Hacker News: abstractbill

New comment by abstractbill in "Mathematicians will probably become obsolete before anyone else [pdf] (2004)"

abstractbill — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 10:27:47 +0000

Theoretical physics, sure, ok. Not experimental physics though.

New comment by abstractbill in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

abstractbill — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:41:23 +0000

Math is full of such steps, moreso than most other endeavors, probably because the main limit is the abstract reasoning itself.

That, as well as how long we've been doing it (thousands of years!) and so how much of the more accessible parts we've explored very thoroughly.

New comment by abstractbill in "Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3"

abstractbill — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 14:31:21 +0000

I've been admining our family minecraft servers for about 5 years, and just handed off that job to my 12 year old daughter who now knows more than enough of the linux command-line to do it. I thoroughly recommend it, it's been great!

There are many ways to get it done. What worked best for us was choosing java over bedrock, renting a cheap linux vps, and writing some very simple shell scripts for starting, stopping, changing worlds, etc. Happy to talk you through anything you get stuck on!

Ask HN: Are you teaching your kids to program?

abstractbill — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:23:06 +0000

I'm still teaching my kids to code. I'm interested to hear if I'm increasingly alone in this, or if others are doing it too.

A few years ago I was firmly in the camp who felt programming was a new form of literacy, and the important question wasn't "should we teach it", but "how should we teach it". These days I'm less certain, but it still feels worth doing on balance.

My own situation, in case anyone is interested: I retired a few years before LLMs took off, so I've never actually used them as a professional engineer, only on my own time. I'm currently teaching my daughters to write python on their Nintendo 3DS consoles (I used codex to build us a really nice python environment on the 3DS, including a good amount of pygame and other useful libraries). It's going well!

I would love to hear your thoughts, motivations, and experiences, if you're teaching kids to code.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48946510

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by abstractbill in "$100 AI Music Video: Claude Fable 5 vs. GPT-5.6 Sol"

abstractbill — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 22:06:22 +0000

These are pretty terrible, but for me there were at least a few moments where they genuinely became "so bad they're awesome". They actually re-enforced an idea I keep coming back to: sometime soon a real artist is going to use AI to make something amazing, not by aiming for flawless "realism" or some kind of pastiche slop, but by leaning into the weirdness that often comes out of AI.

New comment by abstractbill in "Ableton Extensions SDK"

abstractbill — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:31:09 +0000

A couple of times I've tried somewhat seriously to build "google docs for ableton" (meaning two people editing the same project on different computers, seeing each other's edits in realtime). Frustratingly I decided it was impossible to do a really good job of it back then. This sounds like it might finally make it doable!

New comment by abstractbill in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

abstractbill — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:46:19 +0000

It's nice to see peoples' success stories with diagnoses. I've been suffering from something for more than 20 years now. I was healthy until 2005. Then it seemed like I got sick with some kind of virus and just... never got better. I have unpredictable good stretches and bad stretches. During my bad stretches I can't get out of bed. I've mostly given up on the idea of a diagnosis myself, after seeing dozens of doctors over the years, with the most positive interactions being Stanford researchers telling me I'm a really "interesting" case.

New comment by abstractbill in "I Miss Terry Pratchett"

abstractbill — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:42:03 +0000

My 15 year old is devouring them right now. She pauses dozens of times every day to tell me the best jokes. I love it.

New comment by abstractbill in "The last six months in LLMs in five minutes"

abstractbill — Tue, 19 May 2026 13:33:17 +0000

"... though when it tried to animate it the bicycle bounced off into the top and the bicycle got warped."

Should be the pelican bounced off.

New comment by abstractbill in "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness (2022)"

abstractbill — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:09:41 +0000

I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.

New comment by abstractbill in "A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it"

abstractbill — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 19:30:37 +0000

A complaint asking what this has to do with hackers or hacking.

New comment by abstractbill in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

abstractbill — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:57:57 +0000

A question I enjoy asking myself when I'm wondering about this stuff is "if there are alien mathematicians in a distant galaxy somewhere, do they know about this?"

For complex numbers my gut feeling is yes, they do.

New comment by abstractbill in "Second Chances on YouTube"

abstractbill — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 14:37:07 +0000

This is the approach I've settled on. My kids get a very small amount of actual youtube time each week. If they find a new channel they really like, they pitch it to me. If I think it's good enough, I download the whole thing with yt-dlp for them. It works pretty well for us.

New comment by abstractbill in "People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads"

abstractbill — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 22:41:30 +0000

Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else.

Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.

New comment by abstractbill in "University of Cambridge Cognitive Ability Test"

abstractbill — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 19:29:23 +0000

It’s your brain working as intended.

As intended by whom?

New comment by abstractbill in "Collatz's Ant and Σ(n)"

abstractbill — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 22:50:26 +0000

Sure, but I think there's plenty of room for people to say "I found this pattern that looks really interesting!" without analyzing it further themselves.

New comment by abstractbill in "Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?"

abstractbill — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 18:26:53 +0000

It's just "turtle": https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

New comment by abstractbill in "Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?"

abstractbill — Sun, 01 Jun 2025 17:46:01 +0000

I started my kids on turtle graphics. There's a good implementation that comes with python that's very easy to get up-and-running, to the point where it quite reminds me of BASIC on the kinds of microcomputers I got started on as a kid.

New comment by abstractbill in "Owls in Towels"

abstractbill — Tue, 27 May 2025 00:08:13 +0000

Honestly my first reaction to seeing these photos was to wonder if they were AI-generated (I'm not suggesting they are, I just have that response quite often now).

A shower thought turned into a Collatz visualization

abstractbill — Tue, 20 May 2025 01:04:14 +0000

Article URL: https://abstractnonsense.com/collatz/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44036716

Points: 137

# Comments: 26