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9question1

149 karma · joined May 25, 2018

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9question1··on A misalignment of AI in mathematics
That's precisely the problem though. You cannot still read and understand an AI written proof at the current skill level of the AI being applied, because they're orders of magnitude longer than human written proofs even when they don't need to be, and spend most of that length on the parts that aren't important. This has been really thoroughly documented by expert mathematicians who are engaging with AI in public like Terence Tao and showing in detail how much work it takes working alongside AI to figure out how to understand AI generated proofs. With human generated proofs that process is forced to happen before publishing the proof because the new style of AI generated proofs validated only by formal verification is supplanting the old human peer review process that forced the burden of understanding onto the publisher and not the reader.
9question1··on The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war
Probably talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wooden_ox. This page suggests this may be a bit of a myth
9question1··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
That depends. Inflation is a measure of the cost of living in terms of currency. It can be high either if goods and services required for living become scarce, or if currency supply increases. Currency supply increasing does affect asset prices.
9question1··on For Linux kernel vulnerabilities, there is no heads-up to distributions
`it's technically possible to pass the blame to other people` presupposes that the blame belongs to the reporter unless effort is taken to "shift" it. This is just an inaccurate worldview as many people have pointed out clearly in this discussion. If there's a vulnerability in software the blame lies with people who wrote and maintain the software, not someone who finds and discloses a vulnerability. The person who should `check in on the status of the fixes` is the person who owns the thing being fixed, which is very much the kernel and distro maintainers and not the security researcher. It is you who are willfully shifting blame to an innocent party
9question1··on The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
You're mentally stuck in 2009-2015. The world has moved on and Spain is now significantly outperforming Germany in growth (obviously not yet in wealth, which is the integral of growth over much longer time periods). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-YZeqk8NCQ&t=456s
9question1··on Pharma is a small component of US health care spending
The problem with this argument is that pharmaceutical companies are private businesses trying to make a profit, not charities. If it were truly unprofitable to sell drugs in, say, Canada or France, pharmaceutical companies would just not sell their drugs in those countries. It is _less_ profitable to sell drugs in those countries than America but still profitable, which is why they still try to capture those markets. If America fixed this imbalance by forcing a lowering of drug prices in the American market, there's no reason to believe that this would cause raising of prices elsewhere. The only way this would be possible is if it were truly unprofitable to sell the drugs elsewhere, which can't be the case since these are corporations not charities. The real impact would be to slow down new drug development, since existing drugs are already profitable to sell everywhere in the world even in countries with more regulation, but if America fixed its market by lowering drug prices for Americans, the total profitability of pharmaceuticals would decrease, decreasing the incentive to create new pharmaceuticals. That's a totally different and very plausible impact. Rising drug prices for existing drugs in other countries is not a plausible impact.
9question1··on Is Zig's new writer unsafe?
I think it's likely that both the blog poster and the maintainer are being perceived as more negative in tone than the intent / reality. They both included disclaimers "I must be doing something wrong. And if I am, I'm sorry." and "whatever, it’s their blog so they can do what they want." They're also both giving critical feedback "But, if I'm not, this is a problem right?" "Kinda wish the author would attempt to collaborate rather than write stuff like this" but in both cases the criticism is extremely mildly worded compared to most toxic online discourse. This seems... great? Isn't it good we're able to disagree so politely? It's not toxic to have a disagreement or to give critical feedback. We don't need to all pretend to agree with each other all the time or be happy with each other in order to have a civil discourse.
9question1··on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust
These days isn't the solution to this just "ask <insert LLM of choice here>" to read the code and write the documentation"?
9question1··on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust
I love Typescript but I think I disagree with this. The point of the post seems to be that features of the Rust compiler help enforce that you use certain runtime / environment / domain semantics in ways that eliminate common classes of errors. That's never going to prevent all errors, but preventing large groups of common errors so that you only have to manually remember a smaller set of runtime/environment/domain semantics could have some value.
9question1··on Show HN: Nue – Apps lighter than a React button
But the OP did implement a fully featured app as the Nue comparison half of the benchmark. I have never used Nue and don't know if I ever would. I just think to be fair to the OP, even if incremental cost declines as you keep adding stuff in React, there's no way it is negative, which means the benchmark you asked for logically must have a similar result?
9question1··on Show HN: Tach – Visualize and untangle your Python codebase
This. It's ridiculous how often people complain about the design of free software. If you don't like it, just don't use it! Use something else! Build your own! Or fork it to work in the way you described that you'd prefer - you can do that yourself if you really want since the source is available
9question1··on The Amazon Appstore for Android devices will be discontinued on August 20, 2025
Walled gardens are good because if you insist on picking your fruits only from the wilderness due to moral principles you're gonna get mauled by a bear some time. Sure, you might prioritize feeling morally superior, but the majority of society is more practical
9question1··on Interview with Jeff Atwood, Co-Founder of Stack Overflow
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2025/01/elon-mu...

"Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool."

This is not necessarily what I would consider transparent or fair. FWIW I do think government can provide value, but I think folks who don't live in America don't understand how dramatically different and worse the implementation of government is in America from many other countries who sometimes do get value from some aspects of government even if the goals are similar.

9question1··on Cheating Is All You Need
It's an ad. The key point he works up to is `Put another way, you need a sidecar database. The data moat needs to be fast and queryable. This is a Search Problem!` And then of course this is hosted on the corporate blog of a code search platform. It's `make sure you have good prompt context` but trying to define that specifically as the thing they're selling
9question1··on Doomsday Book (2006) [pdf]
You greatly overestimate the quality of the will of the people. Just because you don't like certain outcomes because they are stupid doesn't mean that those outcomes aren't what people wanted. Democratic institutions are a much more accurate way of reflecting the will of the people than most other attempts to measure that, for many reasons including the existence of people who don't respond to surveys but vote.
9question1··on Why are Americans paying so much more for healthcare than they used to?
"Health care should be strictly preventative and diagnostic" runs into the problem that not everyone agrees what that means. For a while most Europeans thought that leeching yourself was preventative medicine, or Japanese people thought removing the outer layer of your skin by rubbing it hard with towels was, etc. Nowadays some people have forgotten that vaccines work and don't want to pay for other people to get them.

Health care in the US is definitely stupid and bad and can easily be made better than it is, but all the easy sounding obvious right answers that would fix everything about some aspect of life usually don't pan out in practice.

9question1··on Why is it so hard to buy things that work well? (2022)
It might not be enough for you, but maybe you're not the target audience. His blog is quite popular so clearly it's enough for a lot of folks.

What is "good" communication depends on the social context of the communication, the audience, etc. A novel probably shouldn't be written in the same style as a project status update document. IMO one of the downsides of people in our modern education system being drilled on the "one true way" of communicating for a small handful of contexts (position paper essays, tactical business memos) is that they begin to think that is the only way to communicate ever in any context to any audience and forget that different people have different tastes and in a lot of contexts catering to your audience's taste is what matters.

9question1··on Big advance on simple-sounding math problem was a century in the making
https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0702396 is a very thorough answer to this question by a very well respected mathematician
9question1··on MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract
Making Elsevier reconsider its practices is a self-defeating goal. Pay-per-access research publishing should be driven out of business. The majority of institutions funding the actual research being done are publicly funded or receive large public tax breaks, so the resulting research should be publicly accessible, and the peer review process should be managed and funded within a similar network of institutions, not by an oligarchy of rent-seeking private entities.
9question1··on America’s Transit Exceptionalism
Too much bureaucracy is often at fault, but seems very unlikely in this particular case. Are all the other countries mentioned in the article less bureaucratized or regulated? There seems to be a strong correlation between countries that have good public transit and invest heavily in public transit and countries that are perceived as having too much regulatory red tape (EU, East Asia). If that's the case, how could this possibly be the problem here?
9question1··on What makes e natural? (2004)
"A base of 2 is useful because there are several small positive integers whose base-two logarithms are also integers." What? No! Base 2 is natural in exactly the same way that base e is natural, except for discrete domains instead of continuous domains. There is a unique family of functions for which the rate of change of the function is equal to the current value of the function everywhere. On discrete domains it's some scaled translation of 2^x, and on continuous domains it's some scaled translation of e^x. "Some scaled translation" here is accounting for the fact that the function is only uniquely exactly 2^x or e^x if we also add the constraint that f(0)=1.
9question1··on 3M executives convinced a scientist forever chemicals in human blood were safe
The stock market represents a tiny and shrinking sliver of the overall economy. https://businessreview.studentorg.berkeley.edu/why-your-favo.... In many cases there is no distributed class of shareholders, just a concentrated set of owners, so both this and the argument it was responding to about wiping out shareholders are irrelevant.

For companies that are publicly traded, if you were to wipe out the shareholders, that would disproportionately hurt financial institutions that pick and choose stocks and concentrate their holdings and exert influence on the corporate policy over passive investments from the average Joe's retirement fund. To the extent that it's "just a tax", it's a tax that's progressively higher on the people more likely to be at fault.

9question1··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)
The reason that pay transparency laws (which probably don't apply to this position, but exist in other states) require salary ranges and not a specific number is precisely to account for the fact that different applicants with different levels of qualification may merit different compensation in the same role based on the impact they can have. So "depends on the qualifications of the individual applicant" is kind of besides the point; a wide range can account for that.

"I'm not the King of Hiring" is fair though, if you're in a jurisdiction where there is no transparency law and you're not setting policy for your company, you may well be required not to provide this information publicly and that's just how it is.

9question1··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2024)
This was a really remarkable way to undermine your argument. It's possible to make a strong philosophical argument that government regulation of salary transparency is unnecessary or harmful. This is not that.

The fact that there exist some types of private information for which we recognize a right to maintain privacy does not at all imply it is morally wrong for the government to recognize a public right for some other type of information (salary ranges). In the US there exist both the Freedom of Information Act and the Fourth Amendment guarding against warrantless search. It's obviously clear that the government recognizes the right to demand public transparency for some types of information and the right to protect privacy for other information. You've made no attempt whatsoever to explain why this type of information should fall in one category or the other, just gestured to the existence of one of the categories and implied that this proves that the information in question belongs there.

9question1··on Ex-athletic director arrested for framing principal with AI-generated voice
You underestimate the laziness of most humans. To be clear, screenshots are still not trustworthy. But the "negligible" relatively more effort could matter in practice.

Cryptography sometimes seem to rely on a stronger version this too. With enough computing power, you can brute force a lot. Some authentication seems just expensive enough that only a nation-state actor would have enough resources to break it, and then rests on the assumption that the small subset of people who could put in enough effort won't care enough to do anything worth being concerned about.

This is also why, say, people lock their doors even if they have windows.

9question1··on This is a teenager
Is your concrete proposal that data should only be allowed to be collected and shared by people with a specific agenda to push?
9question1··on Rolldown: Rollup compatible bundler written in Rust
I don't know what OP is referring to here, but from discussions like this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4417485 It seems like circa 2010 folks were referring to JavaScript as "fast" because it was more performant in some ways than other interpreted languages like Ruby and Python and those were the only major popular options at the time that people would consider for some use cases. The event loop model of JavaScript led to some creative use cases for having a single-threaded application handle many highly parallel requests that require very little CPU usage or computation but a large amount of blocking I/O, which I think was also pitched as "fast". But I think it's always been uncontroversial that interpreted languages like JS, Ruby, and Python are all "slow" compared to compiled ones for CPU heavy use cases.
9question1··on OpenAI: 'The New York Times Paid Someone to Hack Us'
"And even then, they had to feed the tool portions of the very articles they sought to elicit verbatim passages of, virtually all of which already appear on multiple public websites."

Getting OpenAI to spit out part of the prompt you provided in its output, and then claiming that it had been trained on that, seems dishonest. It shouldn't be illegal, but it also shouldn't be the basis of a successful lawsuit unless there's other context missing here.

9question1··on The changing face of post-pandemic New York City
This is true when housing demand is controlled entirely by how many people live in the area. However, large metro hubs like NYC and London have a larger percentage of the housing supply consumed by rich people who buy part-time housing so they have somewhere nice to crash when they visit once in a while, or so they have somewhere nice for tourists to crash where they can make money off Airbnb. In that context, net emigration does not necessarily rule out a tight housing supply.
9question1··on The Domestication of SARS-CoV-2 into a Seasonal Infection by Viral Variants
Actually, gain of function research that's been criticized has been criticized mainly for increasing virulence. The post you're responding to here is asking about in vitro research to decrease virulence.
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