Hacker News: madhadron

New comment by madhadron in "Randomization in Controlled Experiments"

madhadron — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:36:56 +0000

The ACM should probably have run this by a statistician before publishing it. As another commenter pointed out it opens with bad experimental design, then goes on about random allocation in a way that makes it clear that the author doesn't understand the subject well.

You don't need sequences of independent samples for assignment. You need sequences that are independent of the sequence of subjects being assigned. If you have a very small number of possible sequences then you can't get independence by the pigeon hole principle, but both 2^(64*N) (from N random 64 bit numbers) or 2^64 - 1 (for N samples from a PRNG) are so large that it doesn't matter.

The argument about a sample of seeds not producing a flat histogram is also weird. Of course it doesn't. That's irrelevant to whether uniformly sampling a sequence of N 64 bit numbers from the space the PRNG provides produces independent sequences from the subjects.

New comment by madhadron in "Don't become an engineering manager"

madhadron — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 17:01:58 +0000

You're describing a very small number of companies that all copied each other's systems. The idea of a terminal role, for example, is pure Facebook. These do not apply in general across the industry except where managers from those small number of companies came in and shoved them in before they were fired.

New comment by madhadron in "A few random notes from Claude coding quite a bit last few weeks"

madhadron — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 06:25:31 +0000

> tens of thousands of lines of code

Perhaps this is part of it? Tens of thousands of lines of code seems like a very small repo to me.

New comment by madhadron in "Tao Te Ching – Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin"

madhadron — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:54:17 +0000

This seems overly pessimistic. We regularly engage with other cultures and their texts and understand them, and, yes, it takes time and knowledge of context to do so. Someone needs to explain quite a bit about Roman society under Augustus for you to understand what is going on in detail in Ovid's Amores, and the Epic of Gilgamesh is pretty bizarre unless you know quite a bit about ancient Mesopotamia. The Tao te Ching suffers from being written in a style that was very much for people in the know in a certain milieu, limited texts, and a huge amount of cultural baggage on top. The most interesting recent scholarly translation I know of is by Victor Mair, of a different, recently discovered text, and his contention is that the book is a 'mirror for princes' and not a mystical text at all.

> they are still fighting over what 'Hwaet' means

I don't think anyone is particularly fighting over what it means, just how to translate it when there isn't a parallel in modern English. My personal favorite is a translation that opens with 'Bro!'.

New comment by madhadron in "Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale"

madhadron — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 04:57:20 +0000

> Copy-paste his post into any LLM and ask it whether the post is contradictory or whether it's ambiguous whether this is production-grade software or not. No objective reader of this would come to the conclusion that it's ambiguous or misleading.

That's hilarious! You might want to add a bit more transition for the joke before the other points above, though.

New comment by madhadron in "Claude Cowork exfiltrates files"

madhadron — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:09:46 +0000

I'm puzzled by your statement. The activities you're describing have lots of exfiltration routes.

New comment by madhadron in "Games Workshop bans staff from using AI"

madhadron — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:06:30 +0000

Indemnification only means something if the indemnifying party exists and is solvent. If copyright claims on training data got traction, it would be neither, so it doesn't matter if they provide this or not. They probably won't exist as a solvent entity in a couple years anyway, so even the question of whether the indemnification means anything will go away.

New comment by madhadron in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

madhadron — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:39:02 +0000

I’m not sure what you mean by a change of basis making a nonlinear system linear. A linear system is one where solutions add as elements of a vector space. That’s true no matter what basis you express it in.

New comment by madhadron in "The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform"

madhadron — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:41:48 +0000

All these transforms are switching to an eigenbasis of some differential operator (that usually corresponds to a differential equation of interest). Spherical harmonics, Bessel and Henkel functions, which are the radial versions of sines/cosines and complex exponential, respectively, and on and on.

The next big jumps were to collections of functions not parameterized by subsets of R^n. Wavelets use a tree shapes parameter space.

There’s a whole, interesting area of overcomplete basis sets that I have been meaning to look into where you give up your basis functions being orthogonal and all those nice properties in exchange for having multiple options for adapting better to different signal characteristics.

I don’t think these transforms are going to be relevant to understanding neural nets, though. They are, by their nature, doing something with nonlinear structures in high dimensions which are not smoothly extended across their domain, which is the opposite problem all our current approaches to functional analysis deal with.

New comment by madhadron in "Ask HN: What did you read in 2025?"

madhadron — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 01:42:06 +0000

"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).

New comment by madhadron in "Distributed systems programming has stalled"

madhadron — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:53:32 +0000

Lamport's website has his collected works. The paper to start with is "Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system." Read it closely all the way to the end. Everyone seems to miss the last couple sections for some reason.

New comment by madhadron in "Wolves and America's urban-rural divide"

madhadron — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 18:06:44 +0000

Look up the admission of the Dakotas. There was a minimum number of people a state had to have to be admitted, but that was ignored in order to pack the Senate.

New comment by madhadron in "What's happening inside the NIH and NSF"

madhadron — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 18:06:06 +0000

I mean it is psychologically irrelevant to almost all scientists in the US and not something they consider in their career choices at all.

New comment by madhadron in "NIH slashes overhead payments for research"

madhadron — Sat, 08 Feb 2025 08:26:47 +0000

The actual constituted nations of Europe as they exist today? Aside from the UK, not long. Most of them are states that came into existence in the 20th century. Germany was the 1980's. The rest are generally 19th century.

New comment by madhadron in "What's the Deal with Magnetic Fields?"

madhadron — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:58:34 +0000

Because they're not negligible. It's worth calculating it out. Length contraction produces a very slight increase in charge density of the nuclei, but there are a lot of charges and electromagnetism is very strong.

New comment by madhadron in "What's happening inside the NIH and NSF"

madhadron — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 18:14:51 +0000

> USA is a place where you can go from $100k to $100m vesting if you are lucky.

And this is irrelevant to (very conservatively) 99% of scientists in the NSF and NIH.

New comment by madhadron in "Wolves and America's urban-rural divide"

madhadron — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 22:26:05 +0000

No, there's a senate to get the small states in the late 18th century to ratify the constitution. There's still a senate because various groups added states without enough population to pass the bar of statehood in order to get extra votes without having to actually have democratic support.

New comment by madhadron in "Phyllis Fong, who was investigating Neuralink, "forcefully removed ""

madhadron — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 21:37:13 +0000

Lawsuits take a very long time, but a court injunction can control which way that time is spent.

New comment by madhadron in "Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog"

madhadron — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:21:55 +0000

> (I should add, for context, that my friend and I are talking about writing beautiful essays here. If you want to write the most precise thing possible, you need to edit mercilessly and accept that the writing ends up flat and disjointed.)

There speaks someone who has never spent time writing poetry, and probably isn't very good at editing.

New comment by madhadron in "Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s"

madhadron — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 01:13:19 +0000

The BCG vaccine is not protective against tuberculosis in adults. It helps prevent miliary tuberculosis in children.

I did my graduate work on tuberculosis. Those of us who weren't vaccinated because of our country of origin refused to be because the vaccine wouldn't help us and it changes testing for TB from a quick skin test to a lung x-ray.

It's not barbaric or corrupt or anti-vaccine in this case. It's details of this particular vaccine.