Hacker News: wbl

New comment by wbl in "Felony Bench"

wbl — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:18:36 +0000

Mens rea requirements are per crime and can vary wildly. Its difference between murder and manslaughter. The CFAA requires knowingly which is tough to prove.

New comment by wbl in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

wbl — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 21:17:17 +0000

"A Christmas Carol" will never be a great novel, but there is a reason it is beloved the world over for what it is.

New comment by wbl in "An elliptic curve of rank ≥ 30"

wbl — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:59:57 +0000

BSD is hard to appreciate because it connects a function that only now is known to have the right properties for the expression on the left hand side to a group we know next to nothing about, plus other mysterious factors each of which could be a few months to really understand. Proving the function exists? That went a bit beyond what was needed for Fermat's Last Theorem. Number theory demands breadth as well as depth. So no surprise it's hard to understand.

New comment by wbl in "An elliptic curve of rank ≥ 30"

wbl — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:18:16 +0000

The rank of an elliptic curve is expected to be at most one by a combination of a simple heuristic from Cohen and Lenstra and a deep BSD consequence (but I think the case needed is known). However we know of families with rank 15, and sometimes those ranks go up at particular points.

The record before this morning was 29 and people suspected that was as high as it got. When we learn how this curve was obtained that might change.

New comment by wbl in "Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full"

wbl — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 03:35:36 +0000

Its easier on a system that doesn't need to do broadcast distribution and with servers available.

New comment by wbl in "How Go detects struct copies with sync.noCopy"

wbl — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:33:52 +0000

You can very easily define one yourself.

New comment by wbl in "SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX"

wbl — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:53:35 +0000

Extended double has some niche and quite useful for its application properties. You can for instance simulate 128 bit floats more easily with it.

New comment by wbl in "Firefox for iOS now has a native adblocker"

wbl — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:59:37 +0000

Not all markets or manufacturers will have the same degree of vertical integration and that's ok.

New comment by wbl in "Abdominal fat predicts heart disease risk better than BMI"

wbl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 22:53:20 +0000

Different athletes look different. A runner vs a Olympic powerlifter vs a quarterback.

New comment by wbl in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

wbl — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 01:28:03 +0000

US was able to recover, rest of world has not.

New comment by wbl in "Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election"

wbl — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 18:44:44 +0000

The chaos arguably starts with the Coalition and Cameron, and the Brexit vote and tuition fees reversal.

New comment by wbl in "What garbage collection actually costs"

wbl — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:49:46 +0000

That's where write barriers and the like come in. The cost varies by implementation and language.

New comment by wbl in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

wbl — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 14:24:56 +0000

If you buy yuan just to turn around and spend them you aren't holding the yuan.

New comment by wbl in "2026 Eclipse Webcams"

wbl — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:23:11 +0000

I'm watching that one in Egypt.

New comment by wbl in "England set to be one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C"

wbl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:07:44 +0000

RFK has been the person behind the antivax movement for a long time.

New comment by wbl in "$580M undersea cable rerouted to avoid the grave of Dobby the House Elf"

wbl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:03:53 +0000

Slough

New comment by wbl in "$580M undersea cable rerouted to avoid the grave of Dobby the House Elf"

wbl — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:03:15 +0000

Beaches are extremely dynamic environments and can heal in ways that other areas can't.

New comment by wbl in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

wbl — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:13:59 +0000

I've cited letters from Serre to Tate in my dissertation: this is the source for what's known as Faltings-Serre.

New comment by wbl in "Docker Sandboxes – Disposable, isolated sandboxes for AI agents"

wbl — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:30:06 +0000

The AI launches new kernel bugs as matter of course.

New comment by wbl in ""Code was never the hard part" is an insult to all programmers"

wbl — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:12:28 +0000

The infra org has to also understand their internal customer!