Hacker News: metanonsense

New comment by metanonsense in "The recently proposed o(n log n) integer multiplication algorithm [pdf]"

metanonsense — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 06:02:00 +0000

Even pre-AI, there have been proofs that took years to be verified, understood and some were disputed forever and still are (like the Mochizuki / IUT drama). So, even without AI, maths has reached a point of specialization, where only a few people in the world know the areas used in a proof well enough to check it. When „new math“ is invented for a proof, people may even be more disincentivied to put in the effort. So, I‘d argue, AI makes understanding new proofs easier, not more difficult.

New comment by metanonsense in "Ten lines of code that changed my world"

metanonsense — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:22:57 +0000

Always ran this to impress my friends

    10 for i = 0 to 359
    20 plot 100+100*cos(i), 100+100*sin(i)
    30 next i

New comment by metanonsense in "Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design"

metanonsense — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:36:34 +0000

Yeah.. that's something that I thought about for a few years now. I think making sense of code bases and software design will soon be a completely new industry. I had expected that companies like Jetbrains would be in a prime position to offer solutions for that, but it takes longer than I expected.

New comment by metanonsense in "LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'"

metanonsense — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 21:34:07 +0000

We're listening. We hear you. We're hear for you.

New comment by metanonsense in "OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof"

metanonsense — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:13:34 +0000

Maybe the boundaries of the memory subsystem are a bit fuzzy.

New comment by metanonsense in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

metanonsense — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 22:40:51 +0000

I think this is only "statistically" true in the sense that training is based on facts and not non-facts (except maybe with the ingestion of flat-earthers literature ;-). The existence of hallucinations in a bare transformer shows that the convex hull is not about information but about text, so the limit may more be "possible linear combinations of text", which allows for much extrapolation and counterfactuals. True creativity may be one reinforcement learning mid-training goal away that rewards novelty over correctness.

New comment by metanonsense in "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident"

metanonsense — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:44:46 +0000

This visualization really makes not much sense. Very modest signal-to-noise ratio.

New comment by metanonsense in "Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Timeline of the July 2026 Incident"

metanonsense — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:39:30 +0000

I think with agents all around, honeypots will get more important than ever.

New comment by metanonsense in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

metanonsense — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:11:06 +0000

Yeah. I also only use pro in very specific situations. Not (just) because it's slow, but if the question is too simple or vague, pro responses are sometimes overfitting to the noise in my question. Until there is lots of context and the basics are laid out, high or xhigh somehow work better. Pro gives you the last 10%.

New comment by metanonsense in "Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample"

metanonsense — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 23:01:50 +0000

It feels very humbling that here is one of the smartest humans on the planet asking questions, and the LLM keeps answering in this "Yes, it's really simple if you think about it" way, like a professor talking to a talented student.

New comment by metanonsense in "GPT-5.5"

metanonsense — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:47:22 +0000

I also had a frustrating but funny conversation today where I asked ChatGPT to make one document from the 10 or so sections that we had previously worked on. It always gave only brief summaries. After I repeated my request for the third time, it told me I should just concatenate the sections myself because it would cost too many tokens if it did it for me.

New comment by metanonsense in "Mamba-3"

metanonsense — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 13:37:55 +0000

Impatient execs can also be painful. EDIT: Writing this while I am waiting for Codex to complete, so I may enjoy slow AI more than the usual developer ;-)

New comment by metanonsense in "Martial arts robots at 2026 Spring Festival Gala [video]"

metanonsense — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:02:03 +0000

Tbf, if I did whay they do in this video, my battery life would more like a handful of seconds.

New comment by metanonsense in "'It's ridiculous': publicans bemused by rise of single-file queues to get served"

metanonsense — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 22:29:35 +0000

I think the issue it the (literal) "head-of-line blocking". Some requests can be processed either "concurrently" like tapping a beer from a keg or in parallel by having multiple bartenders, but having all people standing strictly in line makes this difficult.

New comment by metanonsense in "Using PostgreSQL as a Dead Letter Queue for Event-Driven Systems"

metanonsense — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:15:49 +0000

only learned about SKIP LOCKED because ChatGPT suggested it to solve some concurrency problem I had. Great tool to learn such things.

New comment by metanonsense in "Deutsche Telekom is throttling the internet"

metanonsense — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:53:00 +0000

Honestly a crappy situation. In Germany, Telekom is a monopolistic bully. In evening hours, any service behind Cloudflare more or less stops working (for instance, before I cancelled my subscription, chess.com web assets were delivered with neck-breaking 5kB/s, which made loading a 20MB wasm for stockfish analysis no fun).. but there are absolutely no viable alternatives that aren’t also crappy: Vodafone -> same peering idiocy, Starlink -> king Elon). VPNs make things complicated, but are often the only alternative.

New comment by metanonsense in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

metanonsense — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:49:45 +0000

I’ve seen this with some of my Indian colleagues, though definitely not all. In fact, most are more than eager to disagree with me :D (even though I’m their superior)

New comment by metanonsense in "Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)"

metanonsense — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:47:27 +0000

Spending months dealing with folks attempting to blackmail us over ridiculous non-issues has pretty much killed any sympathy I had for bug bounty hunters.

New comment by metanonsense in "65% of Hacker News posts have negative sentiment, and they outperform"

metanonsense — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:40:47 +0000

In my experience, this depends a lot on the subreddits you are subscribed to. Even in that set, the general mood sometimes changes significantly over time, e.g. because moderators change, a flood of new people is coming in because of some trends (AI), or some reddit meta events (eg a post being bestoffed). Generally speaking, a few vocal asshles can spoil your subreddit and drag the overall sentiment down.

New comment by metanonsense in "Vodafone Germany is changing the open internet, one peering connection at a time"

metanonsense — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 19:31:19 +0000

Ironic that I switched to HN from chess.com because Deutsche Telekom‘s peering with Cloudflare (or more its lack of) made the site even more unusable than usual. 5 minutes ago I thought „Maybe it’s time to switch to Vodafone“