Hacker News: gottheUIblues

New comment by gottheUIblues in "A case against Boolean logic"

gottheUIblues — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:00:35 +0000

The normal term for the logic that has two truth values, the law of non-contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle is 'Classical Logic' which dates back centuries before George Boole. Non-classical logics which deny one or more of three properties that I've mentioned also exist

New comment by gottheUIblues in "The seven programming ur-languages (2022)"

gottheUIblues — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:45:07 +0000

Rather COBOL is a living fossil? And today's Fortran is the FORTRAN family with horizontal gene transfer from the Algol lineage of programming languages.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Is math big or small?"

gottheUIblues — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 10:21:20 +0000

Err? Peano Arithmetic is provably consistent in ZFC, but it is not in itself (if PA is consistent). Therefore if PA is consistent it is not equivalent to ZFC (regardless of whether ZFC is consistent or not)

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Simple self-distillation improves code generation"

gottheUIblues — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 12:25:16 +0000

"Embarrassingly" considered harmful?

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem"

gottheUIblues — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:38:33 +0000

To the contrary (as summarised by Gemini):

Gödel showed that arithmetic cannot prove everything about itself.

Turing showed that computers cannot predict everything about themselves.

Rice showed that we cannot automatically verify what programs will do.

Chaitin showed that mathematics is full of random, unprovable facts.

Lawvere showed that they are all failing for the exact same structural reason!

These are not fringe issues. They define the absolute boundaries of human and machine intelligence.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "The Windows equivalents of the most used Linux commands"

gottheUIblues — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:38:07 +0000

I don't think of 9 as really being a signal to the process at all, more of an instruction to the OS kernel to terminate the process

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Coding agents could make free software matter again"

gottheUIblues — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:00:04 +0000

If that theory holds - have to ensure that the models have not been trained on any code that is licensed incompatibly with the GPL, in which case the models could not be distributed at all

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Further human + AI + proof assistant work on Knuth's "Claude Cycles" problem"

gottheUIblues — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:54:52 +0000

So specified .. that it can actually prove it can't be completely specified by any single specification

New comment by gottheUIblues in "C++26: A User-Friednly assert() macro"

gottheUIblues — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 01:20:03 +0000

Right so strictly speaking C++ could do anything here when passed a null pointer, because even though assert terminates the program, the C++ compiler cannot see that, and there is then undefined behaviour in that case

New comment by gottheUIblues in "French e, è, é, ê, ë – what's the difference?"

gottheUIblues — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:14:41 +0000

Shouldn't that be the "dam spelling" then?

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Twelve-Tone Composition"

gottheUIblues — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:11:48 +0000

Film score composers are quite famous for borrowing from 12 tone serialism - quite a bit of discussion on it available by Googling or using your favourite chatbot

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

gottheUIblues — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 10:30:17 +0000

Money is a social construct, not some kind of physical quantity subject to conservation laws, and can be and is introduced into the economic system all the time. The real question is really would introducing more money or a UBI cause social disruption by e.g. disrupting price signalling by high inflation or changing incentives to work so less goods and services that people actually value are produced.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "How many options fit into a boolean?"

gottheUIblues — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:51:27 +0000

A trit is log(3)/(8log(2))=0.19812031259014 of a byte

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Deterministic Programming with LLMs"

gottheUIblues — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 13:42:37 +0000

The verifier doesn't need to be deterministic, just to output a proof artifact that can be independently validated for correctness.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

gottheUIblues — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:09:13 +0000

There are infinitely many different p-adic completions of the rationals for each prime p, so we have 2-adics, 3-adics, 5-adics etc, all different.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "HeyWhatsThat"

gottheUIblues — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 07:54:28 +0000

It's topography not topology! Would be funny if a country has a government department dedicated to the mathematical field of topology!

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Programmers and software developers lost the plot on naming their tools"

gottheUIblues — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 11:05:49 +0000

Except protium, deuterium and tritium

New comment by gottheUIblues in "'Big Short' Investor Michael Burry Says OpenAI Is Headed for 'Netscape Fate'"

gottheUIblues — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:24:20 +0000

Netscape open sourced to try and head off Internet Explorer as a 'last throw of the dice'? Chrome based originally on WebKit from Safari which was forked off KHTML from KDE's konqueror, came along years later.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Reverse math shows why hard problems are hard"

gottheUIblues — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:13:24 +0000

I wrote as my comment kind of as a rhetorical question, but perhaps in retrospect the connection between the string comparison problem the pigeonhole principle is not so surprising in the end.

New comment by gottheUIblues in "Reverse math shows why hard problems are hard"

gottheUIblues — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 13:38:46 +0000

I didn't know and not mentioned in the article is that there are two different programs in reverse mathematics, one relating to classical mathematics, the other relating to complexity questions. Claude says this: not sure about accuracy

Let me clarify the relationship between PV₁ and reverse mathematics systems, as there are actually two different research programs here: Two Different Programs 1. Classical Reverse Mathematics (over RCA₀) The standard reverse mathematics program, pioneered by Harvey Friedman and Stephen Simpson, works over second-order arithmetic and studies which set existence axioms are needed to prove theorems of ordinary mathematics. The main systems form the "Big Five": RCA₀ (Recursive Comprehension Axiom) WKL₀ (Weak König's Lemma) ACA₀ (Arithmetic Comprehension Axiom) ATR₀ (Arithmetic Transfinite Recursion) Π¹₁-CA₀ (Π¹₁ Comprehension Axiom) 2. Bounded Reverse Mathematics (over PV₁ or similar) This is a separate program studying computational complexity rather than computability. It analyzes which theorems require which computational resources.