Hacker News: whatshisface

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

whatshisface — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 02:19:51 +0000

I thought technology was supposed to liberate us from the fields, but it turns out that's what wealth is for, and the wealthy want us back in the fields (no more escape through special training or skill).

New comment by whatshisface in "Namecheap just seized and disabled all my domains"

whatshisface — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 19:42:31 +0000

These companies may as well be citing Ron Swanson's park ordinances for all the relevance those regulations have to their data collection demands.

New comment by whatshisface in "Claude reveals ECDSA curve origins"

whatshisface — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 20:46:56 +0000

>if I ask Claude "how do I make cocaine"

I am amazed at how a technical gloss can obscure basic rights. That's legal! It's in chemistry / agronomy books, freely available in libraries. I have the right to tell you how that is done, and you have the right to read what I write.

New comment by whatshisface in "How to Formalize All of Mathematics"

whatshisface — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:25:14 +0000

In principle, a computer can check a nonconstructive proof. I don't know if that's possible in Lean. The interpretation of proofs still assumes the consistency of their axioms.

New comment by whatshisface in "Passkeys are not a trap"

whatshisface — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 23:05:55 +0000

I would like passkeys if they had an ssh key option (something I can store on my device and transfer).

New comment by whatshisface in "The Four Colour Theorem: The first time machines mogged mathematicians"

whatshisface — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:24:12 +0000

Maybe the new heuristic auto tactics will lower the cost of finding the human proof of the four color theorem enough to be affordable in the current environment.

New comment by whatshisface in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

whatshisface — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:43:04 +0000

Investors have a sound economic reason to diversify but your argument works great for pundits.

New comment by whatshisface in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

whatshisface — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 19:42:23 +0000

Writing code is less than 10% of the average business.

New comment by whatshisface in "AI models can provably hide arbitrary capabilities"

whatshisface — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 05:37:05 +0000

A forklift could destroy the earth if it lifted a continent.

New comment by whatshisface in "Clinical trial of a prion disease drug candidate begins enrolling participants"

whatshisface — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 18:09:11 +0000

Neurons are long lived. Most cells in your body are thrown away often.

New comment by whatshisface in "Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay"

whatshisface — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:43:17 +0000

Alas, in US art and civic culture, "you" refers to those eligible to serve in the armed forces.

New comment by whatshisface in "The Mathocalypse"

whatshisface — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:08:54 +0000

The ecosystem is (ahem) gated by hiring committees. There is no risk of AI replacement from the inside. "Replacement" is not even a possible movement. The funding for mathematics worldwide comes mostly from endowments, which are investment pools.

New comment by whatshisface in "The Mathocalypse"

whatshisface — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:03:14 +0000

I'll bite: none of this is real until I have learned something. OK, I am now listening. Does anyone want to make it real?

New comment by whatshisface in "The evolution of effective altruism"

whatshisface — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 23:02:10 +0000

This isn't an indicator, to be part of a culture war something has to be accepted as normal by half. Culture wars are driven by the shock of someone telling you the most normal thing about your upbringing and parent's values is in fact a horrible deviance. The article here is closer to, "we found something we can publish bad news about, without offending our funders."

New comment by whatshisface in "Improper redaction reveals Google Data Center water and electricity usage"

whatshisface — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 22:32:56 +0000

The thinking on display in this thread is something like,

"I needed to add a billing address field to the order flow, so I suggested we use Kafka to process shipping requests. My boss said the form field should turn red if an invalid address was entered, and in response, the team lead objected that Oracle charged too much for MySQL. I checked for a pricing page but found a 'call us' form. The CTO decided to go with Kafka, and told us that landlines are an obsolete platform."

New comment by whatshisface in "Celebrating the 100th birthday of the kidney donated to him as a teenager"

whatshisface — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:14:21 +0000

He's just on HN while he waits for the build (of the pyramids).

New comment by whatshisface in "On social reality in China"

whatshisface — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:48:51 +0000

Because we have a push-based knowledge culture that encompasses only what someone is willing to pay an advertisement channel to tell you.

New comment by whatshisface in "On social reality in China"

whatshisface — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 19:40:59 +0000

The Chinese equivalent of a dive with a good band is not ultra-commercialized international content available through western syndicates. If you want to get an idea of how hard they'd be to discover, try listing the American cultural rebels you know of (that are actually rebelling from something, not commercializing a 40 year old punk style).

New comment by whatshisface in "Pi 1.0"

whatshisface — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 01:01:32 +0000

If you paid DeepSeek directly, that would have been 1 to 10 cents. OpenRouter has a huge overhead due to their cache logic, I'm surprised they keep business coming in the door for tasks other than system prompt - output pairs.

New comment by whatshisface in "Singapore govt dating app uses Gale-Shapley stable marriage algorithm"

whatshisface — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:53:48 +0000

Go recheck your calculations, you'll notice something about their incentive in the case where you pay.