HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

bhk

972 karma · joined December 6, 2015

Proudly preserving the wine-whine and pin-pen distinctions.
submissionscomments
bhk··on “Weird” is a weird word
In America in the 70s, and yes.
bhk··on “Weird” is a weird word
The increase in usage in the latter half of the 20th century is interesting to me, because I recall being surprised in elementary school that "weird" was a dictionary word. I thought it was informal slang among kids, having associated its usage not with adults but with those my age, who generally found its sound amusing.
bhk··on At-home test for infected ticks could improve Lyme Disease diagnosis
Ah, yes, climate change, which also explains how Lyme disease, first diagnosed in the US in the northern midwest and northeast, later spread southward. I'm sure it works in mysterious ways in your neighborhood as well.
bhk··on LLMs reward expertise
Working with the browser technology stack is living in a dystopian world of overcomplicated, often duplicative features defined in many thousands of pages of specifications, often revised and/or contradicted by other specifications, many of which do not apply to the reality of actual implementations, so encyclopedic knowledge of the specifications is not enough -- you need familiarity with everything written on the internet about these APIs. Accessing even conceptually simple features can require navigating through multiple APIs that purport to provide that feature, most of which have fatal shortcomings in design, specification, or real-world support. AI is a godsend here, at least for now ... I wonder what the impending post-human-developer "model collapse" will yield.
bhk··on What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers
Blackpill depression post complaining about "blackpill depression circklejerks"...
bhk··on A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
There's a lot missing in this article. Obvious follow-up questions unanswered.
bhk··on No way to parse integers in C (2022)
Not just the string-related functions. If you want robust error checking, re-entrant code, and bounds checking performed in library functions (instead of performing bespoke validations all across your code base), you have some work to do. Yes, some improvements have been tacked on over the years, but many problems ("current locale", for one) remain endemic.

In my experience, the worst part of the C standard library is not its existence, but the fact that so many developers insist on slavishly using it directly, instead of safer wrappers.

bhk··on Google's AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back
Any opinion voiced on the Internet can manipulate AI responses. Can Google suppress that?
bhk··on Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years
"The more laws, the less justice." -- Cicero
bhk··on New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?
Thanks for the references.

I think you will agree that the bulk of your comment employs a post-set-theory nomenclature.

Regarding "if you were to choose a point completely at random, the odds of that point being another rational is zero", I ponder the question of how one might casually "choose" a value with infinite entropy.

bhk··on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
Ah, but it's worse than this. The truly ambitious ladder climber creates not just unnecessarily complicated abstractions, but organizations. Processes for people to follow. Infrastructure for people to maintain. Committees to vet changes. Standing meetings.
bhk··on Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
Let me guess: the point of the interview was to see if he was a "team player".
bhk··on New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?
I think you are getting away from my point, which pertains to what the article said, which is that mathematicians thought there were "gaps". What mathematician? Can I see the original quote?

The linguistic sleight-of-hand is what I challenge. What is this "gap" in which there are no numbers?

- A reader would naturally assume the word refers to a range. But if that is the meaning, then mathematicians never believed there were gaps between numbers.

- Or could "gap" refer to a single number, like sqrt(2)? If so, it obviously is not a gap without a number.

- Or does it refer to gaps between rational numbers? In other words, not all numbers are rational? Mathematicians did in fact believe this, from antiquity even ... but that remains true!

Regarding this naive construction you are referring to: did it precede set theory? What definition of "gap" would explain the article's treatment of it?

bhk··on New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?
That's not a "gap" that you find by "zooming in". And how can it be a gap when it is occupied?
bhk··on New evidence that Cantor plagiarized Dedekind?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Can you cite any claims by mathematicians that there were "gaps"? It isn't even true for rational numbers that you can identify an unoccupied "gap".
bhk··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
And by the way, what the Hell is up with all these people claiming that two spaces is an obsolete typewriter-era pre-proportional-font thing? Narrow proportional spaces make two spaces after a period MORE important for visually separating sentences. Is it old fashioned to think logically?
bhk··on Sizing chaos
Funny enough, vanity sizing strikes there too. The purported waist size of a pair of Levi's is off by almost three inches.

One might argue that the size on their label is not supposed to indicate the size of the garment waistband, but the waist size of the wearer who would find it comfortable, but even with that interpretation it doesn't work out right.

bhk··on Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level
Hold on there. High fiber consumption increases the excretion of cholesterol, by reducing the reabsorption of the cholesterol in bile. The liver produces cholesterol for bile, which mixes with our food in the duodenum and aids absorption of fats. Most of this cholesterol is then re-absorbed by the small intestines. By increasing bulk, fiber reduces the amount that is re-absorbed.

Effects on but biome are real too, and apparently beneficial, and may factor in, but it isn't the only (or necessarily the primary) mechanism for reducing serum cholesterol.

bhk··on Claude Code daily benchmarks for degradation tracking
According to Anthropic: "We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load."

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-...

bhk··on Eat Real Food
1g/lb is in fact a popular target among bodybuilders.

Much research indicates 0.5 to 0.7 g/lb provides most of the benefits, with continuing but diminishing gains above 0.7 g/lb. And the benefit is not just for "body building", but also for minimizing muscle loss during weight loss and improving insulin sensitivity. Other research indicates we may benefit from higher levels as we age.

bhk··on What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?
It's not just attention to detail. They seem to have abandoned some core design principles like visibility/discoverability.
bhk··on The worrying kink in this job openings, unemployment curve
$11.79 in my neighborhood.
bhk··on ProofOfThought: LLM-based reasoning using Z3 theorem proving
Re: "99% of the time" ... this is an ambiguous sample space. Soundness of results clearly depends on the questions being asked. For what set of questions does the 99% guarantee hold?
bhk··on Serverless Horrors
Consider this analogy: Instead of using a root command shell, it is wise to use an account with appropriately restricted capabilities, to limit the downsides of mistakes. Cloud services support the notion of access control, but not the notion of network resource usage limits. It's an architectural flaw.

Or do you always log in as root, like a real man, relying purely on your experience and competence to avoid fat-finger mistakes?

bhk··on Researchers value null results, but struggle to publish them
Ironic. Isn't Nature the worst offender?
bhk··on I'm Unsatisfied with Easing Functions
Oscullation/"anticipation" in transitions is so gimmicky and cartoonish. Living things don't move like that, and mechanical things don't unless they are broken, chintzy, or poorly designed (underdamped).
bhk··on Scientists reveal a widespread but unidentified psychological phenomenon
"Scientists reveal a previously unidentified term for a widely known phenomenon"
bhk··on Malware found in official gravityforms plugin indicating supply chain breach
What does this impact? 90% of sites on the internet? Just a couple of low-traffic sites?
bhk··on I extracted the safety filters from Apple Intelligence models
In other words, to whatever extent they can control or manipulate the behavior of users, they will. In the limit t->∞, probably true.
bhk··on Peano arithmetic is enough, because Peano arithmetic encodes computation
In what way does analysis require incomputable reals?
Page 1 of 12Next →