Hacker News: wbl

New comment by wbl in "RacketCon Is Saturday"

wbl — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:12:49 +0000

Hygenic macros and the DSL they enable are fantastic ways to prototype things that then inspired stuff like LINQ.

New comment by wbl in "Responsible Release of AI-Generated Mathematics"

wbl — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 05:46:29 +0000

"There is no royal road to Geometry" - Euclid. Mathematical knowledge isn't from tutoring but doing. And no one is against the AI helping explain the tricky parts to help you practice. Rather it's about dumping a giant bunch of low quality text with some Lean claiming a big result is done.

New comment by wbl in "U.S. postal inspectors shut down website selling counterfeit postage labels"

wbl — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 21:00:44 +0000

Because the redacted bits tell you what the crooks are doing wrong.

New comment by wbl in "Scientists build most accurate atomic clock"

wbl — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:11:48 +0000

There are ways using modulated lasers to read out small rubidium cells vs the complexities of the lamp approach.

New comment by wbl in "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"

wbl — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:25:07 +0000

There was a problem with the name: toxic mine trailings weren't what was wanted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_Tunnel

New comment by wbl in "LRU is harder to beat than the KV-cache papers suggest"

wbl — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:22:05 +0000

Its only high quality of this their thoughts. Autotranslation is different from choosing to have AI shape the expression permanently.

New comment by wbl in "Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies"

wbl — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 04:34:44 +0000

Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.

New comment by wbl in "CIA Releases President's Daily Briefs in Commemoration of 9/11"

wbl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 21:51:43 +0000

The PDB contains multiple topics.

New comment by wbl in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

wbl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 18:55:14 +0000

Open problems are not that yardstick. Fermat's Last Theorem is the result of Wiles and Wiles-Taylor, but without key results from Serre, Ribet, Ihara, Langlands-Tunnels, and Frey's program none of what Wiles did would work. But Wiles did get the prize. Nowadays I think the inputs have shrunk a bit by doing more in the R=T theorem so less other cleverness needed.

New comment by wbl in "Houthis 'take control' of key island in global shipping route"

wbl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 16:05:06 +0000

The engineering library of your local college has all the information needed for ballistic guidance systems.

New comment by wbl in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

wbl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:12:48 +0000

They were over takeoff velocity at that point and could have bounced up in the air and waited for the thrust to come. Would have been sketchy but better than what did happen.

New comment by wbl in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

wbl — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 01:29:48 +0000

There is one thing an airline never wants to have happen and it is a fatal accident. Everything else is secondary. Having one caused by corporate policy would lead to mass exodus of passengers.

New comment by wbl in "Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]"

wbl — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:46:47 +0000

And OpenAI confirmed it!

New comment by wbl in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

wbl — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:19:21 +0000

The theorem might not be encoded correctly, as happened with the Riemann hypothesis thanks to how numbers are encoded.

New comment by wbl in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

wbl — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:18:23 +0000

Very careful human examination. This can be tricky.

New comment by wbl in "New York Times and The Athletic workers demand company scrap Kalshi deal"

wbl — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:57:35 +0000

Insider trading is legal in commodities markets. If I am engaged in a hedging transaction I am doing so because I know about risks that I want to offload, and the buyer does also. You don't come to commodities markets without information.

New comment by wbl in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

wbl — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:58:50 +0000

The government does not control the words you or I use to refer to things.

New comment by wbl in "Google avoids a breakup of its ad tech business"

wbl — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:31:05 +0000

Standard Oil was sued for keeping low prices thanks to vertical integration prompting the classic quip about antitrust litigation.

New comment by wbl in "The American Worker vs. the Most Qualified"

wbl — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:20:14 +0000

US higher education is that pipeline now, and it didn't exist in the 1930's and 1940's the way it does now.

New comment by wbl in "Saab has unveiled its A3 collaborative combat aircraft concept"

wbl — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 05:17:31 +0000

VTOL opens up a lot of fun basing options. I'm a little surprised Finland eschewed it.