Hacker News: evanb

New comment by evanb in "Isseven"

evanb — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 04:01:49 +0000

Bug report: I tried 6.999999̅ and got false. So there's some nonstandard model of the reals being leveraged here.

New comment by evanb in "Prompt Injecting Contributing.md"

evanb — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:19:04 +0000

Of course that's true, but (in the context of the GP) code's bespoke artisanal nature is not the one most people value.

New comment by evanb in "Prompt Injecting Contributing.md"

evanb — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:29:41 +0000

I have always anthropomorphized my computer as me to some extent. "I sent an email." "I browsed the web." Did I? Or did my computer do those things at my behest?

New comment by evanb in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

evanb — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:44:08 +0000

As a term-rewriting system the rule x-x=0 presumably won’t be in Simplify, it’ll be inside - (or Plus, actually). Instead I’d expect there to be strategies. Pick a strategy using a heuristic, push evaluation as far as it’ll go, pick a strategy, etc. But a lot of the work will be normal evaluation, not Simplify-specific.

New comment by evanb in "Rethinking Syntax: Binding by Adjacency"

evanb — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:14:30 +0000

Mathematica has Infix [0], which expresses the adjacency with a ~ (because Mathematica reserves pure blankspace for multiplication). But it works fine to do eg. `"hello"~StringJoin~" world"`; I was always surprised we could only have the predefined operators in many other languages and we couldn't define our own.

This seems like a great attempt. I would be worried about how much parsing and backtracking might be required to infer the infix precedence in a totally general system (like garden-path sentences[1]) or actually ambiguous parse trees (which is cured by adopting some rule like right precedence and parens, but what rule you pick makes some 'natural language' constructions work over others).

[0] https://reference.wolfram.com/language/ref/Infix.html

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

New comment by evanb in "Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust"

evanb — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:04:44 +0000

Mathematica has symbolic and infinite-precision addition, so you can't automatically take advantage of obvious compiled code.

New comment by evanb in "Woxi: Wolfram Mathematica Reimplementation in Rust"

evanb — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 23:03:02 +0000

> The initial focus is to implement a subset of the Wolfram Language so that it can be used for CLI scripting and notebooks.

If you have Mathematica installed you can write CLI scripts and notebooks.

New comment by evanb in "The Pentagon Feuding with an AI Company Is a Bad Sign"

evanb — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:58:44 +0000

They did consider it, got a contract that affirmed that the military would be bound by the same pre-existing terms of service as every other user, and want to resist the military's pressure to renegotiate.

Surely that might be naive but the entire issue is that they want to stick to the original contract, which is of course the purpose of a contract in the first place.

New comment by evanb in "Pentagon sets Friday deadline for Anthropic to abandon ethics rules for AI"

evanb — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 11:09:56 +0000

IANAL but it seems 3rd-amendment-adjacent.

New comment by evanb in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

evanb — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 01:09:39 +0000

I'll try to find it; thanks!

New comment by evanb in "The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1961-1964)"

evanb — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:04:06 +0000

I'm using these to teach an intermediate mechanics class, and my only regret is that there are no problems. The flip side is that sometimes Feynman skips over the derivations of certain things, and that makes good assignments ("Fill in the steps between [these assumptions] and [this result]").

Feynman's writing of course is stellar. The order is a bit unusual and not really designed for a "standard" university-level course. I can pick and choose, but I wish I could easily reorder the material.

New comment by evanb in "Experts warn of growing parrot crisis in Canada [video]"

evanb — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 11:29:58 +0000

“Pining for the fjords?”

New comment by evanb in "Bob Weir has died"

evanb — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 04:34:24 +0000

> Winter rain, now tell me why

> Summers fade and roses die

> The answer came, the wind and rain

> [...]

> Circle songs and sands of time

> And seasons will end in tumbled rhyme

> And little change, the wind and rain

Fare thee well, Bob.

New comment by evanb in "Why does a least squares fit appear to have a bias when applied to simple data?"

evanb — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 23:39:03 +0000

3) there's a misunderstanding about ordinary least-squares.

New comment by evanb in "In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution"

evanb — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 15:54:46 +0000

You think it was primarily poor people who were driving their cars into Midtown?

New comment by evanb in "All the Way Down"

evanb — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 14:46:59 +0000

These are nice! I had never seen the 1/5 spiral before!

New comment by evanb in "All the Way Down"

evanb — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 18:01:55 +0000

I animated these and related 'proofs' some time ago

    1/3 = 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-15-quarters/SquareA...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-15-quarters/Triangl...

    1/7 = 1/8 + 1/64 + 1/512 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-16-eighths/EighthsA...

    1/8 = 1/9 + 1/81 + 1/729 + ...

https://evanberkowitz.com/images/2014-03-17-ninths/NinthsAni...

New comment by evanb in "AI agents find $4.6M in blockchain smart contract exploits"

evanb — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 02:33:34 +0000

Careful what you wish for. Negating the predicate of "A COMPUTER CAN NEVER BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THEREFORE A COMPUTER MUST NEVER MAKE A MANAGEMENT DECISION" might open us up to the consequence.

New comment by evanb in "Using Antigravity for Statistical Physics in JavaScript"

evanb — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 12:11:27 +0000

I think it's a reference to https://xkcd.com/353/

New comment by evanb in "Tesla sales in Germany have cratered from last year, data shows"

evanb — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 12:21:20 +0000

Indeed, but if I had called it the Nazi salute I'd have been begging the question---or something like it.