Hacker News: gosub100

New comment by gosub100 in "How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math"

gosub100 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:05:52 +0000

Thank you for this.

New comment by gosub100 in "How Terry Tao became an evangelist for AI in math"

gosub100 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:17:36 +0000

I have a tangent question: is there a formal language definition of mathematical grammar the same way there is for a programming language? If so, is it context sensitive or context free?

I was daydreaming about how someone would model symbolic algebra in computer code, and naively thought it would be easy, but the more I thought about it, it seems to get exponentially (pun intended) more complicated.

New comment by gosub100 in "Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)"

gosub100 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:10:15 +0000

Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?

New comment by gosub100 in "πFS"

gosub100 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:22:16 +0000

> This means that not only does a singular snapshot of our universe exists in pi, but every single one does

The word 'exist' is doing a lot of work here. Could any computer actually find the value in pi? Each computation takes energy, and there is a finite amount of energy in the universe. Does the value 'exist' in pi if it could never be rendered? How much different is that claim from "our simulated universe is a file on gods computer, located just past the edge of the observable universe or 18 inches away in the 4th dimension"?

A similar thought experiment I've had is with the lottery. With just a few sheets of paper, there exist a sequence of numbers that would completely shut down both major US lotteries - ossibly even get you arrested - if they contained the winning numbers for the next 50, 20, or even 10 consecutive draws. Think about the consequences. You would win, and win again the next draw, and they would be certain you cheated. Then confiscate your pad, and draw again and win a third time. They would have to shut the contest down because this is "mathematically impossible ". But it's not. Just like your thought experiment, it's "just numbers"

New comment by gosub100 in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

gosub100 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:49:21 +0000

It's not glamorous but I want to see SpaceX do a 6 month antarctic mission to prove they're capable of supporting life on Mars. No assistance from any existing antarctic base, fully self contained.

New comment by gosub100 in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

gosub100 — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 06:42:11 +0000

This is the first time I've heard of that. What are some of the carcinogens? I know the radiation is bad there, but I didn't know the regolith was toxic.

New comment by gosub100 in "Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight"

gosub100 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:37:38 +0000

I'm risking being wrong here, but I think the difficulty is getting conforming behavior across all device and browser combos.

New comment by gosub100 in "Job: Head of Stonehenge"

gosub100 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:37:52 +0000

Monolithic codebase though

New comment by gosub100 in "Ask HN: Why hasn't there been a real competitor to Ticketmaster yet?"

gosub100 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 12:18:13 +0000

> while leaving the musicians looking like neutral parties.

Then why wasn't Pearl Jam able to shake them in the mid 90s?

New comment by gosub100 in "I replaced Spotify with a homemade FM radio station"

gosub100 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:30:21 +0000

They make low power AM transmitters as well. I bought one for my dad so he could "stream" old music from the Internet to his old tube radios.

New comment by gosub100 in "DeepSeek V4 Pro beats GPT-5.5 Pro on precision"

gosub100 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:06:59 +0000

There are monied interests that do not want inexpensive Chinese successors to Scam Altman's creation.

New comment by gosub100 in "The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games"

gosub100 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 20:02:36 +0000

Effectively you're saying it's ok to steal, because "it's just from 60 people, c'mon".

Try stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.

New comment by gosub100 in "Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas"

gosub100 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:59:20 +0000

I'm fine with that, even as someone who hates AI.

New comment by gosub100 in "How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time"

gosub100 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 14:03:44 +0000

bland-ness, anti-self-expression, fear of being 'called-out'

New comment by gosub100 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

gosub100 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 12:24:55 +0000

> This is not being forced on us by Israel.

somehow the narrative has been able to conflate Israel with jews. so the first person who says something about halting aid to Israel or stopping the genocide is called "anti semite". The fear from this alone is enough to keep almost everyone quiet, especially journalists. It's a perfect byproduct of cancel culture.

New comment by gosub100 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

gosub100 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 20:03:02 +0000

One of the YouTube "CIA former spies" explained it very well (paraphrasing): "we shared the F-35 with them, but we kept about 10% of the technology to ourselves and sold them a variant. That wasn't enough for them, they ran an espionage operation to get the remaining 10%".

New comment by gosub100 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

gosub100 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:55:10 +0000

I've heard very few if any "conspiracy theorists" talk about sexual blackmail because it's boring. The appeal of a conspiracy is that it grabs people's attention. And there are certain types of attention whores who will spout theories about flat earth, or fake moon landing, because it gets them instant attention and engagement. This is what I think the GP meant, that s/he hates that these people were "right" about politicians being compromised.

New comment by gosub100 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

gosub100 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:50:25 +0000

I think what made Epstein effective was balancing the blackmail with favors for complying. If all you do is get dirt on people, eventually it will fail. But if you give them something too, they are less resentful.

New comment by gosub100 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

gosub100 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:46:58 +0000

The Thomas Massie situation is extremely suspicious.

New comment by gosub100 in "Meteor Explodes over Massachusetts"

gosub100 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 13:39:19 +0000

Without disagreeing with you, what should the event be called?

Breakup, impact, fly-by? all those could be incorrect if all you know is a space object entered the atmosphere, made a sound, and flashed some light. What do you call that? Especially because you don't automatically know if it impacted the surface. At which point it becomes a meteorite, so even calling it a meteor is not fully correct. Or do you get ultra technical and say that when it made the sound and flash, it had not yet reached the ground, therefore it was a meteor at the time?