Hacker News Reader

ballooneyon The top secret URSALA, RAQUEL, and FARRAH satellites (2025)

Automatic downvote for linking to that worthless shit heap.

ballooneyon How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language

shame!

ballooneyon I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch

This only proves the original point which is that there is not much demand for actual machine learning expertise because that is only carried out in a small number of places and what demands there is is for the more basic software carpentry like infrastructure and operations rather than the actual technology and Engineering side of things

ballooneyon Numba in the Browser: Unlocking a New Scientific Python Stack in JupyterLite

Does this bring me closer to being able to run notebooks natively on my ipad?

ballooneyon DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio

For a given lift, a larger, lower speed rotor is strictly more efficient than a smaller faster one, all else being equal. So no surprises that when efficiency matters we don’t see quadcopter-type designs. The reason they became ubiquitous is because they are so mechanically simple, all the control can be done with cheap electronics, no need for the great mechanical complexity of a swashplate.

ballooneyon Compression is prediction

It is infact a visual implementation of arithmetic coding, and he used it in his lectures to teach arithmetic coding in the lecture following the one on huffman coding. The video lectures posted earlier are highly recommended, best course I took as an undergrad

ballooneyon A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

This is such a grim thing to read.

ballooneyon I Have Thoughts on the iPhone Air

> I’ve always been a sucker for something novel, so when something as huge as the iPhone had a quirky new model I was really stoked to check it out.

This is just... not a life well-lived.

ballooneyon First Robotic Satellite Servicer Launched

Almost all the ‘servicing’ and ‘orbital debris cleanup’ robot-arm sats are funded quite heavily by military end users, because there is really no market for their stated aims and a huge market for the unstated aims - flying up to an adversary’s satellite and messing it up. Open secret in the industry.

ballooneyon Sam Neill has died

I have rarely had such displeasure from hearing such an interesting interviewee having to cope with such a cretinous interviewer. I’m very surprised you recommended this.

ballooneyon Long Wave radio era set to end with switch-off

In no way whatsoever, for low power devices.

ballooneyon Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?

I don't know, I get runner's high and want to go running again a couple of days later.

ballooneyon Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when using AI to code?

Do something better with your life. Honestly, not /s. Your brain is trying to tell you something.

ballooneyon There's still no point in gigabit broadband

For a proper distributed internet it seemed like a good idea, but silicon valley has rather scorched the earth, and so it’s not that useful for passively consuming slop and adverts.

ballooneyon YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.

ballooneyon Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-sniffing rat

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

ballooneyon Artemis II Launch Day Updates

What he means and you're interpreting a bit too literally is that this [heatshield] is one subsystem where the risks are not well understood or quantified as, say, the propulsion system, for which we have a lot more experience and flight heritage.

ballooneyon Artemis II is not safe to fly

Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no excuse for ‘only look[ing] at this data’ and that is NEVER a reasonable thing to do.

ballooneyon Artemis II is not safe to fly

You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.

ballooneyon Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup

In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code

No you haven't.

ballooneyon Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled

About the same as Bezos invested in the Melania documentary, watched by about six people.

ballooneyon First Website (1992)

Everyone in silicon valley would do well to remember why the web was built (by other people, elsewhere).

ballooneyon Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

What are your favourite active irc channels for technical hobbies?

ballooneyon Same Radio, Different Citizens

For context, the Cosmos Institute an AI lobbying business. [it flatters itself otherwise but that’s not atypical of the form]

ballooneyon Evolving OpenAI's Structure

Hopelessly over-idealistic premise. Sama and pg have never been anything other than opportunistic muck. This will be my last ever comment on HN.

ballooneyon David Tong Lectures on Theoretical Physics

WTF?

[Tang notes in-joke for potential downvoters]

ballooneyon The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

No!

“they must do _something_ that makes their users want to use it.”

Is fentanyl acting in the interests of its addicts?

ballooneyon The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

How could you _possibly_ believe a company like meta would use a new technology to act in your interests rather than theirs?

ballooneyon Why I don't discuss politics with friends

I do worry about seeing more of these posts, as a way of SV people - who bare a substantial burden of guilt for enabling the collective mess we’re in because the ad-tech/algorithm dollars were nice - collectively distancing themselves from facing said guilt.

No idea is this particular person is especially part of the problem, I’m just talking about general vibes.

ballooneyon Despite Ukraine war, Europe imported even more Russian gas last year

The electrical efficiency of breaking water to hydrogen, then combusting hydrogen through a turbine to generate electricity, compares extremely disfavourably to most other forms of storage - it takes about 50kWh of electricity to produce 1kg of Hydrogen, and if you propagate that back through a turbine and make some conservative assumptions about electrolyser costs and so on and so on, you're sort of approaching 5x the cost of others forms of renewable electricity to make electricity from stored hydrogen.

Of course, if we're building enough renewable capacity that electricity is basically free when it's sunny or windy, that changes the eceonomics and maybe we should all be making hydrogen in that sort of [bumpily]-abundant future.

However, storing hydrogen is also a pain - the density is crap even as a liquid and very technically challenging, and the density is mind-bogglingly crap as a gas - you'd want to find some vast geological underground reservoir in which to store it economically.

None of these are insurmountable, it's just not an especially attractive option as things stand.