Hacker News: tacomonstrous

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The fall of the theorem economy"

tacomonstrous — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:56:59 +0000

How does unrejection work exactly?

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:04:48 +0000

You seem to have a strange idea of both money and government.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "AI in mathematics is forcing big questions"

tacomonstrous — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:41:40 +0000

>The situation with human mathematicians is not much different. Eg, Wiles original proof of Fermat's Last Theorem contained errors found by reviewers, which he later repaired.

In fact, it was Wiles himself who realized there was an error.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:06:39 +0000

I don't know the numbers, but you and the parent are saying different things. The US could still be supplying 2/3s of Israel's weapons while only subsidising about 10% of that supply.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:39:49 +0000

”For example, it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award. It also allows NSF to make additional awards without the need to review a new application.”

obvious grifting opportunity

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science"

tacomonstrous — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 11:36:55 +0000

The rule is still open for comment.

FTA: The public comment period closes approximately July 13, 2026 (45 days from May 29 publication). Comments must be submitted to regulations.gov, Docket OMB-2026-0034.

Russell Vought is going to destroy American Science

tacomonstrous — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:28:33 +0000

Article URL: https://elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of-key-changes-in-ombs-proposed

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48604558

Points: 84

# Comments: 10

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Vance: Iran can have access to $300B reconstruction fund"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:55:00 +0000

This kind of comment might have been borderline reasonable before 2025 (though I would have found it laughable even then), but the evidence of the last 18 months shows that one side is in fact evil, corrupt and venal in entirely unprecedented ways.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "How Costco Won in Japan"

tacomonstrous — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:19:48 +0000

FYI, Amazon Fresh is shutting down its physical stores.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Tensors, the geometric tool that solved Einstein's relativity problem"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 22:08:23 +0000

Covariance and contravariance are mathematical notions, and have to do with whether each multiplicative constituent or the tensor is a vector in your given vector space (covariant) or a linear functional on this space (contravariant). There is no inherent physical meaning to either concept.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:42:15 +0000

This is not answering my question at all! How do you generate evidence??

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 20:15:02 +0000

Hard to read this and conclude that there can be any actual way to produce admissible evidence. Can you give me an example of what conversations you can use as evidence if anything involving him or his advisers is off limits?

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Supreme Court rules ex-presidents have immunity for official acts"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 19:07:20 +0000

How would you prove anything if you can't present any of his actual conversations about Watergate as evidence?

New comment by tacomonstrous in "A Rosetta Stone for Mathematics: André Weil's 1940 letter"

tacomonstrous — Wed, 08 May 2024 00:21:07 +0000

Geometric Langlands, while inspired by questions Weil was interested in, is actually answering somewhat different questions, which are not arithmetic in nature: hence the 'geometric' moniker. The actual Langlands program, which deals with number fields and hence with questions of an arithmetic flavor (meaning solving equations over the rational numbers rather than the real or complex numbers) is still very much unexplored in its full generality.

Edit: it appears that I might have spoken too soon. At the link below is a paper by Sam Rankin establishing some consequences for arithmetic questions, though over function fields (such as those formed by rational functions over finite fields).

https://gauss.math.yale.edu/~sr2532/springer.pdf

New comment by tacomonstrous in "How the greatest MP3 player undid itself (2012)"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 21:25:55 +0000

As a poor grad student, I used to unwind by watching Arrested Development playing all 3 seasons in a loop over Shoutcast. Fun times.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "A Mathematician on Creativity, Art, Logic and Language"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:08:21 +0000

Riemann surfaces are algebraic, but their moduli can mean two different things:

a) the (algebraic) moduli space of complex Riemann surfaces of a fixed genus (number of donut holes). This is an object in the realm of algebraic geometry in that it is possible to embed it into complex projective space, using for instance theta functions.

b) the moduli of complex structures on a fixed topological surface of genus g: this is Teichmuller space, which as far as we can tell only an object in differential geometry. However, Eskin, Mirzakhani, Filip and others have discovered that various subspaces of this non-algebraic space are 'naturally' algebraic (or more precisely quasi- projective). This is the surprising part.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Why are there suddenly so many car washes?"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 22:12:18 +0000

Yes, I remember when I first moved to New England, and asked where I could get a hand carwash. No one had heard of such a thing.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Mexico got rid of daylight saving time. Should the U.S. end it, too?"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 10 Mar 2024 03:07:05 +0000

Permanent DST, at least maybe just in New England.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war"

tacomonstrous — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 22:23:37 +0000

>But Hamas doesn't care for civilians.

Neither does the IDF by all available evidence.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Gemini and Google's Culture"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:13:37 +0000

I'm not seeing these responses.

Edit: Interesting! If I ask about the Washington Times after I ask the question about the NYT, then it tells me freedom of speech is paramount. If I ask it to start from scratch, then I get this response.