Hacker News: JoeAltmaier

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 21:47:11 +0000

HIs pubmed subscription expired.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 20:03:03 +0000

It was something like 'Rugobi'. I'll ask him if there's a demo still up.

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

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:45:21 +0000

Mathematical modelling in binary, is not the same thing as the thing being modelled.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

JoeAltmaier — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:43:45 +0000

It's odd that even today, different disciplines are still silo'd. My son started a research cross-database search engine because different disciplies use different terms for nearly identical concepts. Even within medicine it's silo'd.

Trouble with that startup was, the medical folks with money don't use computer tools. And the students in training have no money.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Solving a corn puzzle with CP-SAT"

JoeAltmaier — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:55:14 +0000

To be clear, the digit at position i is the row number of the queen in column i. So 12345678 is every queen along the diagonal (clearly not a solution).

The model (8 different digits representing row in that column) no queen was in the same row or column, by construction. So only the diagonal test remains.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Ask HN: What are you reading?"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:38:53 +0000

Terry Pratchet's entire corpus

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Solving a corn puzzle with CP-SAT"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 22:20:05 +0000

Back in the day BYTE magazine had a puzzle contest - solve the 8-queens problem and find all the solutions.

As a kid, it seemed obvious to me that a good model was the digits 1 through 8, representing the row that a queen would be in. Doing a recursive backtracker on an ordering of the digits and testing each pair for diagonal (digit i minus digit j was equal to +/- i-j) and my BASIC program spit out the solutions in twenty minutes.

I didnt enter the contest because I figured everybody would do that. Turns out when the editor published the 'best' solutions, they all, every single one, modeled the board as an 8 by 8 array and ran around following diagonals iteratively. And took hours to complete.

Anyway, choosing a good solution model is most of the problem solved.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Behold the pawpaw"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:37:00 +0000

We made huckleberry jam - strained out the seeds, threw them in the compost heap in the back yard. Next spring: a wild profusion of huckleberry plants. So sometimes it's not hard to grow them.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Death Rates for Young American Adults Jumped 71% in Just over a Decade"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:32:56 +0000

Wow. American life expectancy is 38th worldwide.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Fragment of oldest known peace treaty found in Turkey"

JoeAltmaier — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:30:32 +0000

Note the Treaty of Ebla and Abarsal, from about 2350 BCE, exists in scores of clauses on a tablet.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Vertical Farming: Reimagining Agriculture in an Urban Age"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:43:27 +0000

My reimagining: An appliance that drools sugar syrup, or carbohydrate, or fat, or protein into a cup. Electric, using micro-machines etched into silicon wafers that sew the molecules together out of elements in the air (CHON)

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 21:32:55 +0000

Surface area is a materials problem? Folded microstructure, atomic-scale textured surface or some other science-fiction solution could have square kilometers of surface area in a shoebox.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Owners mourn spoiled food after firmware update bricks Samsung smart fridges"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:17:13 +0000

Yes! Pretty much everything the driver touches is no longer directly controlling anything. THe brakes are anti-lock (electronic control can disconnect them). The steering depends on assist motors. The throttle is just a suggestion.

Even my rear-view mirror is a camera, and currently it has failed (shows matrix style drippy blue lines instead of a picture.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Wealth Taxes Could Kill Privately-Owned Companies"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:14:09 +0000

All true, to a degree. The particular degree affects where money is invested, borrowed, deposited. It may not 'kill' private ownership, but it will change it, perhaps drastically as other options become more attractive.

Economics is as dot-to-dot picture that folks love to draw sketchy conclusions from by connecting just the dots they see or want to see. But you have to connect all the dots to get a real picture

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:07:16 +0000

A 5% reduction in fuel is significant, especially as cargo ships are responsible for a disproportionate share of petro-pollution. They burn the cheapest petro gunk, emitting tremendous volumes of soot and such.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:49:16 +0000

Oh some few. No right triangle with rational sides has area equal to a perfect square depends on N=4 for instance. And it can be used to form other theorems that are terribly actionable. Every elliptical curve over Q is modular, which has consequences throughout number theory.

But yes, none of those are very tangible, until applied to problem solutions that are tangible.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "The curio cabinet of medieval mental health"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:53:10 +0000

We mock ancient medicine. But they were modelling health in ways that made sense to them, and which gave them some sense of control. Humors, Chakras, even Freud's Ego, Id and SuperEgo were simple models that could be taught and gave some rational for treatment.

Today's models will be seen as childishly simple and unfortunate, in time.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

JoeAltmaier — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 14:20:02 +0000

I meant, each supposed 'fix' is flawed in ways that have been thought about and written about for decades.

Folks here post their first hasty thought and may think it's new and original and worth a dialog. They are not.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "A warning about 'model welfare'"

JoeAltmaier — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:44:49 +0000

Science Fiction has covered the AI panic in perhaps hundreds of stories. Yet we blindly recapitulate the plots as if we don't know how this will turn out.

New comment by JoeAltmaier in "A beginning for mathematics"

JoeAltmaier — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:17:26 +0000

You know, where most of the universities are.

And, who said anything about Japan? Confused.