Hacker News: ccppurcell

New comment by ccppurcell in "Author of "Careless People" banned from saying anything negative about Meta"

ccppurcell — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:17:03 +0000

So what? If we need unscrupulous people to tell us what other unscrupulous people do, so what?

New comment by ccppurcell in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

ccppurcell — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:15:40 +0000

Around the same time, Gödel proved the incompleteness theorems and Turing gave us the halting problem. These and the uncertainty principle tell us not only that the universe is somehow statistical and not mechanical, but that there are certain unknowable facts. That's got to be a major psychological blow.

New comment by ccppurcell in "The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s"

ccppurcell — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 08:40:11 +0000

Not just that but the 30s was the tail end of a period of reduction and unification in science. If physics and biology (large portions of it) could be reduced to a handful of principles, why not economics and politics. Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein, Hilbert, the Vienna Circle. It must have seemed like science was on track to explain more or less everything.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

ccppurcell — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 06:17:36 +0000

Not a hoax, you can search GitHub prs for this string and find many hits.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Goodbye to Sora"

ccppurcell — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:58:37 +0000

The tone of a discussion is shaped as much by who doesn't comment as who does. A product comes out and a lot of people are excited by it, they comment accordingly. People who aren't, don't, unless there is something outrageous about it. Maybe there is in this case but the point still stands that when the product fails, it's a very different set of people who feel compelled to comment. And this is totally expected because "that's a shame, I liked it" doesn't seem to contribute to the discussion. Neither does "this product doesn't excite me", even more so because that's kind of the default assumption. So an online community or institution or publication can seem very fickle, especially when the commenters are pseudonymous.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Microsoft's "fix" for Windows 11"

ccppurcell — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:46:09 +0000

I believe they are abusing their customers but I think it's in poor taste to compare this to domestic violence.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

ccppurcell — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:39:59 +0000

A related idea: politicians know how to fix the problems, they just don't know how to get re-elected after doing so.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

ccppurcell — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:17:31 +0000

I've never eaten a beyond burger or anything like that at home. At home the improvement in flavour over tofu or just beans isn't worth it. I can get flavour from herbs spices and other ingredients. I've only ever eaten beyond burgers at restaurants.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

ccppurcell — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:37:40 +0000

Here's a bet for you: someone will be assassinated to manipulate a poly market bet by 2040.

New comment by ccppurcell in "I beg you to follow Crocker's Rules, even if you will be rude to me"

ccppurcell — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 08:23:55 +0000

This is a false dichotomy between spending the first third of your message on niceties and being maximally blunt. I don't agree that you do not owe other people a modicum of consideration about their emotional state.

I advocate a middle ground and also empathy and curiosity. I think you can keep in mind that you might be wrong and treat people with respect without wasting their time. Something like "please check these lines/this function/whatever again. I think it will have such and such an effect. I did this test, here's the output". Seems fine to me.

New comment by ccppurcell in "A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)"

ccppurcell — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 07:21:45 +0000

Use zotero and betterbibtex. By all means type a comment so you know which ideas came from where but I'm a big advocate of taking notes by hand when you really want to understand something, as opposed to reminding your future self about something you already understand.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)"

ccppurcell — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:56:36 +0000

Same here! This poem and Anthem for Doomed Youth lodged deep in my memory. We all had to perform a poem from one of those GCSE collections and I chose Anthem for Doomed Youth. The silence in the classroom afterwards... We were lucky with English teachers though.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Building a new Flash"

ccppurcell — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 08:21:44 +0000

The creativity and range of newgrounds content was mind blowing. The focus on fun as opposed to money making was really clear to me even as a kid. I've always had this little conspiracy theory that they killed flash because it was a threat, too easy for us to make our own culture and fun without a wealth extraction step in the middle. I know it's not true but it's just a weird little feeling I have.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Points on a ring: An interactive walkthrough of a popular math problem"

ccppurcell — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:40:35 +0000

Probably best to avoid the word ring in a mathematics discussion unless you're talking about the algebraic structure. It's very much a mathematical `keyword`.

New comment by ccppurcell in "Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns"

ccppurcell — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 08:32:13 +0000

I mean laptop webcams also shine a light when they're recording but obviously you don't just trust the light to come on right?

New comment by ccppurcell in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

ccppurcell — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 10:14:23 +0000

Not only is it unjustified, attacking during a negotiation seriously undermines future negotiations. This is a massive self face punching exercise.

New comment by ccppurcell in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

ccppurcell — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 07:45:15 +0000

I was just referring to one of the early sentences saying breakfast is a vector space. If you allow arbitrarily many (say) eggs so that two eggs and one egg are different breakfasts, you get a cone inside R^d. If you normalise and consider the ingredients as fractions of a whole (so that 1 egg and 2 eggs are both represented by the 1.0 egg breakfast) you get this simplex structure and the coordinate system you mentioned. But that's still not a vector space as there are not inverses in general. At best it can be embedded in R^d.

New comment by ccppurcell in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

ccppurcell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 10:51:21 +0000

In the breakfast space, I'm afraid, chicken is orthogonal to eggs.

New comment by ccppurcell in "The Hunt for Dark Breakfast"

ccppurcell — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:59:14 +0000

Someone else may have said this but strictly speaking breakfast is something like a cone in a vector space, unless you want to explain to me how to eat negative eggs.

New comment by ccppurcell in "AI just got its toughest math test yet. The results are mixed"

ccppurcell — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 07:01:34 +0000

Amazing that when ai "solves" an erdos problem by finding the solution in an existing paper it gets hundreds of points and comments, but when ai fails a more rigorous test designed by practitioners (i.e. a much better test of the claim that ai will soon do research level mathematics) it gets zip.