Hacker News Reader

Mathnerd314on Has Violence Against Teachers Become Accepted by Society?

Suspension and expulsion rates are closely watched, as well as graduation rates. Changes in these numbers trigger federal investigations. Meanwhile, disciplinary actions in general are closely watched for DEI/civil rights considerations and there is a significant pressure to under-report them because it makes the school look better.

Mathnerd314on When did Google get so weird?

for what it's worth, "he's never coming over dario meme" (word "meme" added) gives perfect AI answer

Mathnerd314on I'm sorry, you're not going to die from an AI-engineered supervirus

Or you could just play the original Pandemic https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/360724

I think that's one detail that this analysis glosses over is that you design the virus to mutate and develop lethality. So initially, it's just like, oh, another common cold, but then once it's infected a large number of people, then it mutates and starts being lethal.

Mathnerd314on Lawmakers added $1 to car insurance policies. That money paid for Flock cameras

To quote from https://www.txdmv.gov/sites/default/files/body-files/MVCPA_F...

Number of times an ALPR was deployed. 61,875

Number of LPR Deployments by taskforce investigators 42,878

Number of vehicles recovered from LPR detection 1,963

Number of Cleared Cases – Catalytic Converter Theft 1,658

Number of arrests from LPR detection 569

Number of identified/documented prolific catalytic converter theft offenders 266

Number of Catalytic Converter Theft bait operations 236

The problem is they don't define "deployments". There are ~13,500 ALPR cameras and they do thousands of plates per hour and neither of those numbers matches the deployment. My best guess is it is a targeted search and so a vehicle is recovered or a case is cleared 2-3 times out of every 100 times they search the database.

Regarding actual reduction, as another comment said, the amount of crime fluctuates with metal prices, pretty much lockstep. But at least they can lock the people away.

Mathnerd314on Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe

I read the title and the concept I had was to replace highly-paid CEOs with AI. Given the concept of co-ops etc. that seems like it would be a popular idea.

Mathnerd314on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)

A philosophical task manager, based on notable philosophers such as Baudrillard, Foucault, etc. It's been a fun game of reading these works, trying to distill their essence, and putting them through the LLMs to see what comes out. Currently it's not one task manager but rather many prototypes, and I'm trying to reconcile various design issues. In the same way that Marx's "philosophy" is essentially a "praxis" of political and economic power, which does not presuppose a "truth" but rather creates one, my task manager is a pragmatic tool for establishing the meaning of life.

Mathnerd314on Don't start a startup with the goal of getting acquired

It sounds like that was a good outcome, they sold out and got rich? There's definitely a stage that comes where a startup no longer needs founders.

Mathnerd314on Theo Conjecture solves 35-year-old math problem, finds a term no one predicted

Paper is easier to read https://www.researchgate.net/publication/410906746_The_Havel...

Mathnerd314on The AI Productivity Illusion

I think this calculation is bad? I mean, they take sand and produce AI chips, and then the AI chips turn electricity into entertainment. So highly productive use of resources. Global entertainment industry is $3 trillion, easily justifies investment when combined with coding usage. So restructuring the economy etc. - those are moonshots that are like the cherry on top.

Mathnerd314on I told them forced consent was unlawful. 5 years later it cost Elkjop €1.8M

There are some state laws - California, Virginia and Colorado, a bunch of others. And the SECURE Data Act currently in Congress. https://statescoop.com/house-subcommittee-secure-data-act-pr...

Mathnerd314on Even light drinking raises risk of cancer, heart disease, and early death

So I'm looking at Figure 2 of the study and it shows that risk is negative (I.e. it's a benefit) below 7 drinks per week or 1 drink per day. And then they say "There was no protective net effect of alcohol observed at any level of alcohol consumption." And then they discuss the observed protective effects and just say "this body of evidence [that we used] has substantial limitations". They also say "Readers should therefore consider both the point estimates and their associated CIs when interpreting the risk thresholds presented in this study." but then their CI indicates only 2+ drinks per day can cause statistically significant issues.

Overall, a very boring study. It would be more interesting if they published the code and we could play with the numbers, seeing as all the data they used is public, but we can't even do that.

Mathnerd314on U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse

This may help https://www.workboat.com/white-house-budget-would-slash-noaa...

The administration wanted to eliminate everything ocean-related, seems like they are doing it program by program and this is yet another. Probably explains the lack of context, this is like article 20 about program closures (and maybe 200+ more to go)

Mathnerd314on Removing the modem and GPS from my 2024 RAV4 hybrid

It is probably like with smart TV's where the value of the telemetry data ends up subsidizing a significant fraction of the hardware. Car manufacturers seem to be doing a lot of experiments with what they can charge for in terms of ongoing subscriptions. I am sure if they could show ads without it being considered distracting they would.

Mathnerd314on Why airlines are always going bankrupt

Maybe we need Uber for airlines. Pilots don't lose their skills, passengers always have demand, the issue is that pricing is too predictable. You could see this with skiplagged, there really is room for fare pricing innovation. Start by capturing the private luxury market, work down to commodity.

Mathnerd314on I don't want your PRs anymore

The author sounds like he actually responds to feature requests, though. Typical behavior I'm seeing is that the maintainer just never checks the issue tracker, or has it disabled, but is more likely to read PR's.

Mathnerd314on Nanopass Framework: Clean Compiler Creation Language

website is not up to date, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqVN1fGNpZw is not on there

Mathnerd314on Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

"Inference consumes 60–90% of total AI lifecycle costs." So shovel is not the right analogy, more like GPU = coal burning engine. And yes, coal was a big railroad expense, more so than financing construction debt.

Mathnerd314on A perfectable programming language

The author is named Alok, so I would expect alokscript to be a self-authored programming language. But I checked the GitHub profile and I don't see anything.

Mathnerd314on Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

Well, it's a little more than that, like they agreed to issue him a debit card

Mathnerd314on Study investigates how mass distribution of baseball bat affects performance

Yeah, it's like just ignoring the actual conclusions. I mean, it's easier to hit and then it hits less hard, which is actually good because professional baseball players generally hit it out of the park when they get a good hit. So the conclusion is actually completely opposite what the title of the article is - it's not the same. It is a substantial improvement.

Mathnerd314on Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz

to quote: "in the Persian Gulf today, the Navy grasps the reality of the circumstances, recognizing that it simply can’t sail into the strait without risk getting blown to smithereens by Iran’s missiles. Today, its carriers are stationed well outside the Gulf and the ranges of Iranian missiles."

Mathnerd314on Microsoft: Copilot is for entertainment purposes only

It is on Wikipedia under T-Bank, this seems the best source that announces the resolution: https://web.archive.org/web/20220905212700/https://www.tinko...

Mathnerd314on Creating West Coast Buddhism (2024)

Well, if you come at it from the mindfulness angle, there are real studies showing that mindfulness works. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8083197/ and similarly, if you come at it from the religious angle, you can trace a lot of the aspects of mindfulness back to the Buddha's original teachings as recorded in canon. And if you ask if there is a fundamental point beyond those, I think the answer is that there is none recorded - the best description I have been able to get of Nirvana is that it is a state of perfect mindfulness.

Mathnerd314on I decompiled the White House's new app

There's a specific writing style for globalized English that AI's use. And then this post also had none of the stylistic flourishes that a real author might add. And then simple things like constructing a table of 68 libraries or whatever organized by relatively subjective categories. That is something that nobody is going to do by hand.

Mathnerd314on You are not your job

Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.

Mathnerd314on OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

At least with Gemini, I found the trick is to add anything in any system instruction about a task list. Then the follow-up prompt will always be, do you want to add a task for that? Which is actually useful most of the time.

Mathnerd314on Blood test boosts Alzheimer's diagnosis accuracy to 94.5%, clinical study shows

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-025-03622-w this is the paper they're basing the research on. So in primary care, the accuracy rates are in the 80s. So that's something like a 17% false positive rate. That's still like 5 to 1 odds of getting a correct result though. It's much better than nothing.

Mathnerd314on The TSA's New $45 Fee to Fly Without ID Is Illegal

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/11/20/2025-20...

Well apparently Congress passed a law that said TSA could just demand money as long as they published a notice in the federal register.

Mathnerd314on English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings

If you are flipping through the reading to find a quote, then printed readings are hard to beat, unless you can search for a word with digital search. But speed reading RSVP presentation beats any kind of print reading by a mile, if you are aiming for comprehension. So, it is hard to say where the technology is going. Nobody has put in the work to really make reading on an iPad as smooth and fluid as print, in terms of rapid page flipping. But the potential is there. It is kind of laughable how the salesman will be saying, oh it has a fast processor, and then you open up a PDF and scroll a few pages fast and they start being blank instead of actually having text.

Mathnerd314on Show HN: B-IR – An LLM-optimized programming language

I tried a thread, I got that both LLMs and humans optimize for the same goal, working programs, and the key is verifiability. So it recommended Rust or Haskell combined with formal verification and contracts. So I think the conclusion of the post holds up - "the things that make an LLM-optimized language useful also happen to make them easier for humans!"