Hacker News: Sniffnoy

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The Sylvester–Gallai Theorem"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:50:00 +0000

I think what's going on here is that you've misunderstood the theorem's hypothesis. The hypothesis isn't that no three of the points are collinear; rather, it's the weaker statement that there isn't any one single line that all the points lie on. It's true that with your version of the hypothesis the theorem would be trivial; but with the actual hypothesis it is is nontrivial.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"

Sniffnoy — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 04:14:33 +0000

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

Hi, I'm Harry Altman! I was the maintainer of Truffle Debugger (https://github.com/ConsenSys-archive/truffle/tree/develop/pa...), a Solidity smart contract debugger, for 5 years. I eventually ended up writing my own decoding and encoding libraries to support it, as well as a bunch of other things.

I'm good at this sort of nitpicky work, spotting and thinking about edge cases. I like getting things exactly right, even though that obviously isn't always possible due to various constraints. I've been kind of wondering if I should get into embedded development; I find it appealing when things are low-level or similarly constrained. I've beaten Microcorruption. :) (The original levels, I haven't played the new ones.)

I'm also quite interested in unusual or obscure data formats, and working on Truffle Debugger and its associated libraries certainly involved a bunch of having to figure undocumented formats and interfaces. :) I put down above what languages I've worked substantially in but I'd say I'm a generalist and will figure out whatever you give me (I knew approximately no Javascript, Typescript, or Solidity when I started working at Consensys).

I'm a mathematician by background and in my spare time, so after the Truffle Debugger project was shut down I took some time off to focus on my mathematical projects, including old ones I've been shepherding through publication. But now I'm looking for work again! If you need someone like me, I'm available for hire!

New comment by Sniffnoy in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

Sniffnoy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:23:37 +0000

You can, in fact, predict the effect of an atomic bomb without detonating it. Sure, you can't have the same certainty as if you'd detonated it -- empiricism is important; they tested the Fat Man design for a reason. But you may also recall that they were sufficiently confident in the Little Boy design that that one they didn't bother testing, and as it turned out, they were correct in their confidence. That's the power of understanding.

Which is to say, empiricism is important, but if your practice of empiricism is purely looking at what happened before and predicting that things will continue in that vein, rather than using your empirical observations to actually form a model of the world that will allow you to make more general predictions, you're not really using the full power of your intelligence. This is the sort of mistake that led many to not prepare for the covid pandemic, for instance! Meanwhile, others looked at what was going on, realized it wouldn't stay confined like it currently was, realized that it would get much bigger, and prepared.

"I'll believe it when it happens" can be a decent guideline a lot of the time, yes, but at some point you have to actually think. Evidence often comes not in the form of prior similar events, but in the form of models or arguments. To discount these as non-evidence is to blind oneself!

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Email Encryption"

Sniffnoy — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:16:16 +0000

> History may be written by the victors, but the losers still get to dictate theory.

I feel like Tanner Greer's old post "History is written by the losers" is relevant here: https://scholars-stage.org/history-is-written-by-the-losers/

New comment by Sniffnoy in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 06:52:27 +0000

I was confused at first when you asked if the 8-flow is relevant, when like, the 8-flow is a key input that the cycle double cover is built out of. Then I realized, oh, I guess technically they're not using the 8-flow, they're using the Z_2^3-flow. But like. The existence of an 8-flow and the existence of a Z_2^3-flow are equivalent, and I gather most graph theorists are going to talk about it in terms of the existence of an 8-flow, so noting that having a Z_2^3-flow is equivalent to having an 8-flow helps the reader to put this information in context.

I'm not sure why you find this proof so hard to read. I found it mostly quite readable (and the definition of L is straightforward? I wouldn't have written it quite that way but it's hardly inscrutable), although I feel like some parts are maybe lacking some exposition to explain the reason for certain things -- it doesn't feel written "in order". I also don't like that it's not cleanly separated into theorems and proofs -- some of the proof occurs in parts that aren't set off, for instance, and there isn't even a proper main theorem statement! But overall I was able to get through it without a lot of trouble and I'm not even a graph theorist...

New comment by Sniffnoy in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:06:20 +0000

I think "importance" here is just being rated as 1 to 4 stars. So it's not "second-most important" but rather "one of the top 5 most important". That doesn't change much, but FWIW.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra produces proof of the Cycle Double Cover Conjecture [pdf]"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:18:43 +0000

People don't talk about the cycle double cover conjecture here because this isn't a math website. Its lack of mention here is therefore poor evidence.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Megawatts by Microwave"

Sniffnoy — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 08:30:24 +0000

Based on the title, I was expecting this to be about the idea of power transmission via microwave (as seen in e.g. SimCity), but actually it's about microwave communications links used by electrical companies.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "An American Privacy Emergency"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:09:12 +0000

This is guest post by Cynthia Dwork; that's Dwork's writing, not Aaronson's.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "How Many Elementary Particles Are There, Really?"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:32:44 +0000

I feel like you ought to be go lower than 17, down to 9, by not counting the 3 generations of fermions as distinct (so you've just got up-type quark, down-type quark, electron-type particle, and neutrino). After all, if they can mix with one another, should they really be considered entirely different particles?

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Suspicious Discontinuities (2020)"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:27:29 +0000

(2020)

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Underarm Bowling Incident of 1981"

Sniffnoy — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:21:56 +0000

I like this explanation of cricket for Americans: https://www.dangermouse.net/cricket/baseball.html

New comment by Sniffnoy in "AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:42:01 +0000

The blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"

Sniffnoy — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:45:09 +0000

I put in my name, and four boxes popped up -- one for "American mathematician", one for "spelling bee contestant", one for "American poker player", and one for "fitness industry entrepreneur".

In fact, both of the first two are me, but I wonder if Claude Opus 4.8 (the only one that hit both of those two) realizes they're the same person? :P

From Hookswitch to Grave

Sniffnoy — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:45:45 +0000

Article URL: https://computer.rip/2026-06-14-hookswitch-to-grave.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546101

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Sniffnoy in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2026)"

Sniffnoy — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:57:16 +0000

  Location: New York City
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: If it's on the east coast, yeah maybe
  Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, C, Haskell, Solidity, C#, MUMPS
  Resume: https://haltman.neocities.org/resume.pdf
  Email: harry.j.altman@gmail.com

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:34:08 +0000

I don't understand what you're trying to imply here. Yes, he co-authored a report. What is supposed to be dangerous or suspicious about this? What does your statement about "reputational consequences" have to do with your original comment, which implies that this some indicates a bias on his part?

It seems to me like you're trying to somehow imply that writing things to convince people of what you believe is somehow nefarious? It isn't! It's what we're all doing here right now! Putting it in a format that certain people will take more seriously doesn't make it nefarious either. I am quite confused by your point of view here.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:36:36 +0000

Yes, I was surprised he never discussed the idea that such exponentials are typically made of stacked sigmoids.

That said... if the exponential is made of stacked sigmoids, it's still an exponential on the whole! The fact that it's made of stacked sigmoids is relevant to the engineers making it, but not so relevant to the users or those otherwise affected by it.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:34:48 +0000

> He's taken a side.

Yes, that's called "having an opinion". Typically people writing argumentative pieces are doing so because they have a belief about the matter. I'm not sure what exactly you expect here.

> if he's wrong I would hope he owns up to it

I think Scott Alexander is pretty good about that.

New comment by Sniffnoy in "The sigmoids won't save you"

Sniffnoy — Fri, 15 May 2026 21:07:04 +0000

> FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I mean, that's called "having an opinion".