Hacker News: hatthew

New comment by hatthew in "OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof"

hatthew — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 23:04:58 +0000

My understanding of the result that was found is that the blowup doesn't happen in the real world, and only happens in an NS simulation. The bottom line is that NS is insufficient to model the real world, because in this case the real world is more stable than the model. [Take this with a grain of salt, I barely knew of NS before a couple days ago]

New comment by hatthew in "The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about"

hatthew — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:14:08 +0000

Huh? Nobody's talking about that because it's old news. We already talked about it the first few times that AI made notable progress on a difficult math problem. Now, most people who care about the intersection of AI and math just assume that Lean was involved.

New comment by hatthew in "OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem"

hatthew — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:34:05 +0000

I feel like this whole thing hinges on one point. OAI says[0]:

> However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).

How true is this?

If the implied statement is true (i.e. OAI couldn't have stolen results because the results were so different anyways), then I feel like it's pretty clear that OAI solved the problem on their own, and offering some amount of credit to Tristan and Levent is generous. Though on the other hand it's dirty to have even attempted a scoop in the first place.

If the implied statement is false, and Tristan/Levent's results are a substantial portion of the solution to the millennium problem, then it's probably unintentional but clear plagiarism. I think it's plausible to assume that OAI has trained their models on Tristan's codex conversations, and so regardless of legal ownership, the academic ownership definitely includes Tristan and Levent.

The rest of the drama (individual statements and wordings, e.g. by Sebastien) seems like a bit of a red herring. Worth noting, but not worth basing conclusive judgements on regarding academic misconduct. Regardless, OAI does not seem like the good guys.

[0]: https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/

New comment by hatthew in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

hatthew — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 21:29:19 +0000

I like the part where the value is actually still 8

New comment by hatthew in "Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI"

hatthew — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 19:08:34 +0000

Investments need a return on investment. If "the thing you wanted to exist now does" is the only return, that's not enough to support anywhere near the current amount of digital product creation happening today.

New comment by hatthew in "That's a Lot of YAML"

hatthew — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 09:47:58 +0000

I find json annoying to write a lot of the time, but I do enjoy that it's a lot more difficult to get wrong than yaml. The json spec is pretty clear, and can be learned and memorized by any programmer in 5 minutes. I'd much rather write in a format that's slightly annoying than a format that's slightly ambiguous.

New comment by hatthew in "The "File" menu isn't about files"

hatthew — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 20:50:23 +0000

The "File" menu is about CRUD operations on file-level objects.

I think eventually (~decades) the concept of the menu bar will go away, but until it does, File is a fine name for the first menu on the bar. I don't know what it will get replaced with, but it will go the same way as the Save icon—a relic that was a good design at some point, but no longer has much basis other than inertia, and will slowly get forgotten as it becomes obsolete.

New comment by hatthew in "Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code"

hatthew — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:48:12 +0000

If you're like me and struggled to parse the title, my understanding is, "To obtain certain source code from Google, you could previously reference git tags, but now you have to fill out a form and wait for a human to give you a google drive link."

New comment by hatthew in "Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation"

hatthew — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:13:50 +0000

This thought occurred to me too, but then I realized even 37% is very high. In a reasonable society, most individuals' earnings should go up all the time. The downward pressure that should exist is high earners retiring and low earners just starting their career. A mildly idealized society should probably have 3% go from unemployed to employed, 3% go from employed to (voluntarily) unemployed, and the remaining 94% increase their earnings.

New comment by hatthew in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"

hatthew — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:37:38 +0000

My experience is that current models are pretty good at making functional changes without too many more bugs than a human would make, but are still bad at making good high quality changes. I have a degree in software engineering specifically, so perhaps I am overly sensitive to design issues.

New comment by hatthew in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50% on OpenRouter"

hatthew — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:34:32 +0000

I feel like those examples are considered difficult because they're niche topics, but aren't actually all that difficult in a general sense. What I consider truly difficult are things like taking a ticket and implementing it in a preexisting codebase, using a clean and reasonable design that fits the existing style and makes sense to a human, and avoids the footguns I learned by working with the codebase for over a day.

New comment by hatthew in "How to put 170 atoms in an atom"

hatthew — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:24:20 +0000

A little bit of hand waving, but I don't mind it much. A cloud of steam rising from a boiling pot doesn't have a well defined border or consistent shape, but a human looking at a nearby object can usually make a clear and reasonable decision about whether or not that object is "inside" the steam cloud.

New comment by hatthew in "Marketers are Addicted to Bad Data (2020)"

hatthew — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 22:18:57 +0000

I have a hypothesis that that majority of ad clicks are misclicks where someone closes the new page within <1 second.

New comment by hatthew in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

hatthew — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:58:38 +0000

One of the ways I think about this is to treat AI as if it were another person. If I want to give information to Bob but I think Alice might do a better job of writing something, I'm not going to ask Alice and then copy-paste her response to Bob. I'd either tell Bob to ask Alice, or loop Alice into the conversation. Me being the middleman between Alice and Bob can cause several issues including delayed communication, miscommunication, and obscured provenance.

Alice being AI or a real person doesn't change those factors much.

New comment by hatthew in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

hatthew — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:50:57 +0000

Reading a copy-pasted AI response feel the same to me as reading a massive wall of text with no punctuation. It may contain valuable information, but it's harder to extract the signal out from among all the noise, and the writing style is correlated with a lack of valuable information, so I generally give up and decide to spend my time reading something else.

Is that an ego issue? Doesn't seem like it to me.

New comment by hatthew in "How Compaction Works in Pi"

hatthew — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:52:51 +0000

What is that 30% number based on? Surely that's a model specific limit, and is based more on the absolute token length, not percentage, right? I'm not sure it makes sense for e.g. Opus 0.2M and Opus 1M to both degrade at 30% of their respective context lengths.

New comment by hatthew in "Hello, me. It's been a while"

hatthew — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:34:18 +0000

I find that if I'm driving or doing a chore or something, listening to nothing can sometimes be boring, but if I listen to a podcast I'll sometimes get distracted by my own thoughts and miss 5 minutes of it. Music tends to be the sweet spot in the middle where if my mind wants to wander then I'm not missing anything important, but if my mind doesn't want to wander then I still have something for it to focus on.

New comment by hatthew in "Why tiny JPEGs look different in Chrome"

hatthew — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 04:06:41 +0000

It depends on the target audience. Many people prefer the oversharpened content. I always find it incredible how so many people never change the oversharpened and oversaturated default settings on TVs.

New comment by hatthew in "People who grew up with high economic connectedness earn more"

hatthew — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 03:15:46 +0000

Similarly I attribute about 70% of my quantifiable success (i.e. primarily salary) to a chain of events where the "luckiest" thing was that my OS got corrupted. If not for that I would probably be in a low level software job at 30% of my current salary. The other 2 of the top 3 luckiest in that chain are: attending a talk because it had free lunch and then getting a good job from it with no interview, and the time an inhouse recruiter reached out to me on linkedin (despite my mediocre resume) and got me into their high tier company.

New comment by hatthew in "Nashville uses eminent domain to block data center near zoo"

hatthew — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 03:07:37 +0000

Nonsensical issues go viral all the time without any conspiracy behind them