Hacker News: bartnp

New comment by bartnp in "Computers Cannot Make Decisions"

bartnp — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 11:39:41 +0000

Except now there's no longer any guarantees there's even any people you can point at. It's already often diffuse responsbilitiy. Maybe today you can still sort of get around that by pointing at business/organization owners. But soon we're going to see situations where that isn't even realistic. For example if AI agents start spinning up their own agents which work outside of the control of anyone. We're going to need some way to deal with that.

New comment by bartnp in "OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics"

bartnp — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 18:40:08 +0000

>these companies need to adhere to the scientific community rather than expecting the opposite

Why? The pre-existing community doesn't own science.

Considering how hostile the community sometimes is to outsiders, how they frequently demand form over function and think connections are often more important than correctness of argument, perhaps it's good for them to be confronted with a new approach to science that does away with those things and returns to the real cornerstones: proof and empiricism.

If you don't want to engage with proofs that's your call, many of us are happy to see progress being made and don't need you specifically for the confirmation

New comment by bartnp in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

bartnp — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 07:14:45 +0000

I think this happens all the time actually, but it's often smaller scale. Like someone writes a neat architecture to do X at their company, and later someone else walks in, looks at this code and sees it's now super easy to do Y, which then turns out to have immense user/business value.

New comment by bartnp in "It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history"

bartnp — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:11:46 +0000

I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.

Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.

And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.

How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?

New comment by bartnp in "Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time"

bartnp — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:41:28 +0000

Yep.

And as an ignoramus: what it is that you are supposed to be using nowadays?

Think in the context of a small company making enterprise .NET (framework) code where Windows is the world, cloud wouldn't fly with the customers, SOAP is still king and your one IT guy is too busy to notice anything happened after 2010. Suppose also that entire software rewrites are impossibly impractical, and that while you'd love to take some security gains, you just don't have the capacity to do configuration deep dives let alone to gamble on something complex like Kubernetes.