Hacker News: oh_my_goodness

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

oh_my_goodness — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:15:08 +0000

In my opinion Christensen wasn't talking about outsourcing your entire development process to a competitor with much deeper pockets, giving them the ability to turn off your development at will [1], and then running rings around them. I'm sure you're familiar with his story about Dell and Asus. This is worse.

[1] Unless you're assuming that you maintain control over your technology while outsourcing most of the development thinking to a rented AI? Times have changed, and the API is not the only issue anymore.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

oh_my_goodness — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:04:44 +0000

Absolutely. The fact that they know your app better than you do, and that they can revoke your ability to develop it at any moment, those are just details. Those things won't change the game at all.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "The Cognitive Dark Forest"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 23:08:35 +0000

Yeah, and the big guys can't steal your customers. What a crazy idea.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:14:28 +0000

I don't know how many. I do it, because otherwise I'm overpowered by the urge to strangle the little suck-up.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "The Failure of the Thermodynamics of Computation (2010)"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 18:22:44 +0000

Very clear intro to this notoriously slippery area.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 13:34:59 +0000

It's not just a thought experiment. You can google how to do this and it works pretty well.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "AI overly affirms users asking for personal advice"

oh_my_goodness — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:03:00 +0000

Sky found to be blue

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

oh_my_goodness — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:55:20 +0000

Examples in TFA and at least one in the thread. Or say 4-quadrant atan might be simpler or less simple than 2-quadrant atan, depending on what you're doing next. Lots of stuff like that. Is a factored polynomial simpler than unfactored?

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:56:34 +0000

Employees are not victims. Sounds like a universal principle.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:29:44 +0000

Exactly. You have to manifest at a high vibrational frequency.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:26:05 +0000

"aren't you part of the problem?"

Yes? In the same way any victim of shoddy practices is "part of the problem"?

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:29:21 +0000

Not in general. As people have pointed out elsewhere, it's true if x is real. That isn't always a helpful assumption. (When x is real you can plug that assumption into Mathematica. Then Mathematica should agree with you.)

But consider sqrt(i) = sqrt(exp(i\pi/2)). That's exp(i\pi/4). Your rule would give 1 as the answer. It's not helpful for a serious math system to give that answer to this problem.

When I square 1 I don't get i.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:08:28 +0000

This is sometimes helpful. But more often it has very little overlap with what I need when I "simplify" some math.

"Simplify" is a very old term (>50y) in computer algebra. Its meaning has become kind of layered in that time.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 17:03:02 +0000

It doesn't, because we might consider different outputs "simple" depending on what we're going to do next.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Kniterate Notes"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:58:03 +0000

Possibly you might be missing the point. Unless maybe this comment is subtle humor?

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Why Mathematica does not simplify sinh(arccosh(x))"

oh_my_goodness — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 16:22:38 +0000

Yeah, hiding the recipes for how the math is really done would make the whole system kinda guess-and-hope for serious users.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Marcus AI Claims Dataset"

oh_my_goodness — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:54:43 +0000

His rebuttal? His critics' rebuttal?

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Marcus AI Claims Dataset"

oh_my_goodness — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:53:48 +0000

What's your take on TFA then?

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries"

oh_my_goodness — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 12:16:13 +0000

If the first example was "monkey wrench" instead of "boiling water", we'd never have seen the article.

New comment by oh_my_goodness in "The Tears of Donald Knuth (2015)"

oh_my_goodness — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:40:37 +0000

What a weird, bitchy article. Knuth might be wrong but I gave up.