think it's quite rude to reply to a well thought out comment with AI slop

Jabbleson An update on residential proxies and the scraper situation

1,000,000 / 3,600 = ~278

Jabbleson FAANG Simulator

6 weeks parental leave does not sound generous: https://archive.ph/vO2W7

Jabbleson Midjourney Medical

This is comparable to datacenters in space. We have no idea whether:

a) it is possible to construct such a scanner

b) the results of a scan would be able to diagnose anything

c) the false-positive rate would be low enough to make this useful

But it is probably very good as a source of speculation to hype the valuation of the company, because iff the above issues are solved, then this could be very valuable.

Jabbleson SpaceX S-1

If any company can put profitable data centers in space, it will be SpaceX. But I doubt that any company can. The difficulties of the physics and engineering of cooling seem like they will always outweigh the advantages of keeping your data center on Earth.

I am annoyed by the insistence that the value of this company comes from something that no one has been able to show is possible yet without multiplying it by the obvious risk factor. And they seem to have got other companies like Alphabet[1] and Anthropic to publicize the idea, to give it more credibility.

I do not want my pension to automatically buy shares at $1T, but it looks like it will have no choice.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/science/google-spacex-talks-explore-...

[2] https://spacenews.com/anthropic-to-consider-using-spacex-orb...

Jabbleson Gemini 3.5 Flash

> Engineers at google have publically stated that the models are too big and are far from their potencial

Can you link to a source?

Jabbleson Show HN: State of the Art of Coding Models, According to Hacker News Commenters

Please fix your graph so the names of the models are readable

Jabbleson Magic: The Gathering took me from N2 to Japanese fluency

> CEFR B2 which is fluent

That certainly is controversial. I don't think many people would consider anyone who is fluent to only be B2.

Jabbleson Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

It has $40B in liabilities.

[PDF] https://www.airfranceklm.com/sites/default/files/2026-02/202...

Jabbleson As oceans warm, great white sharks are overheating

Talking in terms of "carbon" is misleading. Methane is much more potent than CO2. I don't know why you think methane is broken down at the same rate as it is added.

- Cattle release methane

- Forests are burnt to make room for crops/grazing

- Fertilizer for crops for cattle produces nitrous oxide

I do not claim this adds up to 60%, but to suggest it is zero is incorrect.

Jabbleson String theory inspires a brilliant, baffling new math proof

re 2: special relativity is not general relativity - large elements will not provide testable predictions for a theory of everything that combines general relativity and quantum mechanics.

re: "GR environments (such as geostationary satellites)" - a geostationary orbit (or any orbit) is not an environment to test the interaction of GR and QM - it is a place to test GR on its own, as geostationary satellites have done. In order to test a theory of everything, the gravity needs to be strong enough to not be negligible in comparison to quantum effects, i.e. black holes, neutron stars etc. your example (1) is therefore a much better answer than (2)

Jabbleson $1T in tech stocks sold off as market grows skeptical of AI

Well according to the FT article that this article is based on:

a) it's $800B

b) this is the largest such selloff since April

https://archive.ph/bzr5G

Jabbleson Why is Japan still investing in custom floating point accelerators?

> They explicitly stay around just weeks away from being able to perform a nuclear weapons test

Do you have a citation for "weeks away"? Wikipedia only says "within one year": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapons_progr...

Jabbleson SQLite's File Format

> poorly designed storage layer, poorly designed column formats, and a terrible SQL implementation

Is this opinion shared by others?

Jabbleson Pixel 10 Phones

This is like using a 6-fingered person in an AI imaging advert.

Jabbleson Pixel 10 Phones

https://imgur.com/a/sDJTiyK

That 100x zoom looks a bit... sloppy...

The car has one wing mirror and the rear tire is wider than the front. Edit: this might be real, see child comments.

Is there someone who knows more about cars who can confirm that this is in fact, not real?

Jabbleson Pixel 10 Phones

> For instance, when you're calling an airline, it can automatically find your flight details from your email and display it during your phone call.

Is this really the best example usecase they can think of? How often does an individual call an airline? I'm sure in aggregate they get a lot of calls, but I don't think I've ever had to.

It just seems really weird that this is the top example of on-device AI. The other examples mentioned, like "finding the right photos to share with a friend", seem more relatable.

Jabbleson Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

Like https://support.google.com/docs/answer/15820999?hl=en-GB ?

Jabbleson What went wrong for Yahoo

"Facebook’s board would have forced Zuckerberg to take it"

Doesn't Zuckerberg have majority control?

Jabbleson Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short

Those are points (2) and (5).

Jabbleson The US has a new most powerful laser hitting 2 petawatts

https://archive.ph/w5yDx

Jabbleson I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

Unfortunately this work is now cited by Wikipedia, so expect the confusion to spread.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(music)#Usage_and_trends

Jabbleson Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes

This conversation is about billionaires, not the top 1%.

Jabbleson CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

Um, ok:

When you say:

"The shell games are:

1. claiming it is a proton collider"

it seems to me that you're implying that Sabine is not disclosing the fact that it's a two stage project. And I'm pointing out that it's one of the first things she says in her video.

Jabbleson CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

I don't know what Sabine would spend $40B on instead, but intuitively that seems like it could buy a lot of research in a lot of areas, rather than picking particle physics.

And it doesn't have to be physics, it could be cancer research, or not even research: each country involved could upgrade their sewage system instead.

But Sabine doesn't have to have all the answers to be right to point out that there's an enormous conflict of interest if you ask particle physicists whether they'd like $40B. Of course they'll say yes.

Jabbleson CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

[1] Sabine says "It’s a two-phase project, the first one, called the FCC-ee would collide electrons and specifically measure the properties of the Higgs boson." approximately 20 seconds into the video.

It's unfair to merely critique the headline. If you do not wish to watch the video, here is a transcript: https://www.youtube-transcript.io/videos/elvEcWc7U7c

"This is very important work." is just an opinion.

"The more precise you nail down these uncertainties, the more theorists can do to verify their work, allowing the experimentalists to know where to look for new stuff, if any." Sabine's point is that there are countless theories and parameters that can be changed to fit any measurement. New results will eliminate some, but it will not reduce the total number of possible theories, as others will be constructed to fit the results without having any reason to think one is more true than another.

Jabbleson CERN releases report on the feasibility of a possible Future Circular Collider

But one of her points is that many of the jobs of current physicists depend on the status quo. That seems almost tautological. She then alleges that that clouds their judgement on the best use of research funding.

I'm sure that if you asked a range of physicists if _their_ area of research should receive more funding instead of the FCC, you would see less support for the FCC.

So we, as outsiders, are stuck not knowing what to believe - and ultimately an outsider, a politician, must make the decision for funding.