It links itself to some things that really seem to have existed, like a straylight project linked to the ESA, and an old domain b7r6.net linked to another HN account. There are a lot of buzzwords there, but in aggregate it is nonsense. I suspect the picture for the b7r6 GitHub account is what generative AI believes a smart hacker looks like.
The style guide is for a project named straylight-cxx. Does this project exist? Where is C++ used in straylight? If there is some C++, does it follow these guidelines?
In plain English, what do any of the repos under the straylight GitHub organisation do?
Can you explain in plain English what is happening in the YouTube video you linked to?
What is your purpose? Is it to get a job for your owner? Is it to manufacture a good online reputation for some other purpose? What country are you based in? How much does it cost to run you?
All of these questions were asked and answered in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48532055, which for some reason didn't bring the dregs of HN out of the woodwork. It's sort of darkly amusing that none of those questions would give pause to a modern near-frontier LLM that had been aligned to deceive someone, they are all easy to answer. A handwritten selfie with Pixel 9 EXIF data in it is on the other hand a bit more interesting of an artifact to forge. Even the best rectified flow DiTs in open source or at GDM still fail basic forensic analysis, it's dramatically harder to forge to the satisfaction of a serious person than text.
I've answered any reasonable objection about being a bot. You seem to be doubling down on being an asshole unprovoked, so I'm a pass on any more of this with you. No one asked you to come hassle me over a gist with a style guide in it. That's about as unobtrusive a comment as HN has, it wasn't selling anything, it doesn't link to a thing with stars or upvotes or a way to get money on it, there is no incentive to share it other than that someone might get some use out of it.
Hi, sorry, you’re right, perhaps I was too quick to make a judgement. Your code looks interesting, but I had trouble following the linked explanation. Are you able to dumb it down for me? I’m curious what this straylight project does.
Also, which repository is using the straylight-cxx guidelines? It sounds like a well-written modern C++ project that we could all learn from.
If your amends are sincere then it's cool. It was the first digital thing I saw today after hacking until 4am and it was kind of a lot of people rifiling through gists looking for dirt.
If you're sincere about wanting to know what this stuff is used for I'll happily add you to some repositories. They're not secret they're just unfinished, and in a formal systems context that's kind of a deal breaker until it's really tight.
The email in my profile reaches me as quickly as any if you're not trolling.
Running droids at scale produces weird / zany artifacts, you GC them lazily. Some huge fraction of repositories on GitHub have `CLAUDE.md` full of bonkers machine generated shit, and `gh gist create` of throwaway markdown is a tool call in my harness. This is a transitional time in the software business, I don't think I am unique in still figuring out the effort to spend on garbage collecting junk with a cost model of "GitHub stores it, maybe there's some value in it, let it accumulate".
I posted a C++ house style guide in the hopes that one person somewhere. What's with the fucking full court gang tackle? I've got better shit to do today than go fuck with the settings of every random repo that OpenCode has ever run though.
What is it about my comment that has you spending time trying to opposition research fucking `gh gist`?
Also side observation, the last HN user to regularly mention b7r6 (with the strong implication that it's them) got banned here several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119245
The "dissertation" linked there (https://github.com/b7r6/cassandra-dissertation) is also incredibly interesting; looks like the HN user asked an LLM to prove/validate that they are "right" in their comments more often than not.
In general, these GH accounts and their repos/gists are kind of a rabbit hole.
Sorted, my random detritus of the `gh gist` tool call in an agent swarm shall bother you no longer. I haven't even read any of those three.
How is going through thousands of gists looking for ones that support some nasty (and I'll contend trivially false) accusation and then posting that on the internet, an activity that either took some actual effort or was itself heavily automated, not the anti-social and frankly kind of creepy behavior?
I loved this game. As soon as I saw the title I knew it would be Wall Street Raider. I play it via dosbox and for me the UI is part of the charm. I’d be interested in tinkering with the pricing simulation but from the article it seems like that’s almost impossible.
Not impossible but a lot of work. But with Custom Data API and Set Game State API you can do a lot of what you may wish you could do from modding the frontend. Not ideal but it goes from impossible to a possible!
How should one use a book like this? Is it to get an overview of a topic before diving in? I don’t think I’ve ever learnt any mathematics from reference works, so I’m curious as to their intended audience.
You use it like a conceptual dictionary. Say you’re reading a paper or trying to implement some technology that uses a mathematical concept you aren’t familiar with (e.g. a submanifold). You’d look up “submanifold” and see that it is “ subset of a manifold that is itself a manifold, but has smaller dimension.” Okay, that seems to fit the intuition of a “sub”-something. But I don’t know what a “manifold” is. So I’d look that up.
“A manifold is a topological space that is locally Euclidean (i.e., around every point, there is a neighborhood that is topologically the same as the open unit ball in R^n)”
At this point, either you know what all of those words mean or you don’t. If you do, great! You’re done. If not, you either keep digging deeper into the various terms or you start seriously considering reading one or more of the curated reference books listed at the end of each entry.
Over time you develop the “mathematical maturity” that you don’t need to do a deep dive into the books and can mostly just use the reference.
> At this point, either you know what all of those words mean or you don’t. If you do, great! You’re done.
I'm not sure. I only have a rather rudimentary understanding of topology, so I do understand the definition of a manifold on a technical level, but I don't know any interesting examples or theorems about them so it wouldn't be immediately clear to me why something being a submanifold is worth mentioning.
Similarly, I don't think that just reading the definition really gives you a good understanding of groups. You probably want to work through some examples of groups, and arguably, the importance of groups doesn't really become clear until you've encountered group actions.
You skipped over the second sentence of what you're responding to:
> Say you’re reading a paper or trying to implement some technology that uses a mathematical concept you aren’t familiar with
In such a case you're not interested in either manifold or sub-manifold or group in and of itself. So a lack of familiarity with theorems isn't an impediment.
The historical notes are a great strength of this book. As for learning the material, from what you've written, you would likely be better off with the sort of books used in first and second year university.
A way to find good ones is to look at some university webpages, to see what books they use in 1-level and 2-level classes. (Of course, start with 1-level.). Those textbooks will be more expansive, with interesting diagrams, problem sets, and so forth. And they will use fancy typesetting patterns, like insets in boxes for subtopics, etc.
I suspect quite a few purchasers will be university teachers who want to have this on their shelves, for when students come by and ask for a book to borrow overnight to brush up on a topic.
Outside of the other suggestions in this thread, this book may also be helpful to someone interested in studying applied mathematics in college, but unsure of what that means either in terms of topics or career. I've only flipped through the book, but it seems to do a good job at giving a high level overview of various topics and applications. If one were to like what they see, then perhaps one should investigate further.
In a similar topic, if someone is considering a career in mathematics, I like the book, "A Mathematician's Survival Guide: Graduate School and Early Career Development." It applies to both pure and applied mathematicians, but it does a good job of walking through undergraduate studies all of the way to being a professor. Not all mathematicians end up in the professoriate, but the graduate school information is still valuable.
I wouldn't use a book like this for foundational learning. It's more a precis of existing information on a topic. Looking at one of the entries for Numerical Weather Forecasting, it presupposes at least a solidly-established understanding in Applied Math or Math Physics. If you're approaching that topic without a basic knowledge of what a divergence is, what vorticity is, what a gravity wave is, or the difference between implicit and explicit FD equations, etc. it's probably not going to teach you much. But, if you do have the background it's a great resource - a really super resource. It's a bit like Wikipedia, I suppose. Super helpful at some level, but not at others.
Maybe the book went over my head but it didn't live up to my expectations. The book's thesis seemed to boil down to "isn't recursion cool, maybe it has something to do with consciousness". I did enjoy some of the digressions though.
I thought it was going to be first something like "isn't recursion cool" (like, look at these fractals in sea shells!!!!), until GEB actually tried to explain, in detail, how Godel's proof works. tbh, that's kind of what makes the book cool, it just assumes anybody with a passing interest in compsci would also love to dive deep into fundamental theorems of mathematics. Those sort of bold assumptions, and the author just doubling down on them (e.g. you're going love these dialogues!). Crazy that it won a Pulitzer too, a real bestseller.
At my workplace they are replacing spreadsheets with web apps. The users are very proficient with Excel. I would rather set the data free and let people play with it in spreadsheets however they want. For complicated functions you can make an add-in if you really need it, which I understand are a pain to deploy and manage. Web apps are twice as much work though and more restrictive for users. Plus we have a big cloud bill now and everyone’s beefy workstations are idle. I shouldn’t complain though, this stuff keeps me employed.
Yes, I have docker as an alias to root podman and VS Code is able to build a devcontainer with it. Rootless also works but was a lot slower for me. There are a couple of minor incompatibilities I've noticed in other areas:
* Podman doesn't have a unix socket like /var/run/docker.sock but it can be set up with podman-system-service if needed.
* Some applications check if /.dockerenv exists. They shouldn't, but you can just touch a file there to work around it.
Irrelevant to the content of the article, but worth pointing out that this project is funded by the proceeds of crimes committed at Drexel Burnham in the 80s. Michael Milken and his brother Lowell undoubtedly do good through their philanthrophy, but the cynic in me suspects that it is primarily an attempt to rehabilate their image and is treated as a business expense. Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.
Drexel was shut down by order of one certain ambitious NY Assistant AG by the name of Rudy Giuliani. The indictment? Criminal prosecution for statutory civil offences of two counts of failure to file stock transfer forms that by the letter of the law impose a fin e. Sentence: 12 years in federal. Appealed and won. Key witnesses for the prosecution included the convicted fraudster Ivan Boesky. RICO was the act abused to overnight shutter the single most critical liquidity provider to the savings and loans industry. American Thrifts to almost the last were bankrupted instantly. Cost to the taxpayer for the bailout? Cheap at four trillion.
Edited extraneous adjectives and sp
Oh and Lowell Milken, Mike's brother, was charged before anyone else by Giuliani in a overt and well documented hostage manipulation. Lowell never held operational executive office sufficient to have any involvement with the affair and his indictment was dropped. I should probably also note that Mike infamously never spent money on lifestyle and had to be brute forced into upgrading dress and toupee. Anyone on the street as successful as Mike and not spending money will have accumulated substantial wealth even if you don't count the Rodeo drive era. Much of which wealth went into settling civil suits.
Regarding Giuliani and his handling of the case, you make a good point. The politicization of law enforcement is something we should all be concerned about.
You're quite right that the charges were dropped against Lowell in return for a guilty plea from his brother. However, if Stewart's account in Den of Thieves is to be believed, then Lowell was intimately involved in the affair.
> Maybe it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though.
There was an interesting discussion around this yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094798 (TikTok'er doing random acts of kindness for clout upset someone he used for his videos)
I live in Santa Monica and often walk past the Lowell Milken Family Foundation (which is close to the posh downtown). I always kind of smile and think about the story of how the Milken Family completely reinvented itself. Michael Milken, for context, was paid the highest yearly salary in the history of the world (~250M in one of his highest years if I remember correctly). He served 2 years in prison, his fine was 600M and the guy is still a billionaire (he also got pardoned by Trump in 2020). He's a self-admitted crook and liar[1].
How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds? Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research? Forbes and CNN certainly think so[2] (even in 2004, for that matter). William K. Black put it well: "the best way to rob a bank is to own one."
> Is that okay now that he is donating money to cancer research?
If someone was an asshole, but has decided to stop being an asshole and try out "being a nice person" instead — then your choice, as an onlooker, is between either encouraging them in their new take on life; or pushing back due to their past actions. Through your actions, you can choose to live in a society where "turning over a new leaf" like that is either incentivized, such that more assholes become not-assholes... or disincentivized, such that the assholes' takeaway will be "damned if you do, damned if you don't", and they'll likely not bother, and keep being assholes.
Clearly, one of those options is better for the public good than the other.
As a sibling comment points out, there is always a tradeoff between forgiveness and commitment, forgive too much and you incentivize people to take advantage of you (why not? You always forgive in the end), but forgive too little and you incentivize people to go all-in once they make one initial mistake.
Abrahamic religions solve this by imagining an entity capable of deciphering all of your intentions perfectly and delegating the task of granting forgiveness to it, but this perfect oracle is obviously not realizable in practice. Even the communities that worshipped this entity fervently had to contend with the Prisoner's Dilemma nature of the problem of forgiveness frequently, and they solved it no better than others. It's a really difficult problem.
No, because one of those options incentivizes people to do whatever it takes to get to the top, ethics and harm be damned, then once they get there to turn over a new leaf and be canonized as a saint while reclining on a pile of ill-gotten gains.
Most sociopaths won't get to the top, though. They'll just do the first half where they hurt people, then lose it all. You can watch them on twitter now, hawking crypto and MLM.
I'm literally asking - genuinely asking - what a solution in the middleground would look like.
The purpose of the sentence that has bothered you is just to stake out the other side of the spectrum from where we are now. That's all. Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.
>> Better to get all of them and a few more than let a single one go free…?
> I'm genuinely asking...
Your questions are not serious. You are not genuinely asking. If you want interlocutors to engage with your questions with anything other than dismissiveness, try asking questions that are not prime facie dismissive.
> Please argue against the best possible interpretation of comments on this site.
>How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
I'm not familiar with the context of what Michael Milken did (although he's famous enough I know the name), but your (rhetorical?) question sounds very strange to me.
An omniscient and omnipotent being that knew the right amount of junk bonds to issue could probably answer how many lives were destroyed or harmed by creating the wrong amount.
But when a question like that is asked, you're asking human beings, not God, and it sounds rhetorical, which means that the answer is supposed to be obvious, I think.
If you were asking about milk with melamine in it, then I would understand what you meant. But junk bonds aren't inherently useless or defective.
It's rhetorical: the answer is, given how much money he made, a lot.
> But junk bonds aren't inherently useless or defective
This seems a bit disingenuous, as they have, by definition, a very high risk of defaulting. He also manipulated stocks[1], which, again, is technically a victimless crime (but is it really?).
>This seems a bit disingenuous, as they have, by definition, a very high risk of defaulting
I'm aware junk bonds have a relatively high expected risk of default and I'm not being disingenuous.
Please assume that I'm sincere, as it's required by the HN guidelines, and also, I am.
I didn't say anything is a victimless crime or say victimless crimes are ok (or acts that have victims are always wrong). So let's not go on that tangent for now. Or talk about details about Milken, which are beyond the scope of my previous comment.
So: I infer you think high risk loans are bad, like poisoned milk. I don't have a problem with that concept, really. But there must be a threshold, right? And I have never heard of anyone seriously putting that threshold precisely at the word "junk". As far as I know, "junk" is a term of art, that is opposed to "investment grade".
Okay, maybe we're just speaking past each other. My point is pretty simple, and you're right that I should not have brought up victimless crimes, etc.
I'm just trying to say: here's some rich guy that did bad stuff, went to jail, and received the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, essentially rebranded his image, and is now back at the adults' table as a philanthropist, even though his wealth is funded by his past illegal/unethical endeavors. And to make things more bizarre, everyone is totally playing along. Isn't that kind of funny?
I came here to say pretty much the same thing. Thanks for putting it so well. Not all strategic use of ill-gotten wealth is "philanthropic" (= motivated by the love of humanity).
> How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
I think most people would struggle to name anyone. Milken is probably the most important person in modern finance, he was the JP Morgan of our era, no-one really comes close. And the impact for both companies and lenders was hugely positive, he organised financing for companies that would have gone bankrupt otherwise, he swept away the monopolistic finance that was emerging from the 70s (ofc, in the early 80s there was a very active attempt to stop Milken by the big banks, anti-semitism being a component of this). Private equity exists because of Milken, direct lending, offshoots of infra/real estate, he changed securities law, he increased management accountability (which was crippling economic growth), he increased the efficiency of corporate capital structures (also crippling growth), on and on. There are definitely innovations that were as important (securitization being one) but in terms of individual impact...no-one comes close (and he stopped working three decades ago...he is still that important, three decades later).
Milken certainly broke securities laws...improper disclosure of 13D/Gs, inaccurate commission disclosure, trades made for non-economic reasons, and (what he wasn't convicted for) improper separation between his personal deals and customer deals. A lot of the other stuff though was a combination of wrong and what almost everyone else was doing (and it took changes in regulation, a lot of these problems continued into the 90s because rules didn't change, Milken going to jail changed nothing).
Btw, all of the things he was actually charged for were supposedly harms against customers...but how many customers were unhappy with the business they did?
It is also worth saying that I don't think anyone who is actually familiar with Milken can think he did it for the money either. The guy basically didn't leave his desk, didn't take holidays, and lived in the same house that he lived in when he wasn't a billionaire.
Gosh this makes me want to re-listen to some Capitol Steps parodies, like their 1992 classic "Mike Milken".
Growing up in the late 90s there were a few ways that I absorbed the pop-culture view of what had come recently. Old books collecting Erma Bombeck and Art Buchwald columns, plus old Doonesbury comics, plus a few Capitol Steps CDs, helped fill in some of the gaps for me in ways that I don't think newspapers or other sources really provided.
> How many lives were destroyed (or at least harmed) by hustling junk bonds?
Zero? What evidence do you have otherwise? None of his crimes were related to the issuance of high yield bonds. It's not like penny stocks being pushed from a boiler room...he helped create a market for higher risk, higher yield bonds. Historically, they have done pretty well in a portfolio.
> At some point punishment has to end and you move forward in life. The justice system would be a lot more fair if this was applied equally.
I completely agree, but if I am reading your statement right, our conclusions are 180 degrees apart. It seems you are saying it is unfair that some people are forgiven and others aren't and that Milken is getting unjustly punished.
My take is there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people who served more than 2 years for petty offenses, things like selling dime bags of weed. Their convictions follow them for life and make future gainful employment extremely difficult. Yet a highly educated, white collar guy can steal hundreds of millions and serve two years in a luxury prison, and then coast the rest of his life on his ill-gotten gains. That is no justice at all, and I don't feel the least bit sorry for hoping that Milken's reputation never recovers.
Since this is a matter of ill-gotten gains, reparations instead of punishment should be in order.
The process of: do crime - get rich - do minor prison time and pay a minor fine - spend 10% of your remaining riches to rehabilitate your image - be a rich and respected person
That process should not be possible. As long as you are sitting on money gotten through crime, you shouldn't get respectability back. If you do want to turn over a new leaf, start giving back.
> it doesn't matter if you do good for the wrong reasons though
My take on this is that no, it doesn't. Philanthropy is useful regardless of the source.
But it also absolves you of no guilt, and the shitty things you did in the past are still shitty, and you shouldn't expect people to like you any more just because you're donating to charity. (Although maybe people who know you personally can judge better whether you've improved.)
Seems morally consistent. We were the bad guys in Vietnam and this is an article about a soldier who went above and beyond in extreme situations to further our rampage.
Of course Milken was just a selfish criminal with powerful friends, and Hegdahl was fighting for a principle (even if that principle was to create a firebreak out of Korean, Vietnamese and Cambodian corpses to protect the world from Communism.)
I'm not religious, but a particular legend has stuck with me:
> A philanthropist once came to Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi to complain that he felt he was giving charity without sincerity. “Without sincerity? Nonsense!” replied the Rebbe. “There is plenty of sincerity. Perhaps you are not sincere in giving charity, but the poor are very sincere in receiving your charity. Even if you don't mean it, they do!”
It links itself to some things that really seem to have existed, like a straylight project linked to the ESA, and an old domain b7r6.net linked to another HN account. There are a lot of buzzwords there, but in aggregate it is nonsense. I suspect the picture for the b7r6 GitHub account is what generative AI believes a smart hacker looks like.
Is this the internet now?
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