Hacker News: akkartik

New comment by akkartik in "Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals"

akkartik — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:46:50 +0000

"In 2017, Dyatlov and Long Jin from Tsinghua University in Beijing used the one-dimensional fractal uncertainty principle to prove that you can never trap a wave on a hyperbolic surface; it will always spread out until it touches every corner. To do so, they imagined a region on the surface that a wave never enters, even after having infinite time to spread out. When they removed all the trajectories that entered that region, what remained was the same sort of fractal dust that appeared in the pinball example. Since the fractal uncertainty principle forbids a wave from being trapped on a fractal, no such region can exist — the wave must spread everywhere."

As a non-mathematician this is a wonderfully evocative summary. I'm curious if mathematicians find it a reasonable characterization of the proof.

New comment by akkartik in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

akkartik — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:37:33 +0000

You're confusing the current implementation with future potential of this technology.

New comment by akkartik in "I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union"

akkartik — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 21:36:02 +0000

Like Mr. Incredible at the insurance company.

New comment by akkartik in "Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS"

akkartik — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:27:35 +0000

Interesting! My biggest reaction is I don't use Emacs. Is Emacs a requirement? You're right that Org adds features but it also shrinks the pool of people who will try this.

New comment by akkartik in "Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS"

akkartik — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:52:21 +0000

https://indieweb.org/twtxt

New comment by akkartik in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

akkartik — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:08:41 +0000

Well, my lens tends to be geopolitical rather than economic. Privacy isn't some axiomatic metric for me. I just decide if someone is an ally and I am willing to put up with the cost of their action. With Anubis I don't see it being suborned yet by non-allies like big companies. But I'm definitely watching for that.

New comment by akkartik in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

akkartik — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:16:28 +0000

Yeah, every day brings choices. I tend to allow a first party js from every small site, and that covers Anubis and the even more egregious use case of Mastodon instances. Needing 100KB of Js to display 140 chars :eyeroll:

I still haven't allowed Cloudflare, though. That is bounce or incognito.

New comment by akkartik in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

akkartik — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:41:43 +0000

Absolutely. I have no complaint with their actual change to the terms of service. I've had an account with them for years, and I stopped hosting new repos there a year or two ago, because I got mixed signals about precisely what kinds of projects they want to host. I don't need a host, plenty of fish in the sea. But I also think the world is better for having them in it and being hardened against enshittification, and I don't want to see them constantly struggling to stay up under assault from LLM crawlers. I wish them well.

I am constantly ill-choosing words I didn't mean, it's not such a big deal.

New comment by akkartik in "I regret migrating to Codeberg"

akkartik — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 16:00:04 +0000

I still use NoScript. I actually started in 2018. I will turn on 1 or 2 js sites for a respectable looking page, but blank screens and captchas are a good signal to bounce, or occasionally to use an incognito window which enables all JS.

As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.

New comment by akkartik in "Men That Don't Fit In (1911)"

akkartik — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 01:43:25 +0000

Show me a successful "steady, quiet, plodding" person from the outside, and I'll show you someone who "doesn't know how to rest" and continually makes "fresh mistakes" on the inside.

New comment by akkartik in "Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"

akkartik — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 17:18:04 +0000

Hmm, now I'm wondering if paste should save the clipboard contents before so undo can restore them.

But no. Your text editor is a cottage surrounded by an outdoors it doesn't control. It makes no more sense to try to take charge of the clipboard than of a flock of geese flying overhead. What if someone or some other app pasted something in between? Paste is an arrow shot, a message in a bottle.

New comment by akkartik in "The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency"

akkartik — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:33:55 +0000

Yeah I've seen both approaches. Either teams do their own QA or we have a dedicated function. Depends on the domain to some extent. Both can work. But I don't hear people saying stupid shit anymore like "QA is a cost center". When we have it, everyone understands the value.