Hacker News: mjdv

New comment by mjdv in "Show HN: 18 Words"

mjdv — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:55:47 +0000

That seems only fair. ;-)

New comment by mjdv in "Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies"

mjdv — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 12:32:21 +0000

> eat food, mostly plants, not too much.

If the state of physics was "stuff falls, heat sticks around, light goes fast" I think it'd be fair to describe that as "abysmal".

New comment by mjdv in "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus"

mjdv — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:08:53 +0000

> FWIW, I think this is the same as saying "iff it is bounded and has finite discontinuities".

It is not: for example, the piece-wise constant function f: [0,1] -> [0,1] which starts at f(0) = 0, stays constant until suddenly f(1/2) = 1, until f(3/4) = 0, until f(7/8) = 1, etc. is Riemann integrable.

"Continuous almost everywhere" means that the set of its discontinuities has Lebesgue measure 0. Many infinite sets have Lebesgue measure 0, including all countable sets.

New comment by mjdv in "Threat actors expand abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code"

mjdv — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 09:33:36 +0000

Until this post it wasn't clear to me that just opening and trusting a directory can cause code to be run without taking any other explicit actions that seem like they might involve running code, like running tests. My bad, but still!

New comment by mjdv in "1ML for non-specialists: introduction"

mjdv — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:41:18 +0000

I would say we have a problem when people who write compilers can't read type theory papers, but then our backgrounds might differ. ;-)

New comment by mjdv in "Stop overhyping AI, scientists tell von der Leyen"

mjdv — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 13:00:03 +0000

> We never talk about it now because we obviously blew past it years ago.

It's shocking to me that (as far as I know) no one has actually bothered to do a real Turing test with the best and newest LLMs. The Turing test is not whether a casual user can be momentarily confused about whether they are talking to a real person, or if a model can generate real-looking pieces of text. It's about a person seriously trying, for a fair amount of time, to distinguish between a chat they are having with another real person and an AI.

Q: Do you play chess? A: Yes. Q: I have K at my K1, and no other pieces. You have only K at K6 and R at R1. It is your move. What do you play? A: (After a pause of 15 seconds) R-R8 mate.

New comment by mjdv in "Rewrite it in Rust"

mjdv — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:15:34 +0000

Rush is the most popular brand of poppers. Maybe you're thinking of those? It's a liquid in a vial, but nothing like MDMA, and definitely older than the 2000s. If not, and there was another drug called Rush sold in a vial, I'll bet that it's caused some unfortunate mix-ups.