Top all-time · #5915
Oran Looney
Personal blog · oranlooney.com/postmathprogrammingdata
Oran Looney writes OranLooney.com, a personal blog at oranlooney.com about math, programming and data. Since 2012, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “A Modest Definition of Human Consciousness”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Oran Looney's posts on machine learning from scratch, a fast Fibonacci function, how GPT-4o encodes images, and GPT-4 reading scrambled text. Comments only link the posts or add related links.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Oran Looney's personal blog about math, programming, machine learning, and data visualization.
Most-linked posts?
- A Modest Definition of Human Consciousness3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-10-23
- Cracking Playfair Ciphers (2023)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-03
- A Fairly Fast Fibonacci Function2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-02-21
- Eight Billion People (2022)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-16
- What Rose Petals Teach Us about Induction2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-18
- Principal Component Analysis2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-10-05
What Hacker News says?
Here is a piece I wrote recently on that very subject. Why don't you read that to see if I'm a human writer? https://www.oranlooney.com/post/em-dash/
Comment linking /post/em-dash/
on “It's insulting to read AI-generated blog posts”Submitted How Does GPT-4o Encode Images? as a story · 334 points
HN discussionhttps://www.oranlooney.com/docs/jev_eudemonia1.png https://www.oranlooney.com/docs/jev_eudemonia2.png Also relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49812769#49824215
Comment linking /docs/jev_eudemonia2.png
on “Jev meets the Trolley Problem”Submitted ML From Scratch, Part 1: Linear Regression as a story · 301 points
HN discussionNit: the implied premise that this isn't a beautiful and skilled painting https://www.oranlooney.com/post/gpt-cnn_files/malicious_dogs...
Comment linking /post/gpt-cnn_files/malicious_dogs.png
on “How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?”Submitted Stacking triangles for fun and profit as a story · 193 points
HN discussionWow, that's nostalgic. I remember implementing and writing about deepCopy() in JavaScript over 14 (!) years ago[1]. If you read the OP article and were left wondering how such an algorithm actually works, that old article explains it in some detail. The basic idea is still the same; only the handling of edge cases introduced by newer language features is different. That implementation eventual became obsolete (altho…
Comment linking /post/deep-copy-javascript/
on “Deep cloning objects in JavaScript”Submitted The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Ko as a story · 172 points
HN discussionLocation: Madison, WI Remote: Only Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, Keras, Hyperopt, scikit-learn, SciPy, statsmodels, FastAPI, SQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, Docker, Databricks, Spark, AWS, Azure, R, Tidyverse, ggplot2, Neural Networks, Generalized Linear Models, Regularized Regression, Hypothesis Testing, ANOVA, Random Forest, Boosted Trees, GAM, ARIMA, k-means, PCA, GMM, MARS, LLM…
Comment linking /about/
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2024)”Submitted ML from Scratch, Part 2: Logistic Regression (2018) as a story · 170 points
HN discussionLocation: Madison, WI Remote: Only Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, Keras, Hyperopt, scikit-learn, SciPy, statsmodels, FastAPI, SQL, PostgreSQL, Linux, Docker, Databricks, Spark, AWS, Azure, R, Tidyverse, ggplot2, Neural Networks, Generalized Linear Models, Regularized Regression, Hypothesis Testing, ANOVA, Random Forest, Boosted Trees, GAM, ARIMA, k-means, PCA, GMM, MARS, LLM…
Comment linking /about/
on “Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2024)”Submitted Principal Component Analysis as a story · 138 points
HN discussionFrom a rhetorical perspective, it's an extended "Yes-set" argument or persuasion sandwich. You see it a lot with cult leaders, motivational speakers, or political pundits. The problem is that you have an unpopular idea that isn't very well supported. How do you smuggle it past your audience? You use a structure like this: * Verifiable Fact * Obvious Truth * Widely Held Opinion * Your Nonsense Here * Tautological Pla…
Comment linking /post/history-of-computing/
on “What is intelligence? (2024)”Submitted A Fairly Fast Fibonacci Function as a story · 131 points
HN discussionPart 0 - Introduction: http://www.oranlooney.com/post/ml-from-scratch-part-0-introd...
Comment linking /post/ml-from-scratch-part-0-introduction/
on “ML from Scratch, Part 2: Logistic Regression (2018)”Submitted The Prehistory of Computing, Part II as a story · 70 points
HN discussionHere's my take on the "next-token predictor" idea, from a much longer article I wrote recently: https://www.oranlooney.com/post/rose-petals/#language-models It’s popular to dismiss LLMs as “just next token predictors.” This is technically true, but also kind of misses the point. Markov chains, RNNs, and transformers are all language models that can be described as “next token predictors,” but they don’t all work equ…
Comment linking /post/rose-petals/
on ““Next-token predictor” is the wrong mental model for LLMs”Submitted Kaprekar's Magic 6174 as a story · 39 points
HN discussionThe previous commenter was criticizing https://www.nayuki.io/page/fast-fibonacci-algorithms (for not mentioning the supposedly O (1) solution) not http://www.oranlooney.com/post/fibonacci/
Comment linking /post/fibonacci/
on “A Fairly Fast Fibonacci Function”Submitted ML from Scratch, Part 3: Backpropagation (2019) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionHa! I'm going to steal some of these for my list: https://www.oranlooney.com/quotes/
Comment linking /quotes/
on “Epigrams in Programming (1982) [pdf]”Submitted Cracking Playfair Ciphers (2023) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI like Z3 a lot. I think it's criminally underappreciated and underused. Here is a fairly interesting use I put it to a few years ago: https://www.oranlooney.com/post/playfair/#known-plaintext-at... Slightly more complicated than the toy examples shown in the documentation above, and hints at one of the real world use cases for Z3 - red teaming cryptography. That said, I'm not sure the documentation linked above is…
Comment linking /post/playfair/
on “Online Z3 Guide”Submitted A Modest Definition of Human Consciousness as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf the above article piques your curiosity about Kaprekar's constant (6174), I wrote a blog post[1] last month that goes into some depth and has some nice visualizations. [1]: https://www.oranlooney.com/post/kaprekar/
Comment linking /post/kaprekar/
on “Programming vs. Mathematical Curiosity”Submitted A Modest Definition of Human Consciousness as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've been thinking of getting refern.app[1] to organize and catalog images... Have you used that? Do you have an opinion of how it stacks up against digiKam for the organization use case? Right now, I'm using a bunch of vibe-coded scripts[3] to help me out; for example, here is a gallery wall of ~500 vintage sci-fi book covers[4] that I generated with it. But I think I've taken the CLI approach as far as it can go a…
Comment linking /books/
on “Darktable”Submitted Eight Billion People (2022) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA brief chronology of the extended mind thesis: * Characteristica universalis, Leibniz (c. 1679) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characteristica_universalis * As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945) - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... * Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Norbert Wiener (1948) - https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph-pdf/2254528/boo…
Comment linking /post/history-of-computing-2/
on “Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny (1972 book by the co-creator of BASIC)”Submitted ML from Scratch, Part 4: Decision Trees as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
