<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: auntienomen</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=auntienomen</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:59:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=auntienomen" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "Show HN: Is Hormuz open yet?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The problem with prediction markets is fundamentally that they're unregulated.<p>Modern equities and futures markets are highly evolved and rather carefully regulated systems.  We've spent centuries learning what the failure modes are and how to guard against them.  It's never perfect, it's never going to be perfect -- it's fundamentally a voting system -- but in general, we get liquidity and price discovery at a relatively low cost, while avoiding fraudulent and evil behavior like wash trading and criminal profit laundering.<p>These new "prediction markets" have been put in place without any of those hard-earned protections.  And surprise, they're rife with dirty trick and dirty money.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 01:27:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698295</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698295</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47698295</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ITPs are far older than LLMs in general, sure, but that's a pedantic distraction.   What everyone is talking about here (both the comments, and the article) are ITPs enriched with LLMs to make the "smart" proof assistants.  The LLMs used in ITPs are not vastly different from the usual chatbots and coding assistants.  Just a different reinforcement learning problem, no fundamental change in their architecture.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:52:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580174</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47580174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Exactly this.  LLMs really aren't built for discovering new mathematics, especially _interesting_ new mathematics.  They're built to try the most obvious patterns.  When that works, it's pretty much by definition not interesting.<p>What LLMs are good at is organizing concepts, filling in detail, and remembering to check corner cases.  So their use should help mathematicians to get a better handle on what's terra firma and what's still exploration.  Which is great.  Proof by it-convinced-other-mathematicians doesn't have a flawless track record.   Sometimes major theorems turn out to be wrong or wrong-as-stated.  Sometimes they're right, but there's never been a complete or completely correct proof in the literature.  The latter case is actually quite common, and formal proof is just what's needed.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 21:03:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579681</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579681</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579681</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "Global warming has accelerated significantly"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's going to have to be a mixture of approaches.  Stratospheric injection buys time for more holistic solutions.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:38:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278285</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278285</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47278285</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There's always some risk of confusing the model with the reality, but yeah, if you have chiral fermions interacting through gauge fields and gravity, the charges have to say satisfy all of the anomaly cancellation conditions (there's about half a dozen) or the model will be inconsistent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 16:47:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962637</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962637</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46962637</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There does appear to be a deeper reason, but it's really not well understood.<p>Consistent quantum field theories involving chiral fermions (such as the Standard Model) are relatively rare: the charges have to satisfy a set of polynomial relationships with the inspiring name "gauge anomaly cancellation conditions".   If these conditions aren't satisfied, the mathematical model will fail pretty spectacularly.   It won't be unitary, can't couple consistently to gravity, won't allow high and low energy behavior to decouple,..<p>For the Standard Model, the anomaly cancellation conditions imply that the sum of electric charges within a generation must vanish, which they do:<p>3 colors of quark * ( up charge 2/3 - down charge 1/3) + electron charge -1 + neutrino charge 0 = 0.<p>So, there's something quite special about the charge assignments in the Standard Model.  They're nowhere near as arbitrary as they could be a priori.<p>Historically, this has been taken as a hint that the standard model should come from a simpler "grand unified" model.  Particle accelerators and cosmology hace turned up at best circumstantial evidence for these so far.  To me, it's one of the great mysteries.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 01:34:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954209</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954209</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954209</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "The Q, K, V Matrices"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This might be the single best blog post I've ever read, both in terms of content and style.<p>Y'all should read this, and make sure you read to the end.  The last paragraph is priceless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:20:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544480</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544480</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46544480</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No wonder Gatsby is frequently misunderstood:  Most people won't have the experience needed to understand it until they're in their 30s, but we prescribe it for high schoolers year after year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 07:25:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485766</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485766</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485766</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "The Great Gatsby is the most misunderstood novel (2021)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is a good ending to Game of Thrones:  evil wins, everyone dies.  All the fools who pursued their own interests rather than face an annihilating threat get annihilated.  It's right there in the show's motto.  "Winter is coming."<p>The writers just lacked the courage to do it.  They tried to tack a Disney ending onto a tragedy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2026 07:22:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485757</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485757</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485757</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "AI's real superpower: consuming, not creating"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>A lot of the time, the definitions peculiar to a subfield of science _don't_ require much or any additional technical background to understand.  They're just abbreviations for special cases that frequently occur in the subfield.<p>Looking this sort of thing up on the fly in lecture is a great use for LLMs.  You'll lose track of the lecture if you go off to find the definition in a reference text.  And you can check your understanding against the material discussed in the lecture.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:25:13 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307497</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307497</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46307497</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>On a related note, I've always regarded Python as the best IDE for writing C.  :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:36:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212631</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212631</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46212631</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The answer is still "No".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:32:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207813</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207813</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207813</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the headline is a question, the answer is "No".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:27:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207745</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207745</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46207745</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "Quanta to publish popular math and physics books by Terence Tao and David Tong"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>His foundations are still doing good work.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 19:30:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196550</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196550</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196550</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "A new bridge links the math of infinity to computer science"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think at this stage, most mathematicians recognize that formal proof verification is a real and interesting thing.  We have extremely prominent mathematicians like Scholze & Tao making a point of using these tools.<p>But in many cases, it's extra effort for not much reward.  The patterns which most mathemematicians are interested in are (generally) independent of the particular foundations used to realize them.  Whether one invests the effort into formal verification depends on how hard the argument is and how crucial the theorem.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:12:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062368</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062368</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062368</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Agree.  In fact, I said the list included both genres in my original comment.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:46:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727218</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727218</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727218</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think there are 2 different series.  The "SF Masterworks" seeme to be fans-liked-it, while the "Fantasy Masterworks" is editor favorites.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2025 22:42:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727195</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727195</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45727195</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The Ted Sturgeon of our era.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:35:45 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711756</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711756</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711756</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The genres weren't always as defined and distinct.  The early authors and especially the editors who popularized the genre frequently worked in both.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:32:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711735</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711735</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711735</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by auntienomen in "My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you like these books -- early classics of the genres -- it's going to be well worth your time to check out Fantasy Masterworks collection (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Masterworks</a>).  It's a set of reissued sci-fi and fantasy novels, chosen by the British publisher Millennium for their quality and influence on later writers.<p>3/5 of the books in the linked article are included.<p>It's not perfect-- it's missing War for the Oaks, for example, and doesn't have any Iain M Banks.   But there's an awful lot of good material in there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 26 Oct 2025 13:24:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711654</link><dc:creator>auntienomen</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711654</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45711654</guid></item></channel></rss>