Hacker News: mark_something

New comment by mark_something in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

mark_something — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:26:21 +0000

If someone wants to throw enough money at doing that. Solving the Navier-Stokes problem cost a few million dollars. I don't know how much the other problems cost but I suspect they're all above $100.000.

New comment by mark_something in "Color Names"

mark_something — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:26:07 +0000

Reminds me of https://www.thedoghousediaries.com/1406

New comment by mark_something in "A lost Schrödinger manuscript reveals a twist in quantum physics"

mark_something — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 13:20:37 +0000

If indeterminism gives us free will, it's like making a decision by rolling dice. I wouldn't call that free will.

One explanation that I heard of free will is that it depends on the complexity of a system. A simpler being might think it had free will while it is predictable to us because we see how it works. A much more complex being might be able to predict what we will do.

New comment by mark_something in "What Is Gridifcation"

mark_something — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:29:33 +0000

I didn't read David Byrne's book but I heard about it on the radio. Doesn't it also mention that drummers started playing with less tempo variation since drum computers are used?

New comment by mark_something in "What Is Gridifcation"

mark_something — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:16:21 +0000

I agree, but I prefer old jazz from before I was born. Modern jazz doesn't appeal to me, it sounds too clean and unoriginal to me (maybe gridification, I don't know, I'm not a musician), with some exceptions. But maybe I didn't find the good modern jazz.

New comment by mark_something in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

mark_something — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:19:15 +0000

I only see the graph in the paragraph titled "Where an Amazon sale goes", which tells what the fees are now, not which fees have increased since 2014.

New comment by mark_something in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

mark_something — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:14:35 +0000

I prefer online retailers because there is a lot more choice there. I can't find an inflatable knee pillow in local stores. The supermarket close to me even stopped selling batteries.

New comment by mark_something in "Amazon pushes up prices across the Internet"

mark_something — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:58:52 +0000

Interesting article. But I wish it explained which fees made the share that Amazon takes go from 19% to 46%. The fulfilment fee is evidently necessary, it takes people to do that, and doing it yourself may cost more. The advertisement is also evidently necessary, but could have risen. The referral fee alone can't explain the increase.

And the fulfilment fee is not a fixed percentage of the price, it depends on the size, weight and price tier of the item.

New comment by mark_something in "The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)"

mark_something — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 12:19:13 +0000

I suspect the first ANN researchers called them neurons to get more funding.

In essence an ANN is just a complicated mathematical function that you can tweak to fit the training set. Originally the activation function of a neuron in an ANN resembled real neurons, but later it was found that other, very different, functions are much better, like RLE.

New comment by mark_something in "Calculus with Julia"

mark_something — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:40:24 +0000

I used it for a few hobby projects in VSCode. It's not 100% smooth, e.g. I couldn't compile and run my code with a single shortcut. It's supposed to be possible to show graphs in VSCode but I couldn't make that work.

Debugging worked quite good. I didn't look for static analysis.

But I find programming in any language in VSCode less polished, compared to e.g. programming C++ with Visual Studio, which works out of the box.

New comment by mark_something in "My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps"

mark_something — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:19:20 +0000

Strange, I walked in different regions of Tokyo, and I found it to be very clean. This is in part because in Japan it is not done to eat while walking in the street.

I remember that in Osaka on Saturday night there were young people kicking trash around, that was the only time I found Japan dirty.

New comment by mark_something in "Neijuan"

mark_something — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 10:29:50 +0000

IME, when words like this become common, it allows people to identify them more easily, so it's a good thing to introduce such words.

New comment by mark_something in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

mark_something — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:26:25 +0000

If you're allowed to change the speed of light, you can also change the gravitational constant G to compensate since the Schwarzschild radius is r = 2GM/c^2, where M is the mass of the object.

New comment by mark_something in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

mark_something — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:20:16 +0000

I think that light coming from different parts of the lamp arrives at different times. So if the lamp turns off, you see the part closest to you go black first.

New comment by mark_something in "We have a year to fix security everywhere"

mark_something — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:14:56 +0000

I think you're confusing DNA sequencing with DNA synthesis. DNA synthesis is much more expensive, around $0.07 per base pair [1], and bacteria have more than a million, so it's over $70.000. Then you just have the DNA, turning that into the bacteria is very complex, I'm not even sure whether it can be done.

Using CRISPR to modify existing bacteria is probably cheaper, but still complex.

[1] https://briefglance.com/articles/elegen-slashes-dna-synthesi...

New comment by mark_something in "We have a year to fix security everywhere"

mark_something — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:57:50 +0000

Good point about the AI that might find ways that humans didn't think of. But that would mean that Moore's law of Mad Science only now becomes true, and the drop would be steeper.

Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).

New comment by mark_something in "We have a year to fix security everywhere"

mark_something — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:21:32 +0000

I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or adding stuff to that same vector in that loop. But my rough estimate is that such errors are at least ten times less likely in C++.

I develop in C++ for a job, and when I need to use a library written in C I always have a bad feeling about it.

New comment by mark_something in "We have a year to fix security everywhere"

mark_something — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 07:52:47 +0000

That law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".

New comment by mark_something in "216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]"

mark_something — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 15:45:56 +0000

Another proof of how much our data is worth. But I think they make a loss on me, I can remember only a handful occasions that I bought something based on an ad I saw, which were more informative than seductive, like a monthly bike rental service.

But I guess they still sell my data. I wish they would flag the data of rational people like me as "worthless", and not sell my data.

New comment by mark_something in "Bhartrhari's Paradox"

mark_something — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:28:53 +0000

The reals can be ordered, just use x < y. I think you mean that if ZFC is true, we could enumerate unnameable reals (choose one with the axiom of choice, remove it, choose another one, etc.), but you could not enumerate them all. But it is true that you could get a "first" unnameable real.