Hacker News: mebassett

New comment by mebassett in "Mathematicians disagree on the essential structure of the complex numbers (2024)"

mebassett — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:22:14 +0000

the title is a bit clickbait - mathematicians don't disagree, all the "conceptions" the article proposes agree with each other. It also seems to conflate the algebraic closure of Q (which would contain the sqrt of -1) and all of the complex numbers by insisting that the former has "size continuum". Once you have "size continuum" then you need some completion to the reals.

anyhow. I'm a bit of an odd one in that I have no problems with imaginary numbers but the reals always seemed a bit unreal to me. that's the real controversy, actually. you can start looking up definable numbers and constructivist mathematics, but that gets to be more philosophy than maths imho.

New comment by mebassett in "The RAM shortage comes for us all"

mebassett — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 20:42:52 +0000

large language models are large and must be loaded into memory to train or to use for inference if we want to keep them fast. older models like gpt3 have around 175 billion parameters. at float32s that comes out to something like 700GB of memory. newer models are even larger. and openai wants to run them as consumer web services.

Show HN: I wrote a (slightly less slow, but still bad) autodiff from scratch

mebassett — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 23:58:24 +0000

Almost a year ago I shared an autodiff I wrote from scratch and an implementation of LeNet in it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41875358). Another HNer, tightbookkeeper, offered some helpful suggestions.

The actual code is here: https://github.com/mebassett/quixotic-autodiff/blob/master/d...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45553856

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by mebassett in "Git Diagramming "The Weave""

mebassett — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 11:47:43 +0000

"As with many books, this one is best read piecewise backwards. In describing the contents, I accordingly begin with Part III."

Intro to one of the maths books I had to reference to do my masters thesis. :)

New comment by mebassett in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2025)"

mebassett — Fri, 02 May 2025 14:41:09 +0000

Would you like to help tackle one of the most important sectors for the global economy - maritime shipping? We're hiring for multiple roles: software engineers, data analysts, UI/UX designers, implementation managers.

Nearly every person is affected by stuff shipping on the seas - whether its energy, ore, or wind turbines, but the industry itself is antiquated and archaic, and hampered by paperwork and bureaucracy. Our customers are crying out for better solutions. We're looking for people to help us build those solutions.

If you're the sort of person who is: - intellectually curious about new industries - wanting talking to and getting close to end users - keen to use LLMs and other AI tools

Then please get in touch.

For our SWE roles we have budgeted ~ 90k USD.

Our tech stack for new projects is largely typescript/vue/mysql (we have several fans of fp-ts and EffectT with us and are investing in using more functional programming). But like the industry at large we also have significant legacy code in javascript. If you're the sort of person who likes refactoring complex projects to make them more workable, then we also want to hear from you.

For our Data Analyst or Implementation Manager roles:

You'll be helping our customers in maritime shipping get the most from our software. Initially, a lot of that work will be in helping our customers get their data in and out of it. Lot's of MySQL, Metabase, AWS Glue, DBT, or other ETL pipelines.

For our UI/UX designer roles we have budgeted ~ 40k USD.

You'll be helping us on three different axes: (1) designing the user interface for new features, (2) fleshing out the user journeys and mockups for our roadmap, and (3) helping us craft a consistent and learnable user experience across all our software.

We hire remotely and globally with offices in Houston, London, Singapore, and Joinville (Brasil). You should be fluent in English. The current team is >20 people. You should be in a timezone within 3 hours of one of those offices.

Interested? You can contact me directly from my profile. I'm the CTO.

Please, no recruiters or agencies.

New comment by mebassett in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2025)"

mebassett — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:53:56 +0000

Maritime shipping software | Multiple roles | Global REMOTE | UCT-8 to UCT+4

If you're the sort of person who is: - intellectually curious about new industries - wanting talking to and getting close to end users - keen to use LLMs and other AI tools

Then please get in touch.

For our SWE roles we have budgeted ~ 90k USD.

Our tech stack for new projects is largely typescript/vue/mysql (we have several fans of fp-ts and EffectT with us and would like some more). But like the industry at large we also have significant legacy code in javascript. If you're the sort of person who likes refactoring complex projects to make them more workable, then we also want to hear from you.

For our Data Analyst or Implementation Manager roles... You'll be helping our customers in maritime shipping get the most from our software. Initially, a lot of that work will be in helping our customers get their data in and out of it. Lot's of MySQL, Metabase, AWS Glue, DBT, or other ETL pipelines.

For our UI/UX designer roles... You'll be helping us on three different axes: (1) designing the user interface for new features, (2) fleshing out the user journeys and mockups for our roadmap, and (3) helping us craft a consistent and learnable user experience across all our software.

Interested? You can contact me directly from my profile. I'm the CTO.

Please, no recruiters or agencies.

The Local-Global Principle of Lovingkindness

mebassett — Sat, 01 Feb 2025 02:05:03 +0000

Article URL: https://mebassett.info/local-global-lovingkindness

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42894936

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Late Stage Social Capitalism

mebassett — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 01:15:13 +0000

Article URL: https://mebassett.info/social-capitalism

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42860265

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by mebassett in "Getting Started with Category Theory"

mebassett — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 11:55:57 +0000

I would treat them as totally different things. There is a Category of Sets, but a Set of Categories would be a bit harder to define. So axomatic set theory could be a specific case of category theory, I suppose. But you can probably do a Class of all categories. (A Class is sort of a set-theoretic way to get around Russel's paradox, incidentally, you usually use a Class to define categories, so...) Though that's actually quite an irrelevant point. It's a completely different language for describing mathematics. I think describing category theory as an alternative foundation for mathematics (you really mean topos theory here) is a bit of an exaggeration. it's technically true, but most mathematicians I know are using it as a powerful device to prove things in algebraic topology or geometry, etc.

New comment by mebassett in "Apple Smells Blood in the Water"

mebassett — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 18:06:37 +0000

> In the case of GIMP, the very name itself means it cannot be used in commercial enterprises.

I have no idea where you got this info from but it is 100% wrong. Of course GIMP can be used for commercial purposes. Or any purposes you want, really. The GNU GPL does not prevent commercial use.

New comment by mebassett in "Show HN: I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it"

mebassett — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:15:44 +0000

I think the main point here is that while this style might make sense for a GUI framework it's not so great for a numerical library like this.

For example: my library is really slow.

New comment by mebassett in "Show HN: I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it"

mebassett — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 10:24:16 +0000

> - can you allocate memory for the whole system? - can you make types homogenous so they can fit in tight arrays (unions are common for nodes) - can you batch similar types - specially for auto diff/math can you represent operations as a stack instead of a tree?

these are good questions, thank you! I'm "learning" c++ in a completely different way - looking at books rather than looking at existing code. Appreciate this comment!

Some of these questions I had thought about, but was learning more towards "describe the function in some higher level representation and then 'compile' it down to something computable and autodiff-able". This is exactly where my mind goes when I think about allocating memory for the whole system. that felt more like a racket/lisp way of looking at the problem.

Show HN: I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it

mebassett — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 00:52:04 +0000

Article URL: https://gitlab.com/mebassett/quixotic-learning/-/tree/master

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41875358

Points: 36

# Comments: 9

New comment by mebassett in "Why Haskell?"

mebassett — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 16:56:40 +0000

Lean definitely intends to be usable as a general purpose language someday. but I think the bulk of the people involved are more focused on automated theorem proving. The Lean FRO [0] has funds to guide development of the language and they are planning to carve out a niche for stuff that requires formal verification. I'd say in terms of general purpose programming it fits into the category of being "relatively far from haskell in terms of maturity".

[0] https://lean-fro.org/about/roadmap-y2/

New comment by mebassett in "Common side effects of not drinking"

mebassett — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 10:59:02 +0000

much of your experience with this depends on who you are and how society perceives you. I do not drink alcohol, but I am also a 6ft tall competitive weightlifter. People usually don't question my "no, thank you". And while I have had the annoying person persist and try to get me to drink, they're usually gone after I've reached my 2nd stage of "did you not hear me say no?". I suspect the experience of a less tall and muscular woman might be quite different when it comes to people trying to undermine her choices.

society has a lot of "defaults" that we're suppose to accept. drinking is one. cars is another. eating meat is often one. Some people see it as an attack on their identity when you reject choices made by their society.

New comment by mebassett in "Frame.work laptop now available in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden"

mebassett — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 10:43:36 +0000

I bought a framework laptop (13in, intel, 13th gen) at the end of 2023 and have had nothing but problems with it. Mostly stability issues. It freezes entirely without warning after about 3-5min of use, regardless of whether I'm booting into a linux kernel or windows machine, from the ssd or the usb. very unhappy that I spent money on it. support has been unhelpful.

the idea of a DIY laptop that I could upgrade, et cetera, was something I could really get behind. but in practice it just feels like a waste of time and money. The machine does have to actually work.

New comment by mebassett in "Mass timber is great, but it will not solve the housing shortage"

mebassett — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 17:51:24 +0000

I usually use "democracy" to describe a situation where there are regular transfers of power through reason, persuasion, and cooperation and not through violence or the threat of violence. I'm not sure that it applies to this case about your neighbor, unless you are stopping them through a threat of violence, in which case it is certainly undemocratic.

Generative AI Turns Ordinary Computers into Weapons of Mass Copyright Violation

mebassett — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 00:46:22 +0000

Article URL: https://mebassett.info/ai-copyright

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39364917

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by mebassett in "Finance worker pays out $25M after video call call with deepfake CFO"

mebassett — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 15:20:25 +0000

I have known two publicly traded companies that fell victim to similar sorts of scams (someone impersonating the cfo or ceo over the phone). One was defrauded out of a seven figure sum, the other got lucky and a bank involved stopped the transaction to verify again. I don't know how the first was able to keep it quiet, I only knew because I chatted with the people in question. I suspect that the deepfake angle makes it easier to admit that they were defrauded in this way.

Talking about how something like this can happen in a big company is fun and all, but the scary thing is is that it is _so much easier_ to do these sorts of scams with deepfakes. Which means they will be deployed against "softer" targets, like you and me, and your parents and grandparents.

New comment by mebassett in "Relearning math as an adult"

mebassett — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:20:15 +0000

yes. learning to doing maths is a bit like learning to play an instrument in that you have to spend lots of times practicing scales or other simple stuff (doing the exercises) before you can really be creative on it.

or like learning to write - you got to spend lots of time practicing and memorizing your letters before you can start getting to words and sentences and novels.