Hacker News: drichel

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

drichel — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 12:40:27 +0000

The reasoning traces were traditionally keept secret by legacy mathematicians as well.

"When the architect completes a fine building, he removes the scaffolding." - Carl Friedrich Gauss

New comment by drichel in "Master Emacs in one year"

drichel — Sun, 19 Mar 2023 07:31:10 +0000

"First, you copy the master. Then, you master the master"

Can't find the source of the quote but it was about the Chinese approach to learning.

New comment by drichel in "The NSA Instruction (2019)"

drichel — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:25:51 +0000

Counting bits was the bottleneck in the genomic scan I co-authored (Kanoungi et al. 2020). popcnt resulted in insane perfomance gains comared to all other methods.

However, we re-discovered the fact that some Intel CPUs, including the Nehalem mentioned in the article, have a bug that severly affects popcnt's performance, see for example here: https://github.com/komrad36/LATCH/issues/3#issuecomment-2671...

New comment by drichel in "Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?"

drichel — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 19:28:21 +0000

Well actually you are starting to convince me of the opposite.

My horizon is limited to the galaxy. The hypothesis here is that the Earth is an early bloomer in the Milky Way. Then we are dealing with 1 billion Earth-sized planets, only a fraction of which is orbiting stars capable of sustaining life, only a fraction of which in the habitable hone around their stars... They also need to be in the right region of the galaxy in which heavy stars were formed and died with the right conditions to produce heavy elements. Candidate planets also need to be far enough from sources of gamma ray bursts. And finally, even if they have life, it still needs to develop in the right direction for it to be complex enough and interested in reaching out and colonizing the galaxy.

So, the odds are a billion times a tiny fraction to one, a sustainable hypothesis as far as I am concerned.

I believe I saw a model somewhere, predicting that most habitable planets are yet to form in our galaxy, but I did not bother to look hard enough for references.

New comment by drichel in "Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?"

drichel — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 20:24:46 +0000

There is indeed as far as I know some evidence that we are early bloomers https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015... Half of the stars might be 9 billion years old, but for heavy emelents fo form, you need already certain conditions like neutron star mergers need to have occured. Our galaxy might be just old enough for that.

New comment by drichel in "Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?"

drichel — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:59:52 +0000

Imagine aliens of the future for whom the Fermi paradox does not arise, because the galaxy is teeming with what used to be human.

New comment by drichel in "Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?"

drichel — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:51:36 +0000

I can't quite follow how the "early bloomers" theory would imply either of those two conclusions. What I meant is the concept that our galaxy is young and the conditions just became right for ingelligent life to form, and here we are.

New comment by drichel in "Why do we assume extraterrestrials might want to visit us?"

drichel — Thu, 21 Jan 2021 14:30:46 +0000

We might as well be among the first ones. I find the idea quite fascinating, it kind of puts the Earth back into the center and makes us special in a way.

New comment by drichel in "Prehistoric Horses: Exploring the meaning of Lascaux’s galloping herds"

drichel — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 09:28:56 +0000

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams"? Thats about the Chauvet Cave, but indeed very interesting as well.

New comment by drichel in "Overpopulation one of the ten greatest threats to humanity"

drichel — Sat, 31 Oct 2020 09:09:49 +0000

Result of a roundtable discussion wuth concerned citizens? Not convinced, I'm with Hans Rosling on this topic https://youtu.be/FACK2knC08E

New comment by drichel in "The Nobel Peace Prize 2020"

drichel — Fri, 09 Oct 2020 18:15:10 +0000

Menachem Begin bombed the King David Hotel

New comment by drichel in "Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other"

drichel — Sat, 05 Sep 2020 18:24:32 +0000

> "In the last decade, the field of algebraic geometry was set on fire by “perfectoid spaces” rather than “Scholze spaces” because Peter Scholze kept on calling them that in his talks and papers."

Skip to 5:10 to see Peter Scholze apologize for the name: https://youtu.be/J0QdTYZIfIM