320
points
danso
Joined 166,643 karma
Amateur data scientist and photographer in Chicago.
Formerly: teaching at Stanford and programming+newsing at ProPublica.
Blog: http://www.danwin.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dancow
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/dnguyen; my proof: https://keybase.io/dnguyen/sigs/69iS-DQno44YqjgaowUD_Zze660k3fojXZmHob-bgxA ]
- 6 points
- dansonon paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/science/covid-ecology-ant...
- 2 points
- 50 points
- One of the few unqualified improvements that “X” (aka Twitter) made was rendering the usernames in a font that has wings for the lowercase L
- A real “so you hate waffles?” moment for HN
- 128 points
- > 3. Turning long videos into action: Gemini 3 Pro bridges the gap between video and code. It can extract knowledge from long-form content and immediately translate it into functioning apps or structured code
I'm curious as to how close these models are to achieving that once long-ago mocked claim (by Microsoft I think?) that AIs could view gameplay video of long lost games and produce the code to emulate them.
- > Netflix expects to maintain Warner Bros.’ current operations and build on its strengths, including theatrical releases for films.
If Netflix is committing to releasing WB films in theaters, I wonder if they’ll also release shows under the WB/HBO label in the traditional weekly format. With the staggering amount of content that just exists and continues to grow, the “release everything at once and make people binge” model has had zero appeal to me. And seems quite detrimental to how the shows are paced — they seem heavily incentivized to end each episode with a cheap cliffhanger
- 1 point
- 147 points
- So how good are the latest coding agents? Like if I asked Gemini 3/Claude/ChatGPT 5.1 to convert it into something that could run from a Python interpreter, how far would they get? (I assume Zork Implementation Language is not well represented in the training corpus)
- Easy to forget all the big moves that happened recently, especially since there haven't been (afaict) any major changes to service. I forgot the other day that Sony had bought Bungie, though it'd be pretty memorable if Sony announced Destiny 3 as a PS5 timed exclusive.
- If the instructions were actually specific, e.g. Put a blackberry in its right eye socket, then yes, most humans would know what that meant. But the instructions were not that specific: in the right eye socket
- 3 points
- Transcript link:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5601059
A great listen and thought provoking all the way through, but the part most specifically relevant to HN:
> GONZALEZ: Preston Thorpe is the one making six figures, which, by the way, is double what the corrections officers who guard him make. And it's been a game changer for Preston. He said it's hard enough to get a job when you have a criminal record, let alone while you're still inside.
THORPE: And now, I feel like my life has a purpose. Like, there's no situation right now that would cause me to do something where I would risk losing, like, my job, my computer.
GONZALEZ: Preston is 33 years old. And he told Susan Sharon that he's always been a computer guy, a computer nerd, he said, since he was 13 years old. It's kind of what got him in trouble later in life.
SHARON: He talked to me about buying drugs on the dark web and selling them. And I think the second time, he was convicted because he had a powerful synthetic opioid, much more deadly than fentanyl, capable of killing lots of people.
GONZALEZ: Preston is about nine years into his 20-ish-year sentence. He used to be in a different prison, in a different state, and he says he got in a lot of trouble there, so much so that they transferred him to Maine. Like, we need this person out of our custody. And when he got to Maine, Preston started seeing possibilities-- school, picking up coding again. And he did super well, so well, no issues. And eventually, he got a remote job as a lead principal engineer for this nonprofit that pushes for education in prisons. And because Preston had a laptop, you know, in his cell all day and all night that he could use for certain approved things, Preston started contributing to this big open-source coding project.
Basically, this company was going to attempt to rewrite this database called SQLite in Preston's favorite programming language.
- 3 points
- Given how lackluster most everything was (beyond the visual design of the city) — e.g. physics, crowd interaction, scripted events — maybe the engine was what held their creative vision back?