Hacker News: hnax

New comment by hnax in "Netherlands pulls gold out of the US"

hnax — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 19:50:41 +0000

National debt is a public millstone, and war makes it heavier; but just as a reminder, it was the US that has prevented Iran from having nuclear ballistic missiles on short notice (the acquisition of which would have instantly endangered the ME and the rest of the world, at immensely greater cost). Don't be fooled by "economic considerations": under the surface there is a battle going on the importance of which exceeds everything that the media throws at you. Try hard to understand!

New comment by hnax in "The Humbling of the Once Almighty Dollar"

hnax — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 00:04:41 +0000

Paul Krugman is an Economist, but the world is Multi-Dimensional. By using ideologically aligned proxies, Iran was well on its way to subjugate the Middle East and the World to its radical Islamism - the extend of its weapon capabilities undermined demonstratively the security of the entire region. This couldn't last, but Krugman only sees one horse: his hobby horse ...

New comment by hnax in "What if Python was natively distributable?"

hnax — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:43:04 +0000

100%

New comment by hnax in "Sly Stone has died"

hnax — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 12:41:00 +0000

Midnight Express sounds like machine programmed.

The real thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pA2tXOjDto&list=PLxh03o1BpV...

New comment by hnax in "Sly Stone has died"

hnax — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:49:40 +0000

The best funk band: early Earth, Wind and Fire (before 1976 when they lost themselves into disco). Their funk was harmonically rich and rhythmically complex: A blend of jazz, soul, funk and R&B. Listen to their live double record Gratitude (1975).

New comment by hnax in "Address of Pope Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals"

hnax — Mon, 12 May 2025 10:15:17 +0000

"if you look back at Thomas Aquinas's writings on the soul with a modern bio understanding, [...] his conception of the "soul" is just his attempt at understanding metabolism without any solid physics or chemistry. [...] up until very recently the one last bastion of unexplained behavior where the religious could justify their belief in the soul was the intellect."

Not an expert on Aquinas but as a theologian he should have had to go no further than the opening book of the Bible, Genesis 1:26,27, where God says: "Let Us (plural) create Man in Our (plural) Image. [...] And in His Image He created Them, Male and Female." Indeed, that defines Man, Male and Female: Image bearers of God. How? Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit -- therefore, God is a Trinity, a Father, Son, Spirit perfectly loving relationship.

"AI is a direct assault on this final motto, as it is concrete evidence that many of the "intellectual" outputs of the soul could, at least in principle, have a naturalistic explanation. (There was plenty of evidence of the intellect being fully naturalistic prior to AI, but it wasn't the kind of irrefutable "here's a fully natural thing that does the thing you said natural things couldn't do" evidence)."

I can't see how "AI is a direct assault on this motto". Man's actions are most often far from rational, and unexplainable from an intellectual point of view. Rather, Man's intentions greatly exceed that of naturalist animals, both positive in doing good, and negative in doing evil. It all points to a fundamental difference between Man (who has a Soul) and Animal (who hasn't). The Soul is the seat of Man's passions, and it's a hard thing to control -- impossible even.

New comment by hnax in "Scallop – A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming"

hnax — Sat, 22 Mar 2025 14:52:40 +0000

How does Scallop compare to PyReason (https://neurosymbolic.asu.edu/pyreason/)? Are they by and large the same, or tailored towards different use cases?

New comment by hnax in "Why it's so hard to build a jet engine"

hnax — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 16:36:32 +0000

Me too!

New comment by hnax in "The Leaning Tower of New York"

hnax — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 15:50:21 +0000

FYI: The Old (or Skew) Jan Cathedral in Delft, Netherlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Kerk_(Delft)) is off by slightly less than 2 meters. As it was built adjacent to a canal, and pile-driving technology didn't exists in the 14th century, it was built on layers of wood and cow skins that started rotting already during its building phase, causing the tower to lean from the get go -- curiously, its four pinnacle towers are straight up. The church houses Holland's biggest bell (the Bourdon at 9 metric ton) which, to reduce vibration and further leaning, is only rung at special occasions re the royal Orange family (births and deaths). Holland's painter Johannes Vermeer also used to be buried there -- because of excessive bad small all graves were cleared late 19th century and dumped in a mass grave some place nobody knows. To the satisfying of many a tourist, an impressive grave-like commemoration stone for Vermeer was installed some years ago.

New comment by hnax in "Large Language Models for Mathematicians (2023)"

hnax — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 19:39:36 +0000

I'm afraid you're overlooking the fact that, since AI scales linearly with constraints and exponentially with compute, the importance of knowledge (i.e. constraints) dominates over data (i.e. compute) for AI to be useful.

New comment by hnax in "Buddhist Retreat: Why I gave up on finding my religion (2003)"

hnax — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 23:30:33 +0000

"... science tells us that we are incidental, accidental."

And nonetheless, every second, when not sleeping, the author is trying hard to make sense (... notice how close to "science") of his actual space and time. Throughout the ages, most prominent scientists have managed to do this, with great success, knowing that the universe, and themselves as a part of it, were the opposite of incidental or accidental: they believed their existence had a Reason.

New comment by hnax in "The Soul in the Stomach (2021)"

hnax — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:50:45 +0000

This may be helpful ("The 3 Parts of Man—Spirit, Soul, and Body") to unravel some of the soul's mystery: https://blog.biblesforeurope.org/the-three-parts-of-man-spir...

New comment by hnax in "On the Nature of Time"

hnax — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 02:47:14 +0000

Where it's nowadays standard practice in science to conceive of time as the dimension along which events are tagged, I would suggest the opposite: process, as a sequence of events, induces time. But also in the modern conception, time is derived from atomic events produced by a nuclear source. So, fundamentally the two conceptions are the same, but the process conception allows for greater freedom in what the underlying process may entail.

New comment by hnax in "Caroline Ellison sentenced to 2 years in prison"

hnax — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:55:34 +0000

Will they put her with Sam Bankman-Fried in the same prison cell?

New comment by hnax in "Breaking Bell's Inequality with Monte Carlo Simulations in Python"

hnax — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 13:10:29 +0000

This 'crackpot physicist' is still alive and kicking and, indeed, as per the (analytical) induction requirement to make the case, his work deserves a careful reading to assume the geometric algebraic understanding of QM (for the 'crackpot's latest, see: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joy-christian-oxford_comment-...)

New comment by hnax in "Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content"

hnax — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 16:56:55 +0000

Always, as a good hedger Zuck, anticipating regime change in the White House by November, is minimizing the potential fallout of his treacherous behavior. Hold him accountable.

New comment by hnax in "General Theory of Neural Networks"

hnax — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 04:21:10 +0000

I switched off at paragraph two:

"Prokaryotes emerged 3.5 billion years ago, their gene networks acting like rudimentary brains. These networks controlled chemical reactions and cellular processes, laying the foundation for complexity."

... for which there is no evidence at all. Psuedo-science, aka Fantasy.

New comment by hnax in "Lapis: A Web Framework for Lua"

hnax — Sat, 25 May 2024 15:16:17 +0000

lua-classy (https://github.com/siffiejoe/lua-classy) works like gem and is fast!

New comment by hnax in "Transformer as a general purpose computer"

hnax — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:36:24 +0000

Very good (and concise) explanation. Thanks!

New comment by hnax in "C++ Package Managers: The Ultimate Roundup"

hnax — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 16:55:07 +0000

Why is XMake not mentioned in the list of build systems whereas XRepo is mentioned in the list of package managers? (subjective: XMake is a great tool if you like Lua).