Hacker News: Chinjut

New comment by Chinjut in "Evidence of a spying operation by ICE against left-wing social movements"

Chinjut — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:28:12 +0000

Why was the title changed from the article? The original title is "ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History".

New comment by Chinjut in "What shall I teach my son?"

Chinjut — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 20:33:59 +0000

Teach him to be rich. That's all that matters from now on. That's the only measure of merit. He can buy IQ by the token.

New comment by Chinjut in "Artificial intelligence is capitalism's final destination"

Chinjut — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:45:15 +0000

Making prompts shorter does not seem like the characteristic trait of AI writing.

New comment by Chinjut in "Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits"

Chinjut — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:51:53 +0000

That is, an optional is just a list of length 0 or 1. But this seems to propose treating that completely oppositely from how it proposes treating other lists.

New comment by Chinjut in "OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results"

Chinjut — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:01:32 +0000

This paper "purporting to have solved the Collatz conjecture" was essentially a deliberate joke. It was not a serious attempt to prove the Collatz conjecture, it just used that framing to deliberately point out a Lean soundness bug. The soundness bug is real, but the idea that this was something you might accidentally run into while trying to prove the Collatz conjecture is made up.

New comment by Chinjut in "Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits"

Chinjut — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 05:27:37 +0000

Push lists of 0 or 1 up, but push lists of 0, 1, 2, 3, or etc, down?

New comment by Chinjut in "Integer multiplication below n log n"

Chinjut — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 00:20:32 +0000

It's interesting because people wondered if it was possible to go below the threshold at all, that's all. Many suspected it was not possible.

New comment by Chinjut in "Don't be fooled–LLMs don't reason"

Chinjut — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:21:50 +0000

Yes, and keep in mind also the article author is chair of machine learning at University College London and was a core member of the AlphaGo team at DeepMind.

New comment by Chinjut in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

Chinjut — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 21:39:12 +0000

If only we could all snap our fingers and have our dream jobs.

New comment by Chinjut in "Show HN: How long do I need to work at my salary before I can coast, or retire?"

Chinjut — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:23:23 +0000

I don't want to fly planes, be in a traveling circus, or be a chef. There are things I want to do, but the money spigots of our society aren't lining up to pay me to do them. I'm all for obtaining optionality through universal income. But optionality means also the optionality to retire (today, not decades from now).

New comment by Chinjut in "Show HN: How long do I need to work at my salary before I can coast, or retire?"

Chinjut — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 05:04:13 +0000

Retirement doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't have to. It means you can work for yourself on your own interests instead of for some other boss who tells you what to do.

New comment by Chinjut in "[dead]"

Chinjut — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:11:37 +0000

This is unreadable. What is this?

New comment by Chinjut in "Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce""

Chinjut — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:09:35 +0000

These are pretty close to each other, to the point where I wouldn't bother strongly distinguishing them.

Suppose we have foldr as in [A] -> B -> ((A, B) -> B) -> B, foldl as in [A] -> B -> ((B, A) -> B) -> B, and reduce as in [A] -> ((A, A) -> A) -> A.

Then we have foldr list value operator = reduce [\b -> operator a b | a <- list] (.), foldl list value operator = foldr (reverse list) value (flip operator), and in the case of a finite non-empty list and associative operator, we have reduce list operator = foldr (tail list) (head list) operator = foldl (init list) (last list) operator.

So these are all basically slight re-parametrizations of each other.

New comment by Chinjut in "A beginning for mathematics"

Chinjut — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 02:04:51 +0000

People always bring up the Continuum Hypothesis as though it has something to do with Gödel's incompleteness theorems, but it doesn't really. The Continuum Hypothesis being neither proven nor disproven by some particular axioms is a similar phenomenon as that the group axioms neither prove nor disprove commutativity, the ordered field axioms neither prove nor disprove the existence of a square root of 2, etc. There's no particular reason to expect any particular formal system to be complete, sans some demonstration that is.

Gödelian incompleteness is the specific kind established by Gödel's proof, where theory T can't prove Con(T) without being inconsistent. But the inability of ZFC to consistently decide the Continuum Hypothesis is established in a completely different manner, with the Continuum Hypothesis not consistently decided by ZFC + Con(ZFC) either, or any such thing.

New comment by Chinjut in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

Chinjut — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:07:13 +0000

Much though jobs may involve those things, it has been rare for me to be in a position where management has valued those things to an extent where they would discern between me and a frontier reasoning LLM's capabilities on those same decisions.

New comment by Chinjut in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

Chinjut — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:03:07 +0000

Yes, on that occasion and now on this one. As a mathematician, my fears have been amped up yet further by this new development.

New comment by Chinjut in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

Chinjut — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:52:08 +0000

What is going to become of life for those of us who do not work at AI labs and are unlikely to be hired by AI labs, despite all the years we put into learning math, coding, etc? Those of us who made the mistake of studying anything other than machine learning. How will we make a living? (We don't live in a world that seems likely to distribute gains widely instead of largely to the handful of already mega-rich.)

New comment by Chinjut in "The pencil case model of creativity"

Chinjut — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 15:21:44 +0000

Why not transition to a time where we do less jobs? Why should we have to carve out extra time in addition to a just plain work job?

New comment by Chinjut in "ExactTex. A gradually-typed superset of LaTeX"

Chinjut — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 05:28:34 +0000

This is a repo for a new thing that is not identical to LaTeX, but intended as an improvement upon it. Typst seems apropos to bring up in related conversation.

New comment by Chinjut in "GPT-6 Astra"

Chinjut — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 23:16:57 +0000

Perhaps it was childish to listen to advice, sure. I was a child when I made my formative choices; I was a teenager in college and so on. I can't go back in time now.

Yes, these problems are systematic. That is what I am saying. That doesn't make it any nicer.