HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

abdullahkhalids

9,519 karma · joined July 16, 2011

http://abdullahkhalid.com
submissionscomments
abdullahkhalids··on StreetComplete on iOS is now in public beta
You can choose the type of questions you want to get asked about in StreetComplete. If you want to only enter store names and timings, then go into Settings and pick those.
abdullahkhalids··on The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging
Whenever you analyze a dynamic system, the primary question you ask is, which direction will it evolve in, and will it hit some steady state?

If you apply this thinking to the economic system practiced in most countries, the answer is that the system forces have been set up in a way that the capital owners need to be paid back on an exponential schedule, and there are barely any counter-forces to this. Hence, the system will never hit a real steady state. People will continue to creatively design more and more immoral methods of extracting monetary value from a finite system that cannot indefinitely and continuously grow exponentially. There is no other way to pay back the capitalists. There is no counter-force.

abdullahkhalids··on Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.'
Most people on a budget (i.e. the vast majority of people) are constantly using exact or approximate multiplication while shopping. And they are rarely whipping out their calculator for this purpose.
abdullahkhalids··on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy
I have a family member working for a Canadian company that steps in after a mine has stopped operating. It cleans up and remediates the surrounding land and water to minimize environmental impact. This is usually a thorough process that takes a long time. Many months or years.
abdullahkhalids··on A beginning for mathematics
You are missing the entire point of the oral defense while almost stating it. The existence of the oral defense is what extrinsically motivates the supervisor to do their job well. If the student fails, the supervisor loses faces in front of their peers, which obviously they try to avoid. Removing the oral defense would massively reduce the quality of PhDs because supervisors will not do their job.

Also in my observational experience in physics, a fair number of students (probably like 10%) get some sort of major corrections to their thesis. After writing this, I did a search, and in the UK, the number across all fields is 16% [1].

[1] https://www.lexacademic.com/blog/how-common-is-passing-with-...

abdullahkhalids··on Global Glacier Extinction Explorer
The system is highly non-linear and has a lot of flippable components. For example, average temperature increase will cause the AMOC to collapse which will make parts of Europe cooler (while also increasing extreme weather events).

Similar things could happen with whichever glacier you are looking at.

abdullahkhalids··on What do Visa and Mastercard do? An intro to card networks
The underlying problem is that the whole concept of cards is insane. Basically, you go around telling every shopkeeper the code for your safe, and ask them to take however much cash you owe them out of the safe.

Sane ways to organize payments:

- Merchant gives you a bill-id. You input it into your bank website - where you see the bill amount being charged. You accept, and bank pays merchant.

- You give merchant your card number (that's the only information - no expiry, no ccv, no name). A notification pops up on your bank website asking if you want to pay what the merchant is requesting. You accept.

- You go to your bank website and obtain a random number, either allowing a single transaction or a recurring transaction. You give the merchant the number. After merchant charges it, no other merchant can charge the same number.

abdullahkhalids··on iPhone Duo
He is explaining that if you design an app that displays as desired on the outer display (in portrait mode). Then if you display that app to the inner display (also in portrait mode), it will show up exactly the same, just with everything twice as large.

This obviously makes life easier for both users and developers.

abdullahkhalids··on Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI
There are two stages to learning research level math. First you learn to reprove other people work. This is relatively easy because the language, notion and prior explanations have already been optimized to help prove the next thing, and you know a solution exists. Then in your PhD you try to solve problems you don't really know a solution exists, and if it does, how long and complicated it is, what techniques will be used, etc.

You need to solve the second to get a PhD. For good reason. The second is way harder than the first. And now AI is making second way obsolete. It's not the end of the world, but it is the end of how things have been done for centuries.

abdullahkhalids··on Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect
In the current system, political parties who do things that stop the economy growing are usually voted out, more than political parties that refuse to take action against nebulous criminal activity. That's why, for example, my city refuses to do anything to stop the factories in the city from dumping waste into the river.
abdullahkhalids··on Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect
Shops and factories can be temporarily shut down if they don't comply with regulations. Businesses that require licenses like law practices may similarly have to stop operations. That is half of going to jail.

Unfortunately, the growth potential that software industry generally provides has generally prevented governments for creating and enforcing similar laws for software products and such.

abdullahkhalids··on GrapheneOS says Pixel 11 has MTE support after all
Do we know if Google is operating on the frontier of the trade-off curve? What do we lose from Pixel Android when GrapheneOS security changes are made?
abdullahkhalids··on A third of Perplexity's citations don't contain the number they're cited for
If you are building your own harness that does correct citations, is the correct thing to give AI access to some deterministic tool that allows it to actually copy paste parts of documents its reading (with links), rather than stochastic reproduction that they do by default?
abdullahkhalids··on Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment
Any given single agent is not long-lived due to limited context. What impact does it have on the status signals the agent develop compared to the signals humans (who usually have much longer context) have developed?
abdullahkhalids··on Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
Yes, they do store the value. There was a blogpost posted to HN last year that discusses the cryptographic features of these cards [1,2]. It's amazing that these cards are almost solving the problem of secure digital money.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43993711

[2] working link since original blog is down https://web.archive.org/web/20250517082035/https://aruarian....

abdullahkhalids··on Oceans hit highest temperature on record
Almost no one has the capability to intuitively understand cascading failure modes in complex systems. Especially, those with non-linear or flip-flop behaviour. It takes a lot of education to understand very particular types of complex systems, and then more effort to generalize those lessons to other types of systems.

For example, a science model might predict only a 5% drop in global food production. That is easy to ignore because we waste so much food. But that 5% might be enough to trigger countries to impose food export bans, and some dominoes falling later, there are localized famines in particular places with 50% loss of food supply. That then triggers wars. It's impossible to predict if and when such types of event chains will happen. The only way out is to be very conservative, and aggressively defend against failure.

abdullahkhalids··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
uBlock causes a huge performance improvement for most regular people's computers.
abdullahkhalids··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
The alternative for most countries except a handful is that they continue to import oil from the two dozen-ish odd countries who export it.

The policy relevant question then boils down to, in two decades how many countries will be producing enough solar panels to export it? How many will be friendly to my country?

abdullahkhalids··on France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls
Aren't there decent apps that maintain shared blacklists for spam numbers?
abdullahkhalids··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Very cool. What audio model is this using for listening? I am surprised music recognition is good enough to give any feedback.
abdullahkhalids··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Pretty cool stuff. Do you think it's possible to easily build a science oriented harness like Ref. [1] in DeepClause?

[1] https://github.com/1stproof/batch-2/tree/main/batch-2-submis...

abdullahkhalids··on DeepSeek planning to significantly raise prices
Is there currently a lot of difference between deepseek's own prices and other provider's prices of deepseek models?
abdullahkhalids··on Goodhart's Law Comes for Every Benchmark You Trust
That is correct. It's just that in most cases in the real world, there is a complex casual network, and many of those variables are not even measurable. So you have to pick a proxy for one or more of the variables and make a metric out of this.

The other problem is that in the real world, we want to make decisions, and the easiest way to make decisions is to have a single metric to judge everything by. With multiple metrics, you get into these debates about subjectivity.

You can get around Goodhart's law if you are able to pick multiple proxy variables and demand that the user optimize them all. And you pick these variables in a way that it's really hard to cheat (i.e. deoptimize the actual intended variable while optimizing the proxy variables). Game designers do this all the time for example, because the system is clean and simple enough to do it.

abdullahkhalids··on Building an Advanced Agentic Harness
I don't you what you mean. People have used the above harness (or similar) to prove significant results. See this recent paper [1], which claims

> The human authors take full responsibility for the claims and proofs contained in this paper, and have carefully refined and verified them. The construction and main ideas of the proof were generated entirely by Codex using GPT 5.6 Sol Ultra, using harness ideas generated by the authors based on the UCLA Moonshot Harness [ZHC+26] and [Ope26].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.21551 (Statement on AI usage is at the bottom of page 3).

abdullahkhalids··on Building an Advanced Agentic Harness
A harness [1] was developed by Terrence Tao and some collaborators to prove mathematical results. It has since then been used by others with positive effect. Can someone critique the structure of this harness? I don't know anything about this stuff.

[1] https://github.com/1stproof/batch-2/tree/main/batch-2-submis...

abdullahkhalids··on Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work
> is there a real benefit for a Sandstorm grain over a docker style Linux container?

Linux containers are meant to be used by those with significant software engineering skills. Sandstorm was designed to be used, once installed by someone else, by grandma.

abdullahkhalids··on Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026
Both Germany and Pakistan installed roughly 17 GW of new solar in 2025 [1,2]. Pakistan's GDP per capita is about €1500.

[1] https://janrosenow.substack.com/p/pakistan-the-solar-revolut...

[2] https://eu.globalsolar.store/news/78/germany-installs-175-gw...

abdullahkhalids··on Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America
If you increase the date range to 12 months, you see that (with "likely human"), linux usage jumped from 3-4% to 5%-6% in the last 1.5 months. Something changed.

ChromeOS jumped down several points in the same time period. So maybe some update of ChromeOS got misconfigured?

abdullahkhalids··on Toot.community is shutting down
> how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?

You have outlined two scenarios. One where the old posts are deleted, and in the old posts are moved to the new host.

In the former case, the "referencing posts" start pointing to 404. Maybe in the latter case, we can also just have the referencing posts also point to 404.

A partial solution is better than a full solution.

abdullahkhalids··on Show HN: Qwen Scribe – local transcription and dictation for Apple Silicon
What languages does it support?
Page 1 of 34Next →