Hacker News: orbifold

New comment by orbifold in "RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better"

orbifold — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:20:56 +0000

Maintining this type of long time fork is the kind of mind numbing, tedious thing LLMs are actually exceptionally good at. I did some backend work on Lean4 compiler and then they switched out parts of the codegen, it took Codex less than an hour to recover the feature set I had implemented but on the new backend.

New comment by orbifold in "New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S."

orbifold — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:59:55 +0000

All this AI doomerism is hiding the obvious and immediate harm that will cause a mass extinction event. Funnily enough people at Anthropic are predicting the end of the Anthropocene, completely absolving themselves from any responsibility for the actual reality that the Anthropocene is defined by human made geologically noticeable changes. Like causing a global climate catastrophe.

New comment by orbifold in "AI psychosis is the new leadership blind spot"

orbifold — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:15:00 +0000

Article reads AI generated, or maybe those are the kind of publications is where they got this from?

New comment by orbifold in "Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors"

orbifold — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:16:09 +0000

"What it means and what it does not": article is clearly written by claude, which for me at this point means that I pay as much attention to it as I do to Claudes output: I skim it and then move on. It actually requires far more effort of me to read it than it was to generate the content. Before it would have always been the other way around. Whoever wrote the article would have had to spend way more time writing it than me reading it.

New comment by orbifold in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

orbifold — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 17:30:03 +0000

can you give examples of colo facilities in SF / New York that are shutting down?

New comment by orbifold in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

orbifold — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 02:20:41 +0000

I was thinking that would be great, too. What would be the equivalent for the property developer: one gpu server is 450k.

New comment by orbifold in "IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology"

orbifold — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 02:31:39 +0000

The hardware division has 80%+ margin and still makes the systems that process 75% of all financial transactions. Their processors for those systems are on par or better than any other, I don’t think that is a business at all. This cash cow is not going away any time soon and gives them the profits to make bets on the future of computing.

New comment by orbifold in "Show HN: Modeloop – From visual algorithms to microcontroller C code"

orbifold — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 14:21:25 +0000

I wish that people would not use AI to generate copy or websites, at this point it induces an almost instinctual negative reaction: 'What Modelloop does -- in three movements' is a classical example of AI lingo. I don't have proof but I feel that the most recent models have gotten worse. The rhetorical devices they use are tiring and off-putting at this point.

New comment by orbifold in "Ask HN: High school student – is learning programming still worthwhile?"

orbifold — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:19:15 +0000

I learned programming in QBasic in MS-DOS, you could just start the IDE and the documentation was filled with cool examples. Super easy to run any program. I made music / weird drawings etc.

New comment by orbifold in "Ask HN: High school student – is learning programming still worthwhile?"

orbifold — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:11:29 +0000

Here is how I think about it: Learning to program is learning a new way of thinking. When you learned to do mental arithmetic the point was not that you would necessarily do mental arithmetic at all times in the future. Programming is the last step when solving a problem with a computer, learning to program teaches you how to solve problems more generally.

I recommend reading a book like https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b..., going through it will hopefully as enjoyable as it was for me when I read it in high school. There are many kinds of programming which are not super enjoyable (to me), so I gladly leave those to AI, but based on personal observation, my experience programming lets me be much more effective at using AI to solve problems than a fresh MIT / Oxford grad with less programming experience.

Finally it depends on your interests: If your interests are computers and X, than combining both to solve problems you find interesting can make using AI worthwhile, because then programming isn't the main point.

New comment by orbifold in "Computing quantum waves from classical action"

orbifold — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:45:00 +0000

Writeup by MIT news: https://news.mit.edu/2026/new-study-bridges-classical-and-qu....

Computing quantum waves from classical action

orbifold — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:44:13 +0000

Article URL: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspa/article/482/2336/20250413/481461/On-computing-quantum-waves-exactly-from-classical

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47939570

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by orbifold in "We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git"

orbifold — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:27:21 +0000

is there a jj hosting service?

New comment by orbifold in "OpenAI puts Stargate UK on ice, blames energy costs and red tape"

orbifold — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:15:12 +0000

A lot of that is compute commitments and NVIDIA has a 80% margin

New comment by orbifold in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

orbifold — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:56:38 +0000

they were definitely totalitarian, slightly different mix of ideology. Fascist is a fairly good description here, it describes close collaboration of government with corporations to advance national goals. US had somewhat fascist tendencies for a long time now.

New comment by orbifold in "Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues"

orbifold — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:29:00 +0000

I don’t get that, the use of these books was instrumental and necessary for the success of the training run. The expected value of these training runs is high as the build out of 100 billion+ infrastructure demonstrates, so the book publishers should at a minimum be paid a licensing fee, a small fraction of every inference run revenue or whatever they decide. The fact that authors and publishers didn’t get any say under what conditions their intellectual property can be used is pretty outrageous.

New comment by orbifold in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

orbifold — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:50:18 +0000

In fact 5g and all previous standards have a provision for lawful intercept. So your domestic intelligence service and police can always turn it into a listening device.

New comment by orbifold in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

orbifold — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:10:53 +0000

I guess we will find out in 20+ years once the next electron positron collider at CERN has been build

New comment by orbifold in "Benchmarking a Baseline Fully-in-Place Functional Language Compiler [pdf]"

orbifold — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:44:38 +0000

Curious how this relates to what lean4 is doing, I guess in lean's case some of the data structures are special cased (Array) and there is no easy way to implement such data structures yourself

New comment by orbifold in "The Zen of Reticulum"

orbifold — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 15:01:27 +0000

At some point we will be so tired of distinguishing between AI generated content and human content that we will stop using the Internet and it will be left to bots.