Hacker News: ironSkillet

New comment by ironSkillet in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

ironSkillet — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 02:31:57 +0000

I interviewed someone recently who worked at Meta a couple years ago. He was a software engineer, was paid a bunch of money to mostly up dashboards all day, and eventually quit because it was neither interesting nor challenging.

New comment by ironSkillet in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"

ironSkillet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:19:41 +0000

No that's not true either. A quick Google will reveal many examples, in particular the "Cantor set".

New comment by ironSkillet in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"

ironSkillet — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:16:47 +0000

It is not determined by the derivative, it's the antiderivative, as someone else mentioned. The derivative is the rate of change of a function. The "area under a curve" of the graph of a function measures how much the function is "accumulating", which is intuitively a sum of rates of change (taken to an infinitesimal limit).

New comment by ironSkillet in "There is No Quintic Formula [video]"

ironSkillet — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 23:33:36 +0000

This is some high quality content. Love the visual animations to go along with the mathematical ideas. Did a great job helping to tie the algebra to geometric intuition, but I think the importance of commutators could have gotten a little bit more exposition.

New comment by ironSkillet in "A triangle whose interior angles sum to zero"

ironSkillet — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:55:32 +0000

The disk model of hyberolic geometry is made to map hyperbolic 2 space (which is infinite in area) into the finite interior of the disk. In order to capture this, the normal euclidean notion of distance is distorted by a function which allows "distances" to go to infinity as a curve approaches the boundary of the disk.

New comment by ironSkillet in "I mathematically proved the best "Guess Who?" strategy [video]"

ironSkillet — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:48:10 +0000

Binary search minimizes the number of expected moves until you find the target. If you are already ahead, this is a natural thing to want to do. The reason why this doesn't work when you're behind is that your opponent can also do that and probabilistically maintain their lead.

New comment by ironSkillet in "NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"

ironSkillet — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:14:44 +0000

I think the user means that bullies in school face little consequences, but a bully at work may get called by HR and potentially disciplined.

New comment by ironSkillet in "AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better"

ironSkillet — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 10:44:36 +0000

In my mind that is a problem with your lazy developer colleague, not AI as a whole. You can't expect it to be right on the first try (just like human code), you have to iterate with it and have the experience to know when it's off track and you have to take over.

New comment by ironSkillet in "AI gets more 'meh' as you get to know it better"

ironSkillet — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 23:36:57 +0000

I don't know about other use cases, but AI is definitively a game changer for software development. You still need to know what you're doing and test/think critically about what it's giving you, but the body of software problems that you can conceptually treat as "boilerplate" becomes massively larger with the help of a good AI coding tool.

New comment by ironSkillet in "Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks"

ironSkillet — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 02:22:06 +0000

It seems like there is a universal sense in which statements like 1+1=2" or "7 is a prime number" are true, no?

New comment by ironSkillet in "Putin's nuclear files"

ironSkillet — Wed, 28 May 2025 21:40:03 +0000

Almost certainly a Western intelligence operation to send a message to Putin.

New comment by ironSkillet in "The Web Is Broken – Botnet Part 2"

ironSkillet — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:59:04 +0000

I have found that the dependency injection pattern makes it far easier to write clean tests for my code.

New comment by ironSkillet in "AI models miss disease in Black and female patients"

ironSkillet — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:24:57 +0000

You and the article are both correct. The disease does present itself differently as a function of these other characteristics, so since the training dataset doesn't contain enough samples of these different presentations, it is unable to effectively diagnose.

New comment by ironSkillet in "'Next-Level' Chaos Traces the True Limit of Predictability"

ironSkillet — Sat, 08 Mar 2025 00:34:20 +0000

This is a popular science article, not a scientific paper.

New comment by ironSkillet in "The CAP theorem of Clustering: Why Every Algorithm Must Sacrifice Something"

ironSkillet — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 01:10:34 +0000

The "richness" definition also seemed hand wavey to me so I looked at the referenced paper. The actual definition of "richness" of an algorithm is that for any arbitrary partition P of your original data (singletons, one cluster, etc), there is a distance function on the data, which when used in the clustering algorithm, produces P.

New comment by ironSkillet in "The distribution of eigenvalues of GUE and its minors at fixed index"

ironSkillet — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 12:33:11 +0000

I am a mathematician by education but programmer by profession for many years now, so the significance of this result is over my head. Could someone elaborate on what makes this is an interesting problem?

New comment by ironSkillet in "James Webb Telescope discovers some quasars that seem to exist in isolation"

ironSkillet — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 12:04:39 +0000

Rather than just making a conspiratorial post, could you explain these alternative theories and why you see this article as strong evidence against existing mainstream theories?

New comment by ironSkillet in "Adventures in algorithmic trading on the Runescape Grand Exchange"

ironSkillet — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 18:14:33 +0000

You can have unrealized losses since it's possible that the value of your items is less than the value of the goods you paid to receive them. To repeat this strategy the next day, you need to convert your items back into gold and realize the loss (or just introduce more gold via other means).

New comment by ironSkillet in "Programming Zero Knowledge Proofs: From Zero to Hero"

ironSkillet — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 01:59:06 +0000

Do you have any recommended references on this subject? Seems like this sort of system would be able to obfuscate a lot of metadata that can be used to deanonymize activity. Very interesting.

New comment by ironSkillet in "Ask HN: Why not replace technical job interviews with yearly standardized exams?"

ironSkillet — Sun, 25 Aug 2024 23:19:02 +0000

You'd be surprised at how many people I've interviewed over the years have been unable to hide the fact that they would be terrible to work with. In programming circles at least, I think the ability to socially manipulate and mask true character in an interview setting is way less common than the ability to practice questions and memorize answers.