Hacker News: kd0amg

New comment by kd0amg in "Do we need billionaires?"

kd0amg — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:44:18 +0000

> SpaceX is what it is because the vision is much less tyranny of the masses, and much more damn the torpedoes no one can stop me.

Apple did not need to be controlled by a majority shareholder in order to follow an ambitious, cohesive vision.

New comment by kd0amg in "What I've learned about the trombone"

kd0amg — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 21:05:51 +0000

> I've been trying to square the physics and my experience.

> Pedal B flat is the fundamental, low B flat is the 2x, F 3x, mid B flat the 4x, D the 5X, high F is 6X, G half sharp is 7X and high B flat is 8X.

I've always been amused at how many sources state the "tube with one end open" model, derive the "odd harmonics only" behavior from the model, and then never engage with the observable behavior of the instrument or reconcile it with the model.

I did find this when trying to understand that disparity, but I don't know enough to confirm/refute/amend the explanation:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/a/292724

New comment by kd0amg in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2026)"

kd0amg — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:32:05 +0000

> We also have a Research Engineering role for which we're actively interviewing: https://careers.ibm.com/en_US/careers/JobDetail?jobId=113488...

This page says the job is closed.

Also, not sure if my email response to your last post made it through or not.

New comment by kd0amg in "Live: Artemis II Launch Day Updates"

kd0amg — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:51:22 +0000

Think of it more as "speed is the indefinite integral of acceleration" with the extra constant denoting a choice of inertial reference frame.

New comment by kd0amg in "Grace Hopper's Revenge"

kd0amg — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:41:43 +0000

I took that to mean ≈ "Amount of training data isn't the big factor dwarfing all else." Depends who "we" refers to, I guess. Back when LLM-generated code was new, I definitely saw predictions that LLMs would struggle with niche or rarely used languages. These days, consensus among colleagues within earshot is that LLMs handle Rust much better than Python or C++ (corpus size and AutoCodeBench scores notwithstanding).

New comment by kd0amg in "How to Give a Good Talk"

kd0amg — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:34:41 +0000

And yet a lot of speakers still seem to need that self-evidently true statement pointed out to them. Tautological advice isn't necessarily bad or useless, especially for beginners.

New comment by kd0amg in "Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control"

kd0amg — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 00:23:46 +0000

What percent of own-content submissions are good original content though?

New comment by kd0amg in "Why Craigslist still looks the same after 25 years"

kd0amg — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 05:32:57 +0000

Does that button... do anything?

New comment by kd0amg in "Why Won’t Anyone Teach Her Math?"

kd0amg — Mon, 14 Feb 2022 15:20:45 +0000

> Ever try or even see a "Leet-Code" style question that stated the problem without providing example results?

This style of question asks the examinee to devise a procedure for producing those results, not to come up with the individual results themselves. If a student is given a bunch of systems of linear equations to solve, an answer key isn't especially useful since checking a candidate solution is pretty straightforward.

New comment by kd0amg in "Anyone else feel the constant urge to leave the field and become a plumber?"

kd0amg — Sun, 13 Feb 2022 19:06:44 +0000

Teaching isn't likely to get you away from unreasonable people with unreasonable expectations.

New comment by kd0amg in "Nerdle = Like Wordle but with Equations"

kd0amg — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 01:50:10 +0000

We could be extremely, reductively classical about it and say that all of Nerdle's answers point to the same place (⊤, since any answer equivalent to ⊥ is disallowed by the rules), but the real answer is that Nerdle—like Wordle—is simply about finding the right piece of syntax, not finding the right semantics.

New comment by kd0amg in "On being a PhD student of Robert Harper"

kd0amg — Fri, 28 Jan 2022 03:12:30 +0000

> Python's OOP is awkward with object.f() meaning something different from f(object), when really they ought to mean the same thing.

Why should they? Coming from other OO languages, I would expect `object.f()` to involve a vtable lookup, or something similar that effectively has `object` carrying around its own particular implementation of `f` (which might have been closed over some hidden internal state as well), and I'd expect `f(object)` to not do anything of the sort.

> In Pandas, you sometimes have a function with the same name as a method, which behave subtly different from each other.

This sounds more like a poorly designed library than any language-level awkwardness.

New comment by kd0amg in "They Still Haven't Told You"

kd0amg — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 22:07:30 +0000

> Figure 2 shows plots of overnight and intraday returns for twenty-one major stock market indices around the world. Turn the page and compare Figure 1 with Figure 2. See if you can tell a difference.

These images... do not render well on my machine, to put it lightly. So they look remarkably similar to me. Perhaps the author could spell out what this difference is? There is eventually mention of "striking similarity in the overnight and in- traday return patterns in the indices around the globe," but I don't think I'm ready to conclude that strong correlation of phenomena across markets in a global economy must be caused by a collection of manipulators acting on all of those markets.

I'm curious to see what others have to say, since I lack the hardware and background to properly read this document.

New comment by kd0amg in "Explaining Huffman’s Impossible Pyramid"

kd0amg — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 15:51:12 +0000

The issue is about which edges are in the same plane as which other edges. If this is a polyhedron, AD and BE must be coplanar, and BE and CF must be coplanar. Extending the edges into lines, they don't form a 3-way intersection. G gets projected to the same screen point as some point on line AD, but the only way G can be on line AD is if AD and FC are coplanar. If all three of AD, BE, and FC are coplanar, the entire figure is a flat pentagon (and DE, BE, and FE are not edges).

If G isn't on line AD, then BE and CF can't be a side of the same truncated pyramid.

New comment by kd0amg in "Interview with Charlie Munger on Controversial UCSB Dorm"

kd0amg — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 16:52:29 +0000

The language of someone who's rational would respond to the issues raised by the interlocutor instead of just insulting him.

New comment by kd0amg in "Why do dogs tilt their heads? New study offers clues"

kd0amg — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 14:42:46 +0000

> A quick internet search turned up plenty of speculative results positing that dogs tilt their heads to hear better, to listen for specific words or tones, or to see past their snouts. Sommese found one poster hypothesizing that shelter dogs do it more often because they know on some level that humans find it irresistible.

Amusing to see this play out again in the comments here

New comment by kd0amg in "Algebraic data types: things I wish someone had explained about FP (2019)"

kd0amg — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 13:49:42 +0000

Recursive sum-of-products types also let you do things that sums and products alone cannot.

New comment by kd0amg in "Algebraic data types: things I wish someone had explained about FP (2019)"

kd0amg — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 13:40:36 +0000

OR alone is insufficient because you still need NOT (or AND and ⊥). You can also encode sum-like behavior using negation and products (a continuation consuming a pair of continuations).

New comment by kd0amg in "Things Go needs more than generics"

kd0amg — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 15:33:59 +0000

> Option types require generics

Why would a built-in option type require more genericity than the built-in array and map types?

New comment by kd0amg in "Workers are 'rage quitting' their jobs as a tightening labor market"

kd0amg — Tue, 07 Sep 2021 16:21:51 +0000

> Interesting that this is pointed out, since I noticed they linked to this article, describing these sorts of jobs being a "teenage rite of passage" to be a myth.

The hyperlink's text claims it is a myth, but the linked article does not refute the idea that working this kind of job is considered by our culture to be a significant growth step for teenagers.