Hacker News: bhk

New comment by bhk in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

bhk — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:04:10 +0000

"The more laws, the less justice." -- Cicero

New comment by bhk in "New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?"

bhk — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 03:42:16 +0000

Thanks for the references.

I think you will agree that the bulk of your comment employs a post-set-theory nomenclature.

Regarding "if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero", I ponder the question of how one might casually "choose" a value with infinite entropy.

New comment by bhk in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

bhk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:35:48 +0000

Ah, but it's worse than this. The truly ambitious ladder climber creates not just unnecessarily complicated abstractions, but organizations. Processes for people to follow. Infrastructure for people to maintain. Committees to vet changes. Standing meetings.

New comment by bhk in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

bhk — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 21:29:20 +0000

Let me guess: the point of the interview was to see if he was a "team player".

New comment by bhk in "New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?"

bhk — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:02:54 +0000

I think you are getting away from my point, which pertains to what the article said, which is that mathematicians thought there were "gaps". What mathematician? Can I see the original quote?

The linguistic sleight-of-hand is what I challenge. What is this "gap" in which there are no numbers?

- A reader would naturally assume the word refers to a range. But if that is the meaning, then mathematicians never believed there were gaps between numbers.

- Or could "gap" refer to a single number, like sqrt(2)? If so, it obviously is not a gap without a number.

- Or does it refer to gaps between rational numbers? In other words, not all numbers are rational? Mathematicians did in fact believe this, from antiquity even ... but that remains true!

Regarding this naive construction you are referring to: did it precede set theory? What definition of "gap" would explain the article's treatment of it?

New comment by bhk in "New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?"

bhk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:46:02 +0000

That's not a "gap" that you find by "zooming in". And how can it be a gap when it is occupied?

New comment by bhk in "New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?"

bhk — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 19:42:50 +0000

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Can you cite any claims by mathematicians that there were "gaps"? It isn't even true for rational numbers that you can identify an unoccupied "gap".

New comment by bhk in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

bhk — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 02:00:41 +0000

And by the way, what the Hell is up with all these people claiming that two spaces is an obsolete typewriter-era pre-proportional-font thing? Narrow proportional spaces make two spaces after a period MORE important for visually separating sentences. Is it old fashioned to think logically?

New comment by bhk in "Sizing chaos"

bhk — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 23:03:24 +0000

Funny enough, vanity sizing strikes there too. The purported waist size of a pair of Levi's is off by almost three inches.

One might argue that the size on their label is not supposed to indicate the size of the garment waistband, but the waist size of the wearer who would find it comfortable, but even with that interpretation it doesn't work out right.

New comment by bhk in "Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level"

bhk — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 04:26:44 +0000

Hold on there. High fiber consumption increases the excretion of cholesterol, by reducing the reabsorption of the cholesterol in bile. The liver produces cholesterol for bile, which mixes with our food in the duodenum and aids absorption of fats. Most of this cholesterol is then re-absorbed by the small intestines. By increasing bulk, fiber reduces the amount that is re-absorbed.

Effects on but biome are real too, and apparently beneficial, and may factor in, but it isn't the only (or necessarily the primary) mechanism for reducing serum cholesterol.

New comment by bhk in "Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking"

bhk — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:05:17 +0000

According to Anthropic: "We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load."

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

New comment by bhk in "Eat Real Food"

bhk — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:49:03 +0000

1g/lb is in fact a popular target among bodybuilders.

Much research indicates 0.5 to 0.7 g/lb provides most of the benefits, with continuing but diminishing gains above 0.7 g/lb. And the benefit is not just for "body building", but also for minimizing muscle loss during weight loss and improving insulin sensitivity. Other research indicates we may benefit from higher levels as we age.

New comment by bhk in "What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?"

bhk — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 21:41:32 +0000

It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.

New comment by bhk in "The worrying kink in this job openings, unemployment curve"

bhk — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 18:46:53 +0000

$11.79 in my neighborhood.

New comment by bhk in "ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving"

bhk — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 03:54:21 +0000

Re: "99% of the time" ... this is an ambiguous sample space. Soundness of results clearly depends on the questions being asked. For what set of questions does the 99% guarantee hold?

New comment by bhk in "Serverless Horrors"

bhk — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 19:07:44 +0000

Consider this analogy: Instead of using a root command shell, it is wise to use an account with appropriately restricted capabilities, to limit the downsides of mistakes. Cloud services support the notion of access control, but not the notion of network resource usage limits. It's an architectural flaw.

Or do you always log in as root, like a real man, relying purely on your experience and competence to avoid fat-finger mistakes?

New comment by bhk in "Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them"

bhk — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 13:20:07 +0000

Ironic. Isn't Nature the worst offender?

New comment by bhk in "I'm Unsatisfied with Easing Functions"

bhk — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 14:02:33 +0000

Oscullation/"anticipation" in transitions is so gimmicky and cartoonish. Living things don't move like that, and mechanical things don't unless they are broken, chintzy, or poorly designed (underdamped).

New comment by bhk in "Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon"

bhk — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:16:00 +0000

"Scientists reveal a previously unidentified term for a widely known phenomenon"

New comment by bhk in "Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach"

bhk — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 16:39:56 +0000

What does this impact? 90% of sites on the internet? Just a couple of low-traffic sites?