<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: daynthelife</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=daynthelife</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 19:53:00 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=daynthelife" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Accelerando (2005)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>To the extent that's true, the same would then apply to any sufficiently intelligent life. So if that's the crux of the argument, it has nothing to do with AI being a great filter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 17 May 2026 22:18:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173671</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173671</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173671</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Accelerando (2005)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It always bothers me when people suggest that AI could be the "great filter" in the sense of Fermi's paradox. Yes, AI may well wipe out biological life, but all evidence suggests AI will have a <i>much</i> easier time with space travel compared to biological life, and it will emit much louder signals unless it is intentionally staying silent.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 16 May 2026 22:40:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164390</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164390</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48164390</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "1D Chess"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It clearly doesn't use minimax, since it doesn't play the best move for black in the critical line, leading to a mate in 5 instead if a mate in 6.<p>Best line is N4 N5, Nx6+ K7, R4 N3+!, K2 N5, N8! Kx8, Rx5#. The site has black instead play Kx6 on the third move, allowing a faster mate.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:29:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745216</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745216</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745216</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "1D Chess"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The site plays Kx6 instead. You're right though that I was generous with the exclams; all the moves are easy to find in reality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Apr 2026 22:23:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745181</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745181</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47745181</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "1D Chess"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It frustrates me that the site does not give the strongest defense for black. The position is mate in 6, not 5:<p>1. N4 N5<p>2. Nx6+ K7<p>3. R4 N3+!<p>4. K2 N5<p>5. N8! Kx8<p>6. Rx5#</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:19:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725655</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47725655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Theoretically you can max out every 5 hour window, but they lose money on that.<p>No, there is a weekly limit as well. Maxing out a single 5h window uses ~10% of the weekly limit</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:06:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47635962</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47635962</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47635962</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "What is an elliptic curve? (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I find a lot of motivation from topology. If you plot a smooth degree d curve over the complex numbers, it forms a surface of degree g=(d-1)(d-2)/2. In the case of a cubic, we get genus 1, i.e. a torus. Now tori admit a very natural group action, namely addition in (R/Z)^2. And sure enough, if you pick the right homeomorphism, this corresponds to the group action given by the elliptical curve.<p>Of course, the homeomorphism to (R/Z)^2 does not respect the geometry (it is not conformal). If we want the map to preserve angles, we need our fundamental domain to be a parallelogram instead of a rigid square. The shape of the parallelogram depends on the coefficients of the cubic, and the isomorphism is uniquely defined up to choice of a base point O (mapping to the identity element; for elliptic curves, this is normally taken to be the point at infinity). You still get a group law on the parallelogram from vector addition in the same way, and this pulls back to the precise group action on the elliptic curve.<p>The real magic is that the resulting group law is <i>algebraic</i>, meaning that a*b can be written as an algebraic function of a and b. This means you can do the same arithmetic over any field, not just the complex numbers, and still get a group action.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2025 11:58:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311614</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311614</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46311614</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "How geometry is fundamental for chess"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Rooks don't have taxicab geometry. Their metric space is compact even on an infinite board. I think you're thinking of the wazir: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wazir_(chess)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wazir_(chess)</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2025 07:07:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299077</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299077</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46299077</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "ChatControl: EU wants to scan all private messages, even in encrypted apps"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, but who's reading the conversation to determine whether it "looks suspicious"? A regex? A neural network? Who decides the algorithm, and do you really can believe they won't ever change it to serve other more nefarious purposes like suppressing dissent?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 26 Sep 2025 08:47:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45384281</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45384281</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45384281</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "A short proof of the Hairy Ball theorem (2016) [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am confused how we can define a rotation number of the map from S^1 to R^3 defined at the end of the second paragraph. R^3 is nullhomotopic, after all...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2025 10:22:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45024587</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45024587</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45024587</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Let's stop counting centuries"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>My preference is semi-compatible with both conventions:<p>First = 0
Second = 1
Toward = 2
Third = 3
…<p>This way, the semantic meaning of the words “first” (prior to all others) and “second” (prior to all but one) are preserved, but we get sensical indexing as well.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 Jul 2024 04:16:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40888131</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40888131</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40888131</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1996) [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Beat me to it!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:03:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811312</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811312</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811312</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught (1996) [pdf]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Working in HFT, my favorite is 1 nanosecond ≈ 1 foot</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2024 15:03:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811305</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811305</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811305</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "One Million Checkboxes"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can you make the checkboxes indexed from zero?<p>(Maybe I am too dogmatic)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 27 Jun 2024 14:59:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811264</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811264</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40811264</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Calculus with Julia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> You think mathematicians had it all wrong for centuries<p>As a mathematician, yes, I do. Pretty much everything becomes simpler if you treat zero as the first natural number.<p>> Incidentally, I find it amusing that in Europe, the ground floor is zero, while in the US, it's one.<p>I really think it makes no sense to number the ground floor as 1. This means if you want to know the height of the nth floor, you have to multiply the height of a story by (n-1).<p>There are a ton of other cases where you have to needlessly subtract 1 when people use 1-based indexing. To name a few<p>- Dates: why did the 21st century start on 1/1/2001? Why are the 1800s the 19th century? It doesn’t make any sense. If we indexed from zero, today would be 5/0/2023 (5 months, 0 days, 2023 years since the common era), in the 20th century. It all becomes so easy and intuitive. 
- Mathematical foundations: If we are using set theory to encode mathematics, how is the number 1 defined? As a set containing itself? This leads to paradoxes in many cases. As the set containing a different single element? Then we can call its contents 0. 
- Musical intervals: why do two thirds (ok, major and minor, but I’ll gloss over that) make a fifth? Does 3+3=5? The fact that musical intervals index from 1 significantly increases the cognitive burden for music theory. It becomes much easier when we index from 0. 
- Birthdays: Age is correctly indexed from zero, but it may seem counterintuitive that your first birthday is the day you are born. So when is your second birthday? The day you turn 1, of course. The word “third” sounds like 3, so it seems reasonable to me to introduce a new ordinal here (I like “toward”). 
- Computing: languages that use 1-based indexing are obscuring what is actually going on; they generally just subtract 1 internally from the user’s input. They have to, since indexing from 0 is fundamentally more efficient at the hardware level. 4 bits can only store 15 possible addresses if you throw away 0.<p>These are just a few examples and by no means an exhaustive list. Conversely, I have yet to know of a single instance where 1-based indexing makes more sense or simplifies things (aside from being more compatible with legacy features of our society).<p>After a while, when you think deeply about it, you start to feel that 0-based indexing is something closer to a fundamental truth, rather than simply a convention. Indeed, I propose that the only reason people find 0-based indexing counterintuitive is due to social conditioning.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 01 Jun 2024 18:50:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40548126</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40548126</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40548126</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "How to Turn Off AI Overview in Google and Set "Web" as Default"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>And when you do need google, you can always just add `!g` to your search query. There are a bunch of other useful ones [0], my favorite is probably `!w` for Wikipedia.<p>[0] <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/bangs" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/bangs</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2024 17:46:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431500</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431500</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40431500</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "Calculus with Julia"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I disagree on the zero-based indexing complaint. Indeed, the fact that Julia indexed from 1 is the <i>sole</i> reason I will never use an otherwise great language. I can’t comprehend how people came to the conclusion this was a good idea.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 May 2024 00:24:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40403174</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40403174</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40403174</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "The Nascar Camera Tech Behind a Historic 0.001s Photo Finish"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>For anyone wondering if the speed of light is a concern, a good mnemonic is that a foot is roughly equal to a nanosecond. So a millisecond is long enough (by a factor of ~50000) that camera placement doesn’t matter.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 May 2024 19:17:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359014</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359014</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359014</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "I nearly died drowning"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of many things I learned from [0] is that the vast majority drownings happen in crowded pools with a ton of floaties. It’s so easy to miss a kid falling in. Those floats are supposed to keep kids safe, but they’re a lot closer to being death traps.<p>[0] <a href="http://spotthedrowningchild.com/" rel="nofollow">http://spotthedrowningchild.com/</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 22:32:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070769</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070769</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070769</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by daynthelife in "If gravity isn't a force, then why does it "need" a boson?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Put more briefly, gravity does not produce a compressive stress in the phone in free fall. The external force from the table applied to the phone sitting atop it does create compressive stress. Ergo, the situations are fundamentally different.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 24 Mar 2024 14:25:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39807422</link><dc:creator>daynthelife</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39807422</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39807422</guid></item></channel></rss>