Hacker News: traes

New comment by traes in "Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance"

traes — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 07:07:38 +0000

TRM Labs[0] claims it is indeed NK

[0]: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...

New comment by traes in "Award-winning AI literature"

traes — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:20:38 +0000

You aren't accounting for volume.

New comment by traes in "There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]"

traes — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 01:02:39 +0000

This is not my experience. Having an intuitive grasp of e.g. the graphical interpretation of the determinant instantly lets you figure out most of the key determinant properties without having to memorize them. That's the primary thing you get from intuition imo, having a sense of what must be true without having to memorize or prove it.

New comment by traes in "There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]"

traes — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 22:26:23 +0000

If you don't find the way he presents e.g. linear algebra intuitive I think our brains must work fundamentally differently.

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

traes — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:45:34 +0000

> AI seems to be very good at getting answers, but not always answers to the correct questions.

I don't think that's an accurate summary of the article you linked. The Lean proof solved the exact problem it was supposed to, it just had minor discrepancies from the writeup of the proof (on the level of saying a theorem requires m+4 derivatives when it actually requires m+5 derivatives). Obviously a problem but not really a bombshell.

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

traes — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 04:34:20 +0000

An unpleasant part of the AI math revolution is that people's hatred of AI is bringing to bear their hatred of pure mathematics in general. I've always known in the back of my mind that mathematicians were secretly despised and looked down upon by many, but it's a bad feeling to see it become so mainstream.

New comment by traes in "What should we tell our students?"

traes — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 07:31:12 +0000

It's quite amusing that this mistake gets made on every single one of these guest posts when the first words on the page are "This is a guest post by Álvaro Lozano-Robledo" and the first paragraph starts with "I would like to give Terry my heartfelt thanks for giving me the opportunity to contribute a post to his blog." It's pretty clear that everyone is skimming these at best. Maybe he should put the disclaimer in a bigger font or something.

New comment by traes in "Navier–Stokes Lost in Translation"

traes — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 22:29:00 +0000

This same thing happened back in the 10 advances in math and CS release a month or two ago. The non sofic group construction relied on false prior literature. They realized this and fixed it in the lean program but didn't modify it in the writeup, so the written proof was both incorrect as stated and did not correspond to the lean proof. I was surprised how little press it got at the time, it seems like a huge risk factor.

New comment by traes in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

traes — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:25:29 +0000

My point is it is crazy to make public claims about how important or not important a mathematical result is when you can't spell Riemann. Yes, it technically doesn't matter, but it betrays a damning lack of familiarity with introductory mathematics.

New comment by traes in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

traes — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:24:14 +0000

The mathematicians don't make this mistake, I assure you. I doubt there is a math professor on planet earth who would spell Riemann as Reinmann. In fact, I imagine no one who has ever heard the name pronounced would do so.

New comment by traes in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

traes — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:17:25 +0000

I just don't understand how it happens. If they had ever taken an intro to real analysis class they would learn to spell his name. If they were just parroting what an AI told them... shouldn't they still just say his name? An individual could just be dyslexic or mistaken but it seems to be a substantial volume. I guess they just don't care enough about it to commit the correct name to memory, only remembering the "pattern" of the name and filling in the spelling via guesswork?

New comment by traes in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

traes — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:59:04 +0000

GitHub is a significantly worse place to store important results than Arxiv. Of course, slop does not belong on Arxiv, buy slop should also not get published.

New comment by traes in "Sharing AI progress in mathematics"

traes — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 22:56:28 +0000

Not to pick on you specifically, but as someone who spends a lot of time unproductively reading AI math discourse it's truly shocking how incapable all the supposed math enthusiasts are of spelling Riemann.

New comment by traes in "Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)"

traes — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 17:37:41 +0000

Hmm, I'm not so sure. You may have never had a truly horrible math teacher. I distinctly remember learning matrix multiplication in high school for the first time. We were taught the algorithm without any motivation at all. Not a single picture was drawn, she just did some examples and then passed out a giant worksheet. I didn't learn linear algebra in that class. If Grant Sanderson had taught it I'm sure I would have.

New comment by traes in "Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)"

traes — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 08:07:24 +0000

> The insane popularity of channels such as 3Blue1Brown suggests that a lot of people do.

I don't think this is true.

First of all, the fact that watching videos is not a sufficient way to learn math does not mean that videos cannot be an excellent supplement for learning math. 3B1B's linear algebra videos for example are wonderful tools for gaining geometric understanding and motivation behind why things are the way the are in linear algebra, but of course they won't teach you how to invert a matrix. (He even says something to this effect explicitly many times throughout the series, if I recall.) Not everyone who watches those videos is engaging shallowly with math just because they're watching videos about it, there's plenty of value for serious students as well.

Your next argument might be that the sheer number of views indicates an unrealistic volume of serious students. This is true, but it still doesn't indicate that people think watching videos is a good way to learn math; in particular, nothing says they're watching those videos because they're trying to learn math. They're beautiful and interesting and well put together videos, and I'm sure many people enjoy watching them passively fully conscious of the fact that they aren't actually deeply learning math. I don't think there's anything wrong with that!

I'm sure there is a subset of viewers who think they're actually learning math by merely watching videos, but I'm willing to bet it's a relatively small fraction.

New comment by traes in "Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)"

traes — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:53:42 +0000

This is the single most popular opinion about learning math.

New comment by traes in "Math's pedagogical curse – Grant Sanderson [video] (2023)"

traes — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 01:53:02 +0000

(2023)

New comment by traes in "Show HN: Yantra – an LALR(1) parser generator for C++"

traes — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 04:56:01 +0000

I recall reading in the past that the primary reason parser generators aren't used for production compilers is the difficulty of making them produce useful error messages on malformed code. (Of course, the need for fine tuned optimizations also plays a role). Is this still true, or have parser generators caught up in this regard?

New comment by traes in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

traes — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 05:29:00 +0000

Because the shithole countries are poor and rife with violence that is hostile to operating a profitable company? Obviously?

New comment by traes in "The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence"

traes — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:28:02 +0000

Regarding 1, it's not clear what you want them to actually do. Would you rather they just gave up, rolled over and died instead of at least trying to rescue their field? What is to be gained from considering this?