Hacker News: Mathnerd314

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Even light drinking raises risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:55:34 +0000

So I'm looking at Figure 2 of the study and it shows that risk is negative (I.e. it's a benefit) below 7 drinks per week or 1 drink per day. And then they say "There was no protective net effect of alcohol observed at any level of alcohol consumption." And then they discuss the observed protective effects and just say "this body of evidence [that we used] has substantial limitations". They also say "Readers should therefore consider both the point estimates and their associated CIs when interpreting the risk thresholds presented in this study." but then their CI indicates only 2+ drinks per day can cause statistically significant issues.

Overall, a very boring study. It would be more interesting if they published the code and we could play with the numbers, seeing as all the data they used is public, but we can't even do that.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

Mathnerd314 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:51:41 +0000

This may help https://www.workboat.com/white-house-budget-would-slash-noaa...

The administration wanted to eliminate everything ocean-related, seems like they are doing it program by program and this is yet another. Probably explains the lack of context, this is like article 20 about program closures (and maybe 200+ more to go)

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid"

Mathnerd314 — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:12:42 +0000

It is probably like with smart TV's where the value of the telemetry data ends up subsidizing a significant fraction of the hardware. Car manufacturers seem to be doing a lot of experiments with what they can charge for in terms of ongoing subscriptions. I am sure if they could show ads without it being considered distracting they would.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Why airlines are always going bankrupt"

Mathnerd314 — Wed, 06 May 2026 03:37:25 +0000

Maybe we need Uber for airlines. Pilots don't lose their skills, passengers always have demand, the issue is that pricing is too predictable. You could see this with skiplagged, there really is room for fare pricing innovation. Start by capturing the private luxury market, work down to commodity.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "I don't want your PRs anymore"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 21:34:52 +0000

The author sounds like he actually responds to feature requests, though. Typical behavior I'm seeing is that the maintainer just never checks the issue tracker, or has it disabled, but is more likely to read PR's.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language"

Mathnerd314 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 14:17:23 +0000

website is not up to date, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqVN1fGNpZw is not on there

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

Mathnerd314 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:11:19 +0000

"Inference consumes 60–90% of total AI lifecycle costs." So shovel is not the right analogy, more like GPU = coal burning engine. And yes, coal was a big railroad expense, more so than financing construction debt.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "A perfectable programming language"

Mathnerd314 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:41:28 +0000

The author is named Alok, so I would expect alokscript to be a self-authored programming language. But I checked the GitHub profile and I don't see anything.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

Mathnerd314 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:04:56 +0000

Well, it's a little more than that, like they agreed to issue him a debit card

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Study investigates how mass distribution of baseball bat affects performance"

Mathnerd314 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:49:03 +0000

Yeah, it's like just ignoring the actual conclusions. I mean, it's easier to hit and then it hits less hard, which is actually good because professional baseball players generally hit it out of the park when they get a good hit. So the conclusion is actually completely opposite what the title of the article is - it's not the same. It is a substantial improvement.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 22:05:04 +0000

to quote: "in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles."

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:38:00 +0000

It is on Wikipedia under T-Bank, this seems the best source that announces the resolution: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905212700/https://www.tinko...

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)"

Mathnerd314 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:04:30 +0000

Well, if you come at it from the mindfulness angle, there are real studies showing that mindfulness works. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8083197/ and similarly, if you come at it from the religious angle, you can trace a lot of the aspects of mindfulness back to the Buddha's original teachings as recorded in canon. And if you ask if there is a fundamental point beyond those, I think the answer is that there is none recorded - the best description I have been able to get of Nirvana is that it is a state of perfect mindfulness.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "I decompiled the White House's new app"

Mathnerd314 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 04:19:28 +0000

There's a specific writing style for globalized English that AI's use. And then this post also had none of the stylistic flourishes that a real author might add. And then simple things like constructing a table of 68 libraries or whatever organized by relatively subjective categories. That is something that nobody is going to do by hand.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "You are not your job"

Mathnerd314 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:02:44 +0000

Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)"

Mathnerd314 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:37:49 +0000

At least with Gemini, I found the trick is to add anything in any system instruction about a task list. Then the follow-up prompt will always be, do you want to add a task for that? Which is actually useful most of the time.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 06:58:22 +0000

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03622-w this is the paper they're basing the research on. So in primary care, the accuracy rates are in the 80s. So that's something like a 17% false positive rate. That's still like 5 to 1 odds of getting a correct result though. It's much better than nothing.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal"

Mathnerd314 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 05:06:25 +0000

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/20/2025-20...

Well apparently Congress passed a law that said TSA could just demand money as long as they published a notice in the federal register.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings"

Mathnerd314 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 16:27:18 +0000

If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.

New comment by Mathnerd314 in "Show HN: B-IR – An LLM-optimized programming language"

Mathnerd314 — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 04:30:45 +0000

I tried a thread, I got that both LLMs and humans optimize for the same goal, working programs, and the key is verifiability. So it recommended Rust or Haskell combined with formal verification and contracts. So I think the conclusion of the post holds up - "the things that make an LLM-optimized language useful also happen to make them easier for humans!"