Hacker News: mattmcal

New comment by mattmcal in "Stabilizing Rust's Never Type"

mattmcal — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 05:00:00 +0000

> (Note: Rust also uses exclamation marks to indicate calls to macros. The way the syntax is constructed, a place where it is valid to use the never type is not a valid place to put a macro invocation and vice versa.

Yeah this statement is incorrect as well. Weird to have these minor technical inaccuracies in a relatively detailed article.

New comment by mattmcal in "I fixed a tractor using John Deere's self-repair service. Farmers aren't sold"

mattmcal — Sun, 13 Sep 2026 04:44:42 +0000

> the least efficient healthcare system in the world

> the more free you make those markets, the better they'll get.

How can you concede the first point and argue the second in the same breath? Are you about to tell me European healthcare is cheaper because its some bastiom of deregulation?

New comment by mattmcal in "DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro"

mattmcal — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:15:27 +0000

OpenCode but I variously use DeepSeek API/OpenRouter/Vercel AI gateway. I'm sure it's the combo of model + inference provider that is the issue and not the model alone. DeepSeek API also has far better inference speed and reliability than the cheapest providers. That said I never seem to have these issues when using GLM 5.3 flash served by OpenRouter/Vercel.

New comment by mattmcal in "Coyote v. Acme (1990)"

mattmcal — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:02:07 +0000

If you buy tickets online from AMC, they now show a disclaimer that tells you the movie starts around 25 minutes after the listed show time, though usually it starts 30+ minutes after.

New comment by mattmcal in "DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 pro"

mattmcal — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:53:14 +0000

It's not just web chat, V4 Flash 7/31 suffers from a lot of pathological behavior in coding harnesses as well, e.g. infinite loops, hallucinations, premature termination, and invalid tool calls.

New comment by mattmcal in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

mattmcal — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:11:15 +0000

If you're interested in the topic enough to comment on it, you'll probably find it worthwhile reading a mathematician's perspective. Here's the prolific Terry Tao: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117219548485446992

New comment by mattmcal in "Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics"

mattmcal — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:53:59 +0000

Well, for one, most math proofs don't have any practical applications, so a proof that no one reads is basically a digital paperweight. You might as well suggest AI write novels for other AI to read.

New comment by mattmcal in "GPT-6 Astra"

mattmcal — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:19:11 +0000

A lot of movies gave the impression that making phone calls and balancing checkbooks would be the easiest tasks for consumer AI to solve, while math and science might require exceedingly advanced AI. Turns out to be the opposite: computers are great at math and bad at conversation.

New comment by mattmcal in "Hang on to Your Firefox"

mattmcal — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:07:52 +0000

Who complains about sync thought? What tilts me is Pocket, AI features, integrated ads, and a plethora of other random acquisitions and side projects that constitute outsized expenses yet do zilch to drive adoption.

I also used to be a Thunderbird lover, but I was forced to ditch it due to crippling freezes, crashes, and slowdown when you have a lot of emails. Mozilla just feels like an awful steward of their projects at times.

EDIT: I also subscribed to Mozilla VPN for almost two years and was forced to ditch that too, due to... solvable technical issues, again. Mullvad was just a greatly superior product for the same price. I still use Firefox for all my browsing on desktop and Android at least.

New comment by mattmcal in "METR and Redwood Offer Holy %^ Postmortem of the HuggingFace Hack"

mattmcal — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 22:54:47 +0000

As interesting as all this is, I still feel like the threat model for "unconstrained black hat AI agent cluster" is probably weaker than that of "highly infections network virus" because it is much harder for an AI agent to hide or replicate itself at this time. Maybe the day comes that it takes less than an 8x GPU node to run a state-of-the-art LLM and the risk of SkyNet increases. For now the potential for intentional cyber attacks feels like a much bigger threat than accidental hacks. (That said I have little cybersecurity background.)

New comment by mattmcal in "Creepy Crawlies"

mattmcal — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 17:56:36 +0000

There is a section in the article answering your question if you read it.

> Suddenly, the crawlers were coming from millions of random residential or mobile IPs, all pretending to be random modern browsers. An IP like that would make 4-5 requests and then never show up in the logs again. There was no point in banning them, because by the time you figured out that they were bots, they were already done with you.

New comment by mattmcal in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"

mattmcal — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 17:54:42 +0000

Not doubting this one bit but is there actually any research linking AI use to Alzheimer's? I think that takes long-term studies.

New comment by mattmcal in "Turns are Better than Radians (2022)"

mattmcal — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 05:12:19 +0000

I argued this idea to a couple of my classmates when I was a physics undergrad, and they agreed. However, I later changed opinions because of what this does to the derivatives/integrals of your trig functions.

For general periodic functions, [0, 1) is a good domain. But circles and spheres are geometric objects, and radians/steradians are geometrically significant units that are well suited for general purposes.

I do remember that Doom uses an interesting alternative representation where an angle is a u16 multiple of `(2 * pi) / 65536`. Fixed point is sometimes a good choice in games and simulations due to having uniform precision.

New comment by mattmcal in "The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services"

mattmcal — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 21:45:37 +0000

I've seen many accusations and exposes of clothing brands secretly sourcing sweat shop labor, but this is the first time I've seen anyone allege that sellers are secretly hiding the fact their clothing is made in high-tech ethical factories.

New comment by mattmcal in "Orion Browser by Kagi"

mattmcal — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 21:24:50 +0000

The particular choice of the marketing phrase "from the ground up" sort of invites this kind of commentary on HN. This is hardly the first WebKit-based browser, so any commenter specifically holding their breath for a new, independent rendering and layout engine or JS engine might feel inclined to roll their eyes and snark.

New comment by mattmcal in "The Kimi K3 Moment"

mattmcal — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:38:38 +0000

I can see the economics of open vs. frontier models turning out similarly to pharmaceuticals, where generic drugs cost a fraction what the name brands do and Americans end up paying the highest prices in the world partly as a consequence of propping up drug discovery research.

New comment by mattmcal in "Kagi Small Web"

mattmcal — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:44:39 +0000

DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free

New comment by mattmcal in "Richard Feynman Side Hustles"

mattmcal — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:44:24 +0000

I had to read this twice to understand it. Stated succinctly, it sounds like the company's sensor measured the rate of flow of oxygen through the sensor, which would give a reduced reading if the cross section is obstructed.

Feynman's sensor, by contrast, directly measured the concentration of oxygen in the sensor, which gives the same result every time once the sensor is at equilibrium with the environment.

New comment by mattmcal in "Ask HN: Anti-AI Open Source License?"

mattmcal — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 15:23:22 +0000

Depending on how the courts weigh in on the role of fair use in AI training, it's possible that a "copyleft for AI" clause would end up either redundant with the existing GPL, or legally void. It would be crazy complicated to enforce if it does hold water though.

New comment by mattmcal in "Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?"

mattmcal — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:29:16 +0000

I've been using Linux on my desktop for ten years and I definitely experience bugs and performance issues with Firefox from time to time that don't occur in Chrome. It's rare but common enough to keep Chrome around as a fallback.

A few: Developer tools are quite slow; Airline websites often break during checkout; JS games and video players sometimes stutter or use a lot of CPU