Hacker News: skybrian

New comment by skybrian in "I know why Mathematicians weep"

skybrian — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:17:43 +0000

Maybe math is more like a science now, though? It's as if ancient astronomers saw the results from a modern telescope. "Why even look at the sky anymore," they might ask. "And we don't even own the telescope!"

Maybe the answer is to look into how Big Science works? There's still plenty of work to be done figuring out what to do with the outputs from these new math-observing instruments.

New comment by skybrian in "I know why Mathematicians weep"

skybrian — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:51:28 +0000

You use the word "already" as if it already happened, but this is confusing speculation with reality. Market prices are a summary of speculation. Plenty of things are "priced in" that haven't happened yet, and maybe won't if the market is wrong.

Anticipating that something will happen is not the same as evidence that it's happened.

New comment by skybrian in "Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved"

skybrian — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 02:59:39 +0000

I don’t see anything vague or misleading about either tweet. I suppose it might be misleading if you don’t know what “bots” means in this context and don’t bother to find out?

New comment by skybrian in "Show HN: XY Music Notation"

skybrian — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:18:03 +0000

How often are you doing calculations though? Using the same names as everyone else seems more important.

New comment by skybrian in "Show HN: XY Music Notation"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:45:06 +0000

I think you’d be better off with something compatible with an existing system. Perhaps start with nashville numbering and add accidentals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

New comment by skybrian in "Cyberattack halts construction of tunnel between Denmark and Germany"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:26:24 +0000

Or maybe it’s the Iranians this time? Whoever it is, getting good at cybersecurity seems more useful than going to war over it.

New comment by skybrian in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:08:59 +0000

Okay, paraphrasing text describing an idea isn’t necessarily a copyright violation.

I think the issue is that it’s case-specific, but there are plenty of people claiming copyright violations in circumstances where there’s no specific evidence for it, and a few other people claiming that LLM inference necessarily means it’s transformative use.

New comment by skybrian in "AI models may soon self-replicate without access to data centers"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:55:33 +0000

It can have good uses, but we are also going to have AI botnets soon.

New comment by skybrian in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:32:41 +0000

Ideas can’t be copyrighted. Paraphrasing some text explaining an idea isn’t a copyright violation. Having trained on something you wrote doesn’t necessarily imply a copyright violation. It depends on what the LLM outputs.

New comment by skybrian in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:27:51 +0000

If Big-O lets you run every possible algorithm in "parallel" while still being in some sense "optimal," that seems like yet another exploit?

New comment by skybrian in "Strengthening our defenses against distillation attacks"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:54:18 +0000

I have sympathy for both sides. I don't blame Chinese firms for attempting distillation attacks and I don't blame Anthropic for trying to stop them.

They're just competing companies with conflicting interests.

New comment by skybrian in "A look at the math that OpenAI claims computes faster Fourier transforms"

skybrian — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 03:39:19 +0000

If algorithmic theorists don't care about practical performance then why should we care about what they're doing? It's just a strange game they're playing, of no interest to anyone else.

It seems like rather than coming up with more "galactic" algorithms, a more useful thing to do might be to come up with a replacement for big-O that's not so exploitable, and to convince theoreticians to play that game instead.

New comment by skybrian in "French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack"

skybrian — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:27:27 +0000

True, but they'd need to be specifically checking a thermometer or it might warm up a fair bit before being noticed.

New comment by skybrian in "French supermarkets suffer refrigerator shutdown after unprecedented cyberattack"

skybrian — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 19:07:26 +0000

When a freezer stops working and nobody notices for a while, the food will spoil then, too.

If it were monitoring-only, rather than connected to the power, it would probably be fine.

New comment by skybrian in "Research Firm Calls Anthropic's IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'"

skybrian — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:27:19 +0000

Shouldn’t we wait until the S-1 is officially released before jumping to conclusions? Currently the financial data we have is based on leaks.

New comment by skybrian in "AI Is Throwing a Roadside Picnic"

skybrian — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:19:41 +0000

Oh, absolutely. Just saying there’s something for mathematicians to do before publishing results.

New comment by skybrian in "Passkeys are a trap"

skybrian — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:15:36 +0000

To avoid lockout, you want to have more than one key to open a door however you do it. At least, for accounts that are important to you. It might be that one is a passkey and one is something else, though.

New comment by skybrian in "Passkeys are a trap"

skybrian — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 23:45:11 +0000

There is a reason that banks send increasingly strident text messages that they will never ask for this code.

New comment by skybrian in "Passkeys are a trap"

skybrian — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 23:37:46 +0000

It's not that hard. Chrome and something else. (Such as iOS.) A different kind of backup authentication method would work too.

New comment by skybrian in "Passkeys are a trap"

skybrian — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 22:22:32 +0000

Ideally, passkeys should be cattle, not pets. You should have more than one per account, saved to more than one password manager. Then it's fine if they're not copyable because you can get another.