Hacker News: mkprc

New comment by mkprc in "Can Math as We Know It Survive AI?"

mkprc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:44:40 +0000

The article doesn't attempt to answer the question in the title, but instead, more journalistically, quotes some mathematicians discussing the topic.

I think what bothers me when asking "Can _Math_ as We Know It Survive AI?" is the lack of distinction between Math as a topic of study and intellectual pursuit, and Math as an academic industry focused on publishing papers and garnering citations and pushing the frontier of knowledge.

New comment by mkprc in "Can Math as We Know It Survive AI?"

mkprc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:38:25 +0000

I wish it were clear that someone wrote this article. It's posted under the Aventine [1] substack which is maintained by Danielle Mattoon, but did she write it?

[1]: https://www.aventine.org/about/

New comment by mkprc in "Proofdesk – Collaborative Web IDE and Sandbox for Math Textbooks"

mkprc — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:24:07 +0000

A vibe-coded PreTeXt editor webapp. Okay. GitHub link at the bottom 404s, but presumably intends to link here: https://github.com/harsharajkumar-273/Proofdesk

New comment by mkprc in "Principia Artificialis – Mathematical Foundations of Artificial Thought"

mkprc — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:41:36 +0000

Already posted here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945390

New comment by mkprc in "Principia Artificialis Open mathematical research program onthe theory of AI"

mkprc — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:39:00 +0000

Appears to be crankery

New comment by mkprc in "Ask HN: Who gets credits on big math questions solved by LLMs?"

mkprc — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 01:19:38 +0000

The (boring) answer to "who gets the prize?" is whoever the CMI decides gets the prize.

https://www.claymath.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/millenni...

New comment by mkprc in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

mkprc — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:16:53 +0000

I also think about this, and worry about this. My go-to example is that the file-system in Windows used to clearly be a tree, and the file explorer was how you traversed this tree. With "Libraries" and other shenanigans with the location of the Desktop folder, it's not much of a tree anymore, and I wonder if this is related to kids-these-days not understanding the basics of file systems anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

New comment by mkprc in "Storied Colors – a catalogue of named colors"

mkprc — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:21:44 +0000

Right?! It's a bummer when a nice-looking website is now a red flag. It's become part of my workflow now browsing the web to check the About/Contact page on a website immediately; if there's no real person behind the site, how can it be trusted?

New comment by mkprc in "Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics"

mkprc — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:42:47 +0000

For anyone interested in Grothendieck's opinions on kimchi …

https://mikepierce.github.io/grothendieck-kimchi/translation...

New comment by mkprc in "Ti-84 Evo"

mkprc — Fri, 01 May 2026 23:40:57 +0000

They're most definitely trying to ride on the recent anti-technology in school push.

New comment by mkprc in "Ti-84 Evo"

mkprc — Fri, 01 May 2026 22:17:12 +0000

It's about ensuring "academic honesty" on exams. Also, it's nice to have buttons rather than a touchscreen. Also, there is something to be said about using a device with a different form-factor than the one on which a student also scrolls TikTok/IG and distracts themselves otherwise.

New comment by mkprc in "447 TB/cm² at zero retention energy – atomic-scale memory on fluorographane"

mkprc — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:29:50 +0000

Sniff test: a paper with a single author and 53 revisions, listing a gmail address as contact information despite the author, after a brief internet search, appearing to have affiliations with CSU Global, (maybe) the University of Central Florida, and the San Jose State University Department of Aerospace.

New comment by mkprc in "AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart"

mkprc — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:09:39 +0000

It appears Apple/iTunes has already responded. He's no longer on the Top 100: USA list:

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/top-100-usa/pl.606afcbb7...

New comment by mkprc in "The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep"

mkprc — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 11:40:28 +0000

https://archive.ph/adPYr

New comment by mkprc in "You can now buy a DIY quantum computer"

mkprc — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:38:50 +0000

> Putting it all together isn’t a trivial task, […] the team offers training from its researchers and support throughout the building process. The training would take up to three months, […] with the whole system being ready to run after at least 10 months of work.

> The EduQit quantum computer comes with five qubits, which makes it less than a tenth of the size of cutting-edge devices, but it also only costs around €1 million, making it much cheaper.

New comment by mkprc in "You can now buy a DIY quantum computer"

mkprc — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:35:52 +0000

https://archive.ph/Uxv00

New comment by mkprc in "A case against currying"

mkprc — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:31:30 +0000

Prior to this article, I didn't think of currying as being something a person could be "for" or "against." It just is. The fact that a function of multiple inputs can be equivalently thought of as a function of a tuple can be equivalently thought of as a composite of single-input functions that return functions is about cognition, and understanding structure, not code syntax.

New comment by mkprc in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

mkprc — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 01:20:55 +0000

Hosting and nicely typesetting some of the essays/speeches of Alfred North Whitehead on education and the role of Universities, now in the public domain. Most are from Project Gutenberg, but I've been manually transcribing a couple others.

https://mkprc.xyz/public-domain/whitehead/

New comment by mkprc in "Quantitativity on the number of rational points in the Mordell conjecture"

mkprc — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 12:16:16 +0000

Here's a direct link to the 178 page preprint:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01820

New comment by mkprc in "New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes"

mkprc — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:09:17 +0000

A counter comment: I'll bet many folks didn't know what an em-dash was until the whole "you can tell it's AI because of the em-dashes" thing. Then everyone learned what an em-dash is, and every pause in every sentence thereafter suddenly deserves an em-dash. While I suspect it's mostly bots, the number of sincere (human) new em-dashers isn't negligible.