Hacker News: okintheory

New comment by okintheory in "What have been the greatest intellectual achievements? (2017)"

okintheory — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:06:12 +0000

This was clearly written by someone with too little exposure to history and (comparably) too much to academic economics. No one else could think Coase belongs on such a list and forget Orsted/Faraday/Maxwell (initially...). And if you think John Locke did something important beyond adding philosophical veneer to capitalism as it was already practiced, you need to read Meiksins Wood's 'The Origin of Capitalism'.

New comment by okintheory in "Danish government agency to ditch Microsoft software (2025)"

okintheory — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 10:38:19 +0000

How could any European govt use MS after Trump ordered MS to sanction an ICC prosecutor and MS complied? I imagine they're all trying to walk away

New comment by okintheory in "The Legacy of Daniel Kahneman: A Personal View (2025)"

okintheory — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 14:58:05 +0000

I don't think that's a great example. If Kahneman claimed not to be susceptible, it would have greatly undermined his claims about the universality of these phenomena: many other people would presumably also not be susceptible.

New comment by okintheory in "First Proof"

okintheory — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:58:50 +0000

I settle this question for myself every month: I try asking ChatGPT and Gemini for help, but in my domains it fails miserably at anything that looks new. But, YMMV, that's just the experience of one professional mathematician.

New comment by okintheory in "First Proof"

okintheory — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 09:11:24 +0000

I think you're misunderstanding the point this paper is trying to make. They're interested in trying to distinguish whether AI is capable of solving new math problems or only capable of identifying existing solutions in the literature. Distinguishing these two is difficult, because self-contained math problems that are easy enough for LLMs to address (e.g. minor Erdos-problems) may have been solved already as subcomponents of other work, without this widely known. So when an AI makes progress on such an Erdos problem, we don't know if it had a new idea, or correctly identified an existing but obscure answer. This issue has been dogging the claims of AI solving Erdos problems.

Instead, here you get questions that extremely famous mathematicians (Hairer, Spielman) are telling you (a) are solvable in <5 pages (b) do not have known solutions in the literature. This means that solutions from AI to these problems would perhaps give a clearer signal on what AI is doing, when it works on research math.

New comment by okintheory in "Project to formalise a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in the Lean theorem prover"

okintheory — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:44:28 +0000

You're wrong. The mistake could have been unfixable. That happens quite frequently (see: countless retracted claimed proofs of major results by professional mathematicians).

Assessing GPT Performance in a Proof-Based University-Level Course

okintheory — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:43:39 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13664

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44284529

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by okintheory in "Huawei targeted in new European Parliament corruption probe"

okintheory — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 12:37:14 +0000

The thought police already arrived, see Columbia grant cancellations and Mahmoud Khalil [1].

[1] "Khalil is a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States,” said the official, noting that this calculation was the driving force behind the arrest. “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law,” said the official." https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ice-detention-of-a-columbia-stud...

New comment by okintheory in "The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science"

okintheory — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:52:55 +0000

I also can't tell whether Stanford is joking, but the notion that he's a good fit for the job of biology professor is definitely funny!

New comment by okintheory in "The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science"

okintheory — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:48:41 +0000

It's nice to live in a world where actions have consequences. When the media coverage got too much, Marc Tessier-Lavigne finally had to resign as president of Stanford, so he could focus on his job as a Stanford professor.

New comment by okintheory in "Minimum bipartite matching via Riemann optimization (2023)"

okintheory — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:53:02 +0000

Interestingly, the asymptotically fastest known algorithm for minimum weight bipartite matching [A] uses an interior point method, which means it's also doing Riemannian optimization in some sense.

[A] https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-achieve-absurdly-...

New comment by okintheory in "Cancellation of Naval Academy Lecture by Ruth Ben-Ghiat Threatens Inst. Autonomy"

okintheory — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 17:12:09 +0000

It's right there, in the press release:

>>> Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms director of PEN America’s U.S. Free Expression programs, said:

“The irony cannot be lost here: government officials have used their positions to muscle out a scholar of authoritarianism from a prestigious lecture," <<<

New comment by okintheory in "Show HN: PreCog AI – Automatic AI Model Selection for Any Task"

okintheory — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:54:37 +0000

Ah yes, Minority Report, that story we're so eager to repeat.

New comment by okintheory in "Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton [pdf]"

okintheory — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 10:58:04 +0000

But, the starting point of Neural Networks in the ML/AI sense, is cybernetics + Rosenblatt's perceptron, research done mathematicians (who became early computer scientists)

New comment by okintheory in "Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Machine Learning and Neural Networks"

okintheory — Tue, 08 Oct 2024 10:55:59 +0000

Absolutely. This makes very little sense, IMO, and is a bad look for the committee, trying to claim 'physics' for something that clearly is not.

New comment by okintheory in "AI solves International Math Olympiad problems at silver medal level"

okintheory — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:24:06 +0000

These problems are literally already solved? Of course, the IMO problem designers make sure the problems have solutions before the use them. That's very different than math research, where it's not known in advance what the answer is, or even that there is good answer.

New comment by okintheory in "Researchers develop the fastest possible flow algorithm"

okintheory — Sun, 30 Jun 2024 13:22:53 +0000

Interestingly, the same guy also works on making 'theory-only' algorithms work well in practice [1]. But, it seems like that takes another 20 years -- [1] is building on a theory breakthrough from 2004 [2], but these algorithms are only starting to work in practice in 2024, IIUC. I guess that means there's hope for practical min-cost flow algorithms in 2044.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.00709

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0310051

New comment by okintheory in "(Tesla) has twice attempted to drive directly into a train while in FSD mode"

okintheory — Tue, 21 May 2024 06:42:04 +0000

I'm not arguing that X/Twitter is doing something that prevents it from being protected by section 230 as it exists. But, when Congress granted these protections, I think they had in mind things like forum moderation to remove hate speech, not selectively censoring journalists that write critically of a company. So one could rethink whether companies that censor journalists should be protected.

New comment by okintheory in "(Tesla) has twice attempted to drive directly into a train while in FSD mode"

okintheory — Mon, 20 May 2024 20:59:06 +0000

When Ken Klippenstein obtained footage of an FSD Tesla causing a major accident [1] and wrote about it, he got blocked from being found through X/Twitter search [2]. I remember verifying the search block on my phone at the time.

If I were a US lawmaker, I'd take a moment to reflect on whether a company such as X/Twitter, which actively censors journalists to protect the financial interests of its owners, should really be granted Section 230 protection.

[1] https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1612848872061128704 [2] https://x.com/kenklippenstein/status/1604574747945275396

New comment by okintheory in "'Your pay is still – not – going up too fast'"

okintheory — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 16:32:01 +0000

When was mainstream media not advertising driven? When was media not beholden to corporate interests?