Hacker News: testaccount28

New comment by testaccount28 in "How real are real numbers? (2004)"

testaccount28 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 06:03:27 +0000

"Make a line of 10 apples and declare it to be 2 units long" <- what number does this physically realize?

New comment by testaccount28 in "Our position on open-weights models"

testaccount28 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 05:11:20 +0000

> Why would countries have funds to help places like Haiti otherwise?

because that's what they think is best. what point are you trying to make? that countries don't pursue 'profit' at the expense of all other concerns?

New comment by testaccount28 in "How real are real numbers? (2004)"

testaccount28 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 01:35:00 +0000

in what way does drawing a diagram have anything to do with physically realizing a number?

New comment by testaccount28 in "How real are real numbers? (2004)"

testaccount28 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:53:24 +0000

> equality is undecidable

equality is always undecidable until you see the light of intuition. consider the rational number whose numerator is 0 if $theorem is true, and 1 if it is false, and whose denominator is 1.

New comment by testaccount28 in "How real are real numbers? (2004)"

testaccount28 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 22:48:00 +0000

"suppose that the minimum distance is one inch. well, that's one of something. so now imagine half of that! there you go: one half. a physically unrealizable number."

New comment by testaccount28 in "Show HN: Reverse Minesweeper"

testaccount28 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 16:54:08 +0000

it reverses right and left click

New comment by testaccount28 in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living (One Every Two Days)"

testaccount28 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 23:24:36 +0000

2000 WPM @ 75%

New comment by testaccount28 in "Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation"

testaccount28 — Sun, 31 May 2026 15:13:55 +0000

the correct answer here is that they are all accountable. there is not some fixed quantity of blame to divvy up: each malfunctioning leg is responsible for the outcome.

New comment by testaccount28 in "AI sticker shock hits corporate America"

testaccount28 — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:47:34 +0000

what a bizarre non sequitur

New comment by testaccount28 in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

testaccount28 — Thu, 28 May 2026 03:41:17 +0000

lol "the extralegal spy agency has become as corrupt as the search engines!"

New comment by testaccount28 in "New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production"

testaccount28 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 20:04:40 +0000

right. view it instead as "we need to keep domestic corn production above a certain threshold." the result is that we have a lot of extra corn. now the question becomes: what do we do with this extra corn? we can either throw it away, or turn it into fuel.

it's not an efficient course if the target is fuel, but that's not the target. it is a decent use if we have lots of corn that nobody wants, which we do.

New comment by testaccount28 in "Brussels launched an age checking app. Hackers took 2 minutes to break it"

testaccount28 — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 01:16:30 +0000

op meant "in" not "into"

New comment by testaccount28 in "Everything we like is a psyop?"

testaccount28 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:28:52 +0000

how could that crap possibly be organic

New comment by testaccount28 in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

testaccount28 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:00:19 +0000

ah, the paper acknowledges this. my bad for jumping to the diagrams!

New comment by testaccount28 in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

testaccount28 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 05:35:10 +0000

derivation of -x seems wrong. we can look at the execution trace on a stack machine, but it's actually not hard to see. starting from the last node before the output, we see that the tree has the form

    eml(z, eml(x, 1))
      = e^z - ln(eml(x, 1))
      = e^z - ln(e^x)
      = e^z - x

and the claim is that, after it's expanded, z will be such that this whole thing is equal to -x. but with some algebra, this is happening only if

    e^z = 0,

and there is no complex number z that satisfies this equation. indeed if we laboriously expand the given formula for z (the left branch of the tree), we see that it goes through ln(0), and compound expressions.

x^-1 has the same problem.

both formulae work ...sort of... if we allow ln(0) = Infinity and some other moxie, such as x / Infinity = 0 for all finite x.

New comment by testaccount28 in "Sam Altman's home targeted in second attack"

testaccount28 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:49:14 +0000

do you hold Altman solely responsible for everything on earth?

New comment by testaccount28 in "Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)"

testaccount28 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 19:19:08 +0000

is there anything Collier doesn't sneer at? her purpose seems to be discouraging free and creative thinking.

New comment by testaccount28 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

testaccount28 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 14:28:17 +0000

right, i love this plan, we are aligned politically. but until we make some change to the balance between renters and landlords, subsidizing demand is unlikely to help.

New comment by testaccount28 in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

testaccount28 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:47:22 +0000

or just pay the landlords directly and cut out the middlemen!

New comment by testaccount28 in "Show HN: A game where you build a GPU"

testaccount28 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 03:22:24 +0000

thanks boss!