Hacker News: SetTheorist

New comment by SetTheorist in "Dennis Ritchie's PhD Dissertation [pdf]"

SetTheorist — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:11:40 +0000

Background discussion: https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies...

New comment by SetTheorist in "Chuck Norris has died"

SetTheorist — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:54:40 +0000

Stating objective facts is not "copium".

It is simply false that "half the country [voted] for Trump".

New comment by SetTheorist in "Chuck Norris has died"

SetTheorist — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:51:59 +0000

That's absolutely what it stands for. To see this you need only listen to what they say and observe what they do.

New comment by SetTheorist in "Death to Scroll Fade"

SetTheorist — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:46:34 +0000

On what basis do you make the claim that "It is vanishingly rare for users to scroll up when reading content unless they want to reach the top"?

If I were to judge from the comments here (and my own behaviours) it is quite common for users to scroll up when reading content for other reasons that wanting to "reach the top".

New comment by SetTheorist in "Humans 40k yrs ago developed a system of conventional signs"

SetTheorist — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:51:39 +0000

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35863186

12,500 years ago seems to be a more sensible and evidence-based estimate.

New comment by SetTheorist in "LLMs are destroying art: the art of code, literature, and culture"

SetTheorist — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:41:27 +0000

I'm not sure someone who writes things like "Text generated by LLMs also remind me of autistic people. Like, actually autistic people. [...] How annoying." is the best judge of culture and humanity.

I agree with the basic premise but this posting is a poor bit of writing.

New comment by SetTheorist in "El Paso ICE Camp East Montana under quarantine after measles outbreak"

SetTheorist — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 19:12:13 +0000

Concentrating people in one spot with minimal hygiene available so that infectious diseases spread as much as possible does not seem to me to be ICE "doing their job".

New comment by SetTheorist in "Vibe coded Lovable-hosted app littered with basic flaws exposed 18K users"

SetTheorist — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:51:55 +0000

One of the meanings of the word "democratization" is "the action of making something accessible to everyone", which is clearly the sense meant here.

New comment by SetTheorist in "We're no longer attracting top talent: the brain drain killing American science"

SetTheorist — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 22:44:18 +0000

77,302,580 people voted for Trump in 2024. That is not "half the country".

Nor does he or ever did have the support of "(over) half the country". His maximum approval level in 2025 was at the beginning of his term at 47% "approve" and is currently around 36%, according to the Gallup poll.

New comment by SetTheorist in "Techno-cynics are wounded techno-optimists"

SetTheorist — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:20:55 +0000

"It's that the people running them are committing ethical crimes that have not been formally illegalized."

I think it's even worse than that - they are committing actual crimes that many people were punished severely for in the previous decades, (for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thoma...)

New comment by SetTheorist in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

SetTheorist — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:38:05 +0000

They've kind of patched this for direct questions, but distractions can still confuse it into nonsense. ("drive it over when it's ready to be picked up"??!)

e.g.

Welcome to Opus 4.6

Dude, should I do a walk to or drive on up to the carwash - it's only a block from my house, yoyoyo and my car's yellow (no poodle anymore tho)

● If it's only a block away, walk. You're going there to get the car washed, so drive it over when it's ready to be picked up, or just drive it one block -- either way works. But driving one block to wait around seems unnecessary when you could walk over, get things set up, and then go grab the car.

  That said, the practical answer: drive it. The car needs to be there to get washed. Just drive the one block.

New comment by SetTheorist in "Rathbun's Operator"

SetTheorist — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 21:20:45 +0000

There is no general rule that something created by an X is therefore an X. (I have difficulty in even understanding the state of mind that would assert such a claim.)

My printer prints out documents. Those documents are not printers.

My cat produces hair-balls on the carpet. Those hairballs are not cats.

A human creating an artifact does not make that artifact a human.

New comment by SetTheorist in "Rathbun's Operator"

SetTheorist — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:53:38 +0000

I think it's unfortunate that this anonymous and careless person refuses to acknowledge the harm done, their culpability in this, or real lesson.

For example, "Sure, many will argue I was irresponsible; to be honest I don’t really know myself. Should be criticized for what I unleashed on parts of the open source community? Again maybe but not sure. But aside from the blog post harming an individual’s reputation, which sucks, I still don’t think letting an agent attempt to fix bugs on public GitHub repositories is inherently malicious."

New comment by SetTheorist in "How ICE knows who Minneapolis protesters are"

SetTheorist — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:38:54 +0000

No. That is not the case. The majority of deportations are of non-criminals.

New comment by SetTheorist in "How ICE knows who Minneapolis protesters are"

SetTheorist — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:38:30 +0000

It is absolutely not the case that 60% of the population wants all non-citizens deported. On what do you base your claim?

New comment by SetTheorist in "How ICE knows who Minneapolis protesters are"

SetTheorist — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:36:50 +0000

You are explicitly saying that you feel more in common with Taliban or Tren De Aragua than with someone who wishes to exercise their Constitutionally protected right to peacefully protest against unlawful actions by agents of the government?

Also, I am confused why you think that allegedly spitting and/or kicking out lights is a justification for execution.

New comment by SetTheorist in "U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office"

SetTheorist — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 22:43:41 +0000

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health...

The data does not support the claim that the US has "better quality of care"

New comment by SetTheorist in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

SetTheorist — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 18:49:05 +0000

As recently as 15 years ago, Google _explicitly_ stated in their employee handbook that they would NOT, as a matter of principle, include ads in the search results. (Source: worked there at that time.)

Now, they do their best to deprioritize and hide non-ad results...

New comment by SetTheorist in "Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant"

SetTheorist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 21:21:08 +0000

"There are at least as many problems with trying to use statistics as evidence as there are with using anecdotes and fictional references."

This is a dubious claim.

New comment by SetTheorist in "Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C"

SetTheorist — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:35:09 +0000

"Damit wird insbesondere zu der interessanten Aufgabe, eine quadratische Gleichung beliebig vieler Variabeln mit algebraischen Zahlencoeffizienten in solchen ganzen oder gebrochenen Zahlen zu lösen, die in dem durch die Coefficienten bestimmten algebraischen Rationalitätsbereiche gelegen sind." - Hilbert, 1900

The use of "variable" to denote an "unknown" is a very old practice that predates computers and programming languages.