Hacker News: aquafox

New comment by aquafox in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

aquafox — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:10:30 +0000

FWIW, the best traveling speed is 147000km/h, because the Doppler effect makes a red light appear green. ;)

New comment by aquafox in "My Mental Model of AI Broke on September 8"

aquafox — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:48:56 +0000

> but that an AI system may have produced new mathematical knowledge that humanity did not have before

From the expose in Terence Taos blog [1], it seems the difficulty of the Navier-Stokes counter example is a delicate balancing act between having a blow-up solution and a well behaved force field. And this involves a lot of technical arguments based on already existing ideas.

If this is true, then the achievement of the AI is rather to correctly navigating this balancing than inventing something completely new.

[1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/07/finite-time-blowup...

New comment by aquafox in "Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem"

aquafox — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 19:20:09 +0000

We should start a gofundme to send him 2 months to a remote tribe in the Amazon. Chances are, we see the Riemann hypothesis and twin prime conjecture proven. ;)

New comment by aquafox in "Pre-Release of Polars 2.0"

aquafox — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:15:38 +0000

Coming from an R/dplyr background, I agree. Compare

df.select(

  pl.col("x"),
  (pl.col("w")/pl.col("z")).alias("y")

)

with

df |> select(x, y = w/z)

New comment by aquafox in "Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming"

aquafox — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 16:31:00 +0000

Nice, but Rainbolt would do it in under a minute ;)

New comment by aquafox in "GPS and the Lost Art of Getting Lost"

aquafox — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:45:35 +0000

I also dont miss the days without GPS bike computers, having to navigate route with printed out google maps sheets just to realize the resolution was not high enough for my route and I had to stop at every 3rd intersection to confirm I'm still on the right track.

New comment by aquafox in "Midjourney Medical"

aquafox — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 04:37:28 +0000

The problem is: Since we don't regularly full-body scan healthy people, we don't know how healthy, or say, still ok, looks like. This will create a lot of false positives and potential harm from unneccessary follow-up procedures and treatments.

New comment by aquafox in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

aquafox — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 09:06:56 +0000

I think it's difficult to objectively quantify "effectively solved". A good source with loads of information about many diseases and their clinical status is OpenTargets, e.g. https://platform.opentargets.org/disease/EFO_0003860

New comment by aquafox in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"

aquafox — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:35:36 +0000

If I tell you I have function f with f(a) = 10 and on it's path from a to b, the graph first increaes by 5 units then by another 10, and then later on drops by 25 units, you can immediately deduce that f(b) = f(a) + (+5 +10 -25) = 0. The fundamental theorem of calculus uses the same concept:

To see why \int_a^b f(x) dx = F(b) - F(a) with F'(x) = f(x),

we replace f with f' (and hence F with f) and get

\int_a^b f'(x) dx = f(b) - f(a).

Re-arranging terms, we get

f(b) = f(a) + \int_a^b f'(x) dx.

The last line just says: The value of function f at point b is is the value at point a plus the sum of all the infinitely many changes the function goes through on its path from a to b.

New comment by aquafox in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

aquafox — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 11:09:20 +0000

As someone who has written his PhD thesis in LaTeX, I wish Markdown, or more specifically Quarto, would have existed at that time. Spent too mich time setting up basic stuff that is now just 2 pre-defines styles away.

New comment by aquafox in "SSH certificates: the better SSH experience"

aquafox — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:53:09 +0000

I work in a corporate setting and the money and time we wasted because of Zscaler and its SSL inspection [1] is beyond your wildest imagination. Whenever I see a "SSL certificate problem: self-signed certificate in certificate chain" error, I know I'm in trouble.

[1] https://www.zscaler.com/resources/security-terms-glossary/wh...

New comment by aquafox in "Moldova broke our data pipeline"

aquafox — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 06:32:00 +0000

I really don't understand why people think it's a good idea to use csv. In english settings, the comma can be used as 1000-delimiter in large numbers, e.g. 1,000,000 for on million, in German, the comma is used as decimal place, e.g. 1,50€ for 1 euro and 50 cents. And of course, commas can be used free text fields. Given all that, it is just logical to use tsv instead!

New comment by aquafox in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 21:51:40 +0000

There is a saying about Gauss: when another mathematician came to show him a new result, Gauss would remark that he had already worked on it, open a drawer in his desk, and pull out a pile of papers on the same topic.

New comment by aquafox in "The Q, K, V Matrices"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:33:54 +0000

Oh wow, I wish I could give more than one upvote for this reference!

New comment by aquafox in "Open Infrastructure Map"

aquafox — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 06:24:11 +0000

Or a good one, forcing governments to have robust infrastructure that this info isn't useful. Similar reasoning as with security and open source software.

New comment by aquafox in "Maybe comments should explain 'what' (2017)"

aquafox — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 11:58:42 +0000

I'm a data scientist and a lot of my R code are dplyr-chains a la data |> select(features) |> filter(low_quality) |> mutate(feature=...). It just saves time to comment on what those chains do instead of having go through them every time I want to change something.

New comment by aquafox in "A guide to local coding models"

aquafox — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 06:15:31 +0000

> I'll basically do

    $ man tool |

or even $ cat source |

Could you please elaborate on this? Do I get this right that you can set up your your command line so that you can pipe something to a command that sends this something together with a question to an LLM? Or did you just mean that metaphorically? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

New comment by aquafox in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

aquafox — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 05:21:15 +0000

Having gone through the explainations of the Transformer Explainer [1], I now have a good intuition for GPT-2. Is there a resource that gives intuition on what changes since then improve things like more conceptually approaching a problem, being better at coding, suggesting next steps if wanted etc? I have a feeling this is a result of more than just increasing transformer blocks, heads, and embedding dimension.

[1] https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/

New comment by aquafox in "Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading Australians over 365 subscriptions"

aquafox — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:17:41 +0000

I once bought an Office 2016 license and when I installed it this year on a new laptop, it turned itself into a trimmed down O365. After the first Office update, I got a non-closable ad next to my Excel spreadsheet to upgrade to a full O365. Even more, I was only able to save files to OneDrive and not locally. That was not what I originally paid for!

New comment by aquafox in "Space Elevator"

aquafox — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 18:51:19 +0000

> Our liveable breathable atmosphere is razor thin compared to the size of earth.

If earth were a grapefruit, our atmosphere would be ~1mm thick!