Hacker News: mr_mitm

New comment by mr_mitm in "Lunar Terminator Paradox"

mr_mitm — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 23:50:55 +0000

It's simply a huge, beautiful coincidence. If the galaxy was teeming with life capable of interstellar travel, our planet would be famous for its perfect eclipses.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Claude Opus 5.5"

mr_mitm — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 09:22:40 +0000

Let's not paper over that gap and find the root cause instead

New comment by mr_mitm in "Don't Just Say Hello"

mr_mitm — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:47:06 +0000

What? No one says you can't say hello. It just shouldn't be the only thing you say

New comment by mr_mitm in "AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran"

mr_mitm — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 22:25:18 +0000

That's probably already true for 7 days or less

New comment by mr_mitm in "An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem"

mr_mitm — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:19:52 +0000

If you define the initial conditions such that their relative velocity is zero or parallel to the plane, yes. But that's not the case in general.

New comment by mr_mitm in "An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem"

mr_mitm — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:16:12 +0000

I'm pretty sure there is always a unique solution to the equations of motions (safe for some pathological edge cases perhaps). Classical mechanics is deterministic, after all. But for more than two bodies, there is in general no solution in closed form, and it's often chaotic, so not even computeable for arbitrary time frames.

The "about" info states that all of these are computed numerically.

New comment by mr_mitm in "An atlas of periodic solutions to the three-body problem"

mr_mitm — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 13:13:36 +0000

It's well organized, the animations are smooth, and it looks beautiful... I'm not sure what to do with the information, but it's mesmerizing and fascinating. Great find!

New comment by mr_mitm in "Navier-Stokes Announcement"

mr_mitm — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:03:36 +0000

I also don't remember checks, but I believe that having an email address of an approved organization was enough to pass.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Navier-Stokes Announcement"

mr_mitm — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:02:04 +0000

I checked, you're right, but I think it's important to note that the prize did go to Perelman and he declined to accept.

New comment by mr_mitm in "I spent $220 on Google app ads and 60% of the installs were robots"

mr_mitm — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:01:47 +0000

There is https://knock-knock.net/, which is similar

New comment by mr_mitm in "Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?"

mr_mitm — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 10:09:32 +0000

It doesn't really make a lot of sense to contextualize a velocity with a distance or a time period.

You think those time periods are large because you see a lot of numbers in the units you chose, or because it is much larger than your lifespan. But in the grand scheme a galaxy is nothing but a spec of dust, 10k years a blink of an eye.

There is no other natural velocity that I'm aware of that we could compare it to, but we can say that the speed of light is the fastest there is, so how can it be slow?

New comment by mr_mitm in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

mr_mitm — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:58:39 +0000

I'm waiting for some data center to be built where no one can agree on who actually commissioned and payed for the thing. Every body "just followed orders" until it turns out that it was Grok.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Keep Our Servers Running"

mr_mitm — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:34:13 +0000

The archive that bypasses paywalls is archive.today (or archive.is, archive.ph, ...) which is run by some shady person, not a professional organization like Wayback Machine.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Keep Our Servers Running"

mr_mitm — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 06:52:48 +0000

That's a different archive

New comment by mr_mitm in "QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes"

mr_mitm — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 18:11:59 +0000

You also can run a Mastodon application server side and serve server-rendered pages. I'm not aware of anyone having done that yet, but, you know, be the change you want to see. It's probably got privacy implications.

New comment by mr_mitm in "QBittorrent breaks out of sandbox to commit crimes"

mr_mitm — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 16:44:47 +0000

How is that different from email, IRC, instant messaging, or anything else nerds use?

New comment by mr_mitm in "GPT-6 Astra"

mr_mitm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:07:19 +0000

Why does he say what he feels? Is that how leading figures in the space define AGI - a gut feeling? What are the usual definitions and how can we test for it? Is there something like a Turing test for AGI?

New comment by mr_mitm in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

mr_mitm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 09:00:40 +0000

Quantum Chromodynamics, path integrals, and what other mechanisms you need for deriving the half life are extremely complicated, especially for that many particles, so of course it's hopeless without approximations, which can be wrong, or are even wrong by definition. But the fact that it's prohibitively hard to solve the equations for such complicated systems doesn't indicate a gap in our understanding. You don't even have to go to xenon, this is already the case for tritium.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

mr_mitm — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:33:04 +0000

Can you be more specific? I believe quantum mechanics explains all of radioactive decay. Unless the GP meant that QM is mysterious, I don't understand the problem.

New comment by mr_mitm in "Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle"

mr_mitm — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:47:24 +0000

Where is the mystery? Any system can spontaneously transform into a new state with a probability greater than zero unless some conservation law prevents it. In a sense it's just quantum tunneling.