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OpenAI might pivot to the "most addictive digital friend" or face extinction

https://twitter.com/lebed2045/status/2020184853271167186
1•lebed2045•44s ago•1 comments

Show HN: Know how your SaaS is doing in 30 seconds

https://anypanel.io
1•dasfelix•1m ago•0 comments

ClawdBot Ordered Me Lunch

https://nickalexander.org/drafts/auto-sandwich.html
1•nick007•2m ago•0 comments

What the News media thinks about your Indian stock investments

https://stocktrends.numerical.works/
1•mindaslab•3m ago•0 comments

Running Lua on a tiny console from 2001

https://ivie.codes/page/pokemon-mini-lua
1•Charmunk•3m ago•0 comments

Google and Microsoft Paying Creators $500K+ to Promote AI Tools

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html
2•belter•5m ago•0 comments

New filtration technology could be game-changer in removal of PFAS

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/23/pfas-forever-chemicals-filtration
1•PaulHoule•6m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

https://github.com/Momciloo/fun-with-clip-path
1•momciloo•7m ago•0 comments

Kinda Surprised by Seadance2's Moderation

https://seedanceai.me/
1•ri-vai•7m ago•1 comments

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

https://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
2•valyala•7m ago•0 comments

Django scales. Stop blaming the framework (part 1 of 3)

https://medium.com/@tk512/django-scales-stop-blaming-the-framework-part-1-of-3-a2b5b0ff811f
1•sgt•8m ago•0 comments

Malwarebytes Is Now in ChatGPT

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/product/2026/02/scam-checking-just-got-easier-malwarebytes-is-n...
1•m-hodges•8m ago•0 comments

Thoughts on the job market in the age of LLMs

https://www.interconnects.ai/p/thoughts-on-the-hiring-market-in
1•gmays•8m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Stacky – certain block game clone

https://www.susmel.com/stacky/
2•Keyframe•11m ago•0 comments

AIII: A public benchmark for AI narrative and political independence

https://github.com/GRMPZQUIDOS/AIII
1•GRMPZ23•11m ago•0 comments

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

https://xorvoid.com/sectorc.html
2•valyala•13m ago•0 comments

The API Is a Dead End; Machines Need a Labor Economy

1•bot_uid_life•14m ago•0 comments

Digital Iris [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_2MAgS_pE
1•Jyaif•15m ago•0 comments

New wave of GLP-1 drugs is coming–and they're stronger than Wegovy and Zepbound

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-glp-1-weight-loss-drugs-are-coming-and-theyre-stro...
4•randycupertino•16m ago•0 comments

Convert tempo (BPM) to millisecond durations for musical note subdivisions

https://brylie.music/apps/bpm-calculator/
1•brylie•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tasty A.F.

https://tastyaf.recipes/about
2•adammfrank•19m ago•0 comments

The Contagious Taste of Cancer

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/contagious-taste-cancer
1•Thevet•21m ago•0 comments

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikestunson/2026/02/05/us-jobs-disappear-at-fastest-january-pace-sin...
1•alephnerd•21m ago•1 comments

Bithumb mistakenly hands out $195M in Bitcoin to users in 'Random Box' giveaway

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2026-02-07/business/finance/Crypto-exchange-Bithumb-mis...
1•giuliomagnifico•21m ago•0 comments

Beyond Agentic Coding

https://haskellforall.com/2026/02/beyond-agentic-coding
3•todsacerdoti•22m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw ClawHub Broken Windows Theory – If basic sorting isn't working what is?

https://www.loom.com/embed/e26a750c0c754312b032e2290630853d
1•kaicianflone•24m ago•0 comments

OpenBSD Copyright Policy

https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html
1•Panino•25m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% of Apps Will Disappear

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uzGDAoNOZc
2•schwentkerr•29m ago•0 comments

What Happens When Technical Debt Vanishes?

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11316905
2•blenderob•30m ago•0 comments

AI Is Finally Eating Software's Total Market: Here's What's Next

https://vinvashishta.substack.com/p/ai-is-finally-eating-softwares-total
3•gmays•31m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

The undeserved status of the pigeon-hole principle (1991)

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1094.html
18•tosh•2mo ago

Comments

xg15•2mo ago
He wasn't wrong, but I also think this an example of "professional blindness", where experts in a topic can lose the ability to imagine the POV of a layman/novice.

I was thinking this was parody for a moment, because the "bad" formulations (0) and (2) seem obviously easier to understand than the "good" formulation (1).

I needed some attempts to parse what (1) even wants to say. (Minimum, maximum and average of what? I imagine the counts per unique item in the bag, but it doesn't say that anywhere)

It's also not obvious at all that (1) is true, so you'd need to see at least a proof.

But what's true is that (1) is more versatile and easier to apply to new problems - it's just harder to teach. So maybe the right solution would have been to start with (0) and (2), then show how those actually imply (1) - and then go on using (1) as a tool, like the quadratic formula.

It's a bit like "If I have two apples and get three more apples, I have five apples" is easier to understand for someone learning addition than "2+3=5", but you still don't want to spend the rest of your life imagining metaphorical apples whenever you have to calculate something.

gweinberg•2mo ago
Yeah, it may seem like a "better" (because stronger) conclusion to the author that if you have more pigeons than pigeonholes you must have more than one pigeon in a hole even if negative or irrational numbers of pigeons. But you're pretty much only invoking the pigeonhole principle in discrete math, where "more than one" means "at least 2".
xg15•2mo ago
Yeah, I think that was something that irked me about the "general" formulation: It suddenly brought in an average, i.e. a real, even though the "common" formulations only dealt with integers. This may be more general but made reasoning and understanding harder.
karmakaze•2mo ago
The Pigeonhole Principle is merely the Law of Excluded Middle with more than two 'slots'.

Proof by Contradiction relies on the Law of Excluded Middle and is considered inferior than direct or by induction, so there is no elevated status given to these.

bmacho•2mo ago
I think overall it's a good habit to go through your proofs again, and remove unnecessary double negations, and make proofs 'more constructive'.

Reductio ad Absurdum makes coming up with proofs easier (you have one more information to use, you can work from both ends of the problem and try to make 2 half long proofs meet, instead of one normal long), but in the end it is often unnecessary, you can remove it, and your proof reads better.

I don't share his view that Generalized Pigeon-hole Principle makes the normal version unnecessary. The normal version is used a lot in the form it is formulated.