Hacker News: MathMonkeyMan

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "The last time my family was replaced by technology"

MathMonkeyMan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 23:12:44 +0000

That's a good point. I'll add that killing someone (even yourself) with a public chat bot is a drawn out affair. With a car it happens all the time.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "We’re forgetting what darkness feels like"

MathMonkeyMan — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 06:52:04 +0000

Fortunately it's growing smaller all the time. Very slowly.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

MathMonkeyMan — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 05:31:22 +0000

The interstate highway system in the US has to straighten out every so often so that a plane can land on it. Otherwise I like the idea, except that you'd need more pylons per panel since a continuous run of panels might shade the road too much. Maybe run them in a strip over all of the existing light poles?

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "I don't want to read what you didn't write"

MathMonkeyMan — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 19:05:35 +0000

> For some people expressing their thoughts in words is really, really hard.

I suspect it is for everybody, but I might be blowing smoke up my own ass.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits"

MathMonkeyMan — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:09:04 +0000

I didn't read OP's remark as "few people make long use out of e-readers," but rather "many more people have e-readers and don't use them," which I'm willing to believe but don't have any evidence of. At the very least it's likely to reflect the case with physical books. The people who don't read you don't hear as much from.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "English: A vs. An"

MathMonkeyMan — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 07:57:11 +0000

Also [a history vs. an history][1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/1ssrby/an_history_...

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "English: A vs. An"

MathMonkeyMan — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 04:27:39 +0000

Is it "a LLM" or "an LLM"?

More generally, do you choose the article as if the first letter of the initialism were pronounced or as if the first word of the initialism were pronounced? Does it differ with acronyms? Does it differ between the UK and America?

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Eating Fruit Skins"

MathMonkeyMan — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 07:11:59 +0000

My dad said that he older he gets, the more of the apple he eats.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds"

MathMonkeyMan — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:07:40 +0000

When an oil well goes off, high explosives can be used to extinguish it. Maybe this is the same principle.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

MathMonkeyMan — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:31:13 +0000

Funnily enough, I use Cloudflare Warp at work, and it breaks my site for what I think are DNS related reasons. Maybe there are some more exotic DNS keys that I need to add.

Or I could go back to IPv4 with dynamic DNS, but that would mean changing domain registrars.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

MathMonkeyMan — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 21:18:34 +0000

Interesting

    david@carbon12:~ $ dig +short AAAA home.davidgoffredo.com
    2603:7000:5101:de1c::cafe:babe

I'll have to look into it, thanks for the QA testing everyone.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

MathMonkeyMan — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:51:48 +0000

No, but IPv6 only these days. I never set up dynamic DNS.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

MathMonkeyMan — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:04:50 +0000

The proper time (that is, the time the traveler measures on a clock) goes to zero very quickly towards the end. Even with both axes plotted logarithmically, it's just a sudden drop at the end towards light speed.

- [pic](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

- [plot](https://home.davidgoffredo.com/hackernews/proper-time-one-li...)

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Feather Atlas"

MathMonkeyMan — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:22:38 +0000

I thought that it was going to be a new battery powered microcontroller board with cloud database integration.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world"

MathMonkeyMan — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:13:25 +0000

Here's the [paper][1] on the arxiv.

I found it hard to believe that they accounted for other forces precisely enough that they could attribute the phase change to gravity, but this is beyond me so I trust the result.

At first I thought "they showed that you can measure a particle falling in gravity," which seemed dumb because we already know that particles fall in gravity. But they showed that you can measure a single (aggregate) particle falling in gravity, which is pretty cool because if gravity is quantum then that means that they observed an interaction between the graviton and their rubidium atom.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14535

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Simple Is Not Small"

MathMonkeyMan — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:56:57 +0000

Maybe part of it is that fully functional notation necessarily preserves certain properties of the computation, while imperative style doesn't have to. For a complex piece of code, all of the hairiness is manifest in a functional style, but can be made implicit in an imperative style. So there's an economy to the imperative approach as things get complex, but in a sense we're just laundering the complexity from understanding the machinations of the code to understanding the correctness of the code.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Simple Is Not Small"

MathMonkeyMan — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 21:48:34 +0000

This is beside the point, and I'm being pedantic, but the unix pipeline and the clojure expression don't quite do the same thing.

The clojure expression reads the entire file into memory first, and then operates on that memory representation.

The pipeline processes the input in chunks. The two `sort`s might read the entire contents into memory, but an implementation like GNU sort will instead, for large inputs, create temporary files for sections of the input and then merge sort them to the output.

You could make clojure do the same thing, but it might not be as "simple" as the pipeline.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Is There I/O After Death? What Happens to Io_uring When a Process Dies"

MathMonkeyMan — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:52:09 +0000

I'm a lowly shell, but in another life I aspire to achieve greatness through docker.

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Holden's Lightning Flight"

MathMonkeyMan — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:03:56 +0000

typical Jim

New comment by MathMonkeyMan in "Engineered yeast for converting plastic and biomass compounds to food additives"

MathMonkeyMan — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 06:13:17 +0000

No, the plot of The Andromeda Strain is about a low orbit bacterium that clots blood very quickly but is extremely sensitive to blood pH.