Hacker News: nuncanada

New comment by nuncanada in "“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically"

nuncanada — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:30:25 +0000

I agree whole heartdely. But that is about the current state of IAs. I do think the next missing (and probably last) big step is exactly how to give LLMs a better abstraction capability.

New comment by nuncanada in "Scientists predict and witness evolution in a 30-year marine snail experiment"

nuncanada — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 13:55:45 +0000

This has been done countless times with Bacteria... Bury your head in the sand as much as you want...

New comment by nuncanada in "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming (2009)"

nuncanada — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 16:53:46 +0000

Bought it just because of the interviews with Knuth and Norvig, but it amazed me how fun and interesting was to read all the other interviews also. Definitely one of my favorite CS books.

New comment by nuncanada in "Electronic Structure of LK-99"

nuncanada — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 17:53:08 +0000

I have a theory of superconductivity that also explains that, unfortunately this comment box is too small for me to explain it.

New comment by nuncanada in "Venus is not Earth’s closest neighbor (2019) [pdf]"

nuncanada — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:04:01 +0000

Yup silly.. And people consider the closest mostly in the sense of the closest distance between orbits not distance between planets...

New comment by nuncanada in "Want Your Country to Thrive? Give Geniuses a Universal Basic Income"

nuncanada — Tue, 06 Dec 2022 15:16:36 +0000

IQ is the variable with most correlation for income at your 50s.... I have friends with extremely high IQ with a very similar path to yours...

New comment by nuncanada in "Modern PHP features – PHP 8.0 and 8.1"

nuncanada — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 13:45:35 +0000

Actually, I think most of the bad rap comes from the community. A community where the majority still thinks that using the CodeIgniter framework is a reasonable way to develop in 2022.

New comment by nuncanada in "Are Real Numbers Real? (2017)"

nuncanada — Mon, 24 Oct 2022 16:45:14 +0000

Worse, if you take "Imaginary Numbers" to be only the necessary complement to make polynomials factoring complete... And "Imaginary Numbers" are definitely a necessity to describe reality... Meanwhile almost all "Real Numbers" are nothing but phantasmagorical numbers which we cannot name nor talk about them... It seems beyond the pale that we still are teaching these bizarre axioms instead of the Computable Reals which don't have all these phantom numbers...

New comment by nuncanada in "Covid: Summary of lab-origin hypothesis"

nuncanada — Tue, 06 Sep 2022 14:07:25 +0000

It does matter a lot. Knowing the origin makes us able to try to prepare for it in the future. Specifically if it was a lab leak, we should put highly stringent procedures for conducting such research. Theses labs should be isolated far away from major urban areas, and have mandatory quarantine while leaving it... For example...

New comment by nuncanada in "Will low and no code tools ever truly disrupt tech development?"

nuncanada — Thu, 11 Aug 2022 14:58:58 +0000

TL;DR: I spoke with a lot of people in the industry and thus came to the conclusion that X will not be disruptive...

The good part of the bet is that most potential disruptions end not happening... But the exactly same median consensus is also reached about the disruptions that do end happening...

New comment by nuncanada in "How the modern world arose from imaginary numbers"

nuncanada — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 16:11:05 +0000

Mathematicians have been constantly been giving bad names do their concepts... Imaginary Numbers is one of the atrocious ones, Imaginary Numbers are part of the fabric of our reality... Meanwhile Real Number were axiomatized in a way that creates completely unrealistic numbers, "ghost-like" numbers, numbers that can never be given a name... The first course in Analysis is ridden with examples of Continuous Functions that are not continuous in any sense humans would consider ever it...

New comment by nuncanada in "The control group is out of control (2014)"

nuncanada — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 23:13:27 +0000

Then there is a huge problem with how we publish Science... Decades ago, sharing all these huge datasets would have been quite difficult if not uneconomical. But nowadays there is no reason left for not publishing the data and hopefully get academic rewards for that... I have seen huge amounts of data not being digitized and lost because of this ownership mentality...

New comment by nuncanada in "81% of developers admit to knowingly releasing vulnerable apps – research"

nuncanada — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 12:59:42 +0000

19% are too ignorant to know it?

New comment by nuncanada in "Best practices for REST API design (2020)"

nuncanada — Mon, 22 Feb 2021 17:12:13 +0000

I have been bitten by this really bad idea of reusing HTTP CODE for application problems. The server was 404 itself instead of the application.

It is a bad engineering idea to reuse HTTP codes that can be thrown by multiple intermediaries confusing the client code.

New comment by nuncanada in "Faster Than Light in Our Model of Physics: Some Preliminary Thoughts"

nuncanada — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 21:24:47 +0000

He hasn't derived 3 dimensions from this framework yet... The whole program is very interesting, it might find general laws not only for Physics but for many phenomena, but I feel like Wolfram has jumped the gun on connecting Physics to it... Particularly, I think that quantum non-locality might be evidence that fundamentally 3 dimensions is just an emergent property, but that has yet to be derived from this hypergraph framework...

New comment by nuncanada in "Why Are Plants Green? To Reduce the Noise in Photosynthesis"

nuncanada — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 14:53:08 +0000

Not "good enough"! There are so many known instances where Evolution gets trapped in local maxima and can't escape it... Another local maxima that photosynthesis trapped itself is its efficiency being jumbled by higher O2 concentrations.

New comment by nuncanada in "A look at modern PHP"

nuncanada — Tue, 05 May 2020 16:19:00 +0000

REST is a waste of time and effort, use GraphQL.

New comment by nuncanada in "Swish: SWI Prolog Notebook"

nuncanada — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 17:15:47 +0000

No. It is not... The CUT operator is worse than Ruby's monkey patching for debugging and maintenance reasons... Prolog without CUT is awesome, but currently there is no way to have reasonable performance without it.

New comment by nuncanada in "IBM casts doubt on Google's claims of quantum supremacy"

nuncanada — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 20:11:52 +0000

No. It scales linearly with circuit size. Exponentially with qubits size. Just read Scott Aaronson's blog, probably the greatest expert on this subject. https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372

New comment by nuncanada in "Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production"

nuncanada — Sun, 13 Oct 2019 01:17:56 +0000

Do you realize that what you are complaining about has the same problematic root as what you think are good ideas? They are all pseudo-scientific ideology. Hayek and neoliberalism just as much as the radical left ideology...