Hacker News: xamuel

New comment by xamuel in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

xamuel — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 03:32:20 +0000

>alimony

Why on earth should you be on the hook for alimony given your circumstances and situation? That makes zero sense.

New comment by xamuel in "“I just chose words carefully”"

xamuel — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 04:48:24 +0000

I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said.

I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.

The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf

New comment by xamuel in "GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven"

xamuel — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 04:07:39 +0000

I don't know if it's OSX itself or one of the common GUI engines implementations on OSX, but I notice a lot of apps (including Firefox when you try to save a file which would overwrite another file) will have popup modals with multiple buttons and there's no way to click the non-default button with just keyboard.

For example, in Firefox, trying to save a file when a file by that name already exists, you get a "Cancel" or "Replace" prompt and you can "Cancel" by pressing return, but if you want to "Replace", you apparently HAVE to use mouse or trackpad!?!

New comment by xamuel in "Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9"

xamuel — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:06:44 +0000

The Beatles absolutely still exist! They published a new single in 2023 ("Now and Then") and they surgically injected slices from archive footage into new footage for the music video to make it look like young Lennon and Harrison perform alongside elder McCartney and Ringo.

New comment by xamuel in "EEG shows brain can simultaneous encode two speech streams"

xamuel — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:40:32 +0000

And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.

New comment by xamuel in "Sleep research led to a new sleep apnea drug"

xamuel — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:49:23 +0000

The drug is called AD109, but the title seems misleading as the drug is apparently still under trial, though it has shown good results there so far

New comment by xamuel in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

xamuel — Thu, 21 May 2026 07:17:05 +0000

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" to be the moment when the already-trained weights are sent to the GPU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)

New comment by xamuel in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

xamuel — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:25:38 +0000

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).

New comment by xamuel in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

xamuel — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:19:39 +0000

Before the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus, enormous ingenuity and whole careers were spent doing calculations which the fundamental theorem trivialized. To be clear, I'm not just saying that the people involved were doing lots of mechanical arithmetic (though they did that, too). I'm saying they did creative, inspired, nontrivial mathematics to calculate certain things, all of which was then trivialized and made obsolete by the fundamental theorem of calculus.

New comment by xamuel in "An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry"

xamuel — Thu, 21 May 2026 02:09:41 +0000

Mathematics is a bridge to what Neoplatonists call the intelligible world. Currently, mathematicians navigate that world on foot. It's exciting to think that soon we might have cars and trains in that world so we don't have to painstakingly walk everywhere.

New comment by xamuel in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

xamuel — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:30:29 +0000

I find that I don't necessarily mind when a book repeats itself, and a good helping of anecdotes can help a point get across. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Trying to distill a book down to the minimum logically equivalent length is like eating the smallest possible portion of a supplement one time and then wondering why it doesn't do anything for you.

New comment by xamuel in "Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests"

xamuel — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:50:39 +0000

It happens specifically when I wander out of network coverage. If I stay in my airbnb where I have coverage, then 0 spam

New comment by xamuel in "Three men are facing charges in Toronto SMS Blaster arrests"

xamuel — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:15:40 +0000

Agree. I do a lot of travel and in 3rd-world countries it is quite common to get 2g spam, it's really unacceptable that Apple doesn't offer a way to turn off 2g short of lockdown mode.

New comment by xamuel in "The Legibility of Serif and Sans Serif Typefaces (2022)"

xamuel — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:09:36 +0000

One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show password"), at least as of MacOS Monterey 12.1. I also see them as almost identical in my browser's URL bar (Firefox 148.0.2 on aforesaid version of OSX) which isn't just an annoyance but might even be a security concern!

New comment by xamuel in "The Legibility of Serif and Sans Serif Typefaces (2022)"

xamuel — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:05:05 +0000

All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."

Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.

New comment by xamuel in "The Legibility of Serif and Sans Serif Typefaces (2022)"

xamuel — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 11:02:03 +0000

I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually copy for whatever reason. Does the article address this in any way? Or is the context limited to "real" language where that's not as much of an issue?

New comment by xamuel in "The Legibility of Serif and Sans Serif Typefaces (2022)"

xamuel — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:59:11 +0000

Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.

New comment by xamuel in "Looks like it is happening"

xamuel — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 13:12:13 +0000

On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.

New comment by xamuel in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

xamuel — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 07:07:56 +0000

I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!

The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)

New comment by xamuel in "Looks like it is happening"

xamuel — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:58:48 +0000

Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.