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cossatoton Show HN: Prometeo – a Python-to-C transpiler for high-performance computing

I'm curious what an example use case is for scientific computing on an embedded device. Is this for real-time analysis on a data logger or something?

Many of us think of clusters as high-performance scientific computing, which are about as far from embedded as it gets.

Please note that I am not being snarky, just curious!

cossatoton Why Emacs: Redux

This also looks great, thanks a ton!

cossatoton Why Emacs: Redux

Thanks! This looks awesome.

cossatoton Why Emacs: Redux

I agree completely. I made a big push to switch from vim to spacemacs so that I could use org-mode for note taking and reduce my dependence on paper notebooks, but the lack of ability to easily sketch really killed it. I'm a geologist so I need to sketch out maps and other kinds of figures that aren't just scatterplots and flowcharts or whatever (which can be done programmatically). If I could have something even quite crude it would be revolutionary, especially if the org clients were improved for iOS with better editing/syncing capabilities and less of a focus on agenda and calendar capabilities (todoist and native calendar apps work better for my job situation, personally). The rest of org is so easy and powerful... I still dream my little dreams but am not willing to learn how to implement something like that myself I guess.

cossatoton “Click to subscribe, call to cancel” is illegal, FTC says

I tried to cancel my NYT subscription a few weeks ago after my heavily discounted rate went up to normal, and the second web page in the process offered to cut the price by half, which was acceptable to me. Although it is still a pain to cancel, the no-haggle rate reductions are nice.

cossatoton Is there such a thing as good taste?

I've long thought that postmodernist critical theory offered an array of very useful tools and positions for epistemic inquiry, but that due to various internal and external conditions of the literature/arts/sociology departments, more widespread and beneficial use of these tools were basically lost (in no small part because of the insecurities, narcissism and nihilism of many of the critical theorists themselves).

For example, two decades ago when I was double majoring in both geology and English, I found the poststructuralist idea that a 'text' exists separately from narratives about its meaning, but the narratives of meaning were inseparable from the broader social constructs use to build the narratives, both clearly correct and very useful in understanding the process of scientific inquiry. The Earth exists, you know, somewhat independently of us; however geological theory is a human construct and every part of the process from measurement to analysis to interpretation to presentation is a human act that carries with it the stamp of human ingenuity and human flaws: The sample sites selected for measurement, and the measurements themselves, contain biases and other uncertainties related to the selection process (mostly based on theoretical considerations), the engineering of the measurement tools, and other constraints (e.g. physical and budgetary limits). Obviously, scientific methodologies are centered around scientific theories, one or two of which is tested and refined in the process, but a thousand others are invoked as assumption and context, i.e. a larger theoretical structure. And presentation is communication, and additional choices are made as to what to highlight and what to gloss over.

Similarly, postmodernism's stance that there is no objective and unbiased observation and interpretation, and therefore all perspectives use one or more lenses that basically basically bias or filter the results, is clearly and often quite literally applicable to the sciences (think microscopy or remote sensing). Beyond those trivial cases, I think postmodernist theory helped me be able to disentangle the literature a bit and think, "OK, when someone interested in river erosion and landscape evolution looks at this dataset, they see X but I am interested in tectonics and Y stands out", or (in a wider theoretical context) "the geophysicists who come into the geosciences from physics use mathematical tools and make assumptions that assume the processes and configurations are time-invariant; on the other hand, the geologists know this area has evolved over the past 2 million years but their data analysis is trash--and that's why the groups can't talk to each other".

The major difference here I think is intentionality. The STEM communities do generally operate on good faith and have some sense of shared purpose, and scientific advancements are real, positive sum phenomena. So it's possible to apply these tools to the literature and to one's colleagues in a way that doesn't really involve value/moral judgements or seek to diminish or purposefully misinterpret the work of others. However this is missing in much of the liberal arts world where there is no clear definition of progress, and as a result much can be reduced to controlling unfalsifiable narratives and battles for influence.

That said, for all of its possible utility, critical theory's current escape from academia into the wider world doesn't seem to be going well. (For what it's worth, I also see modern Identitarianism as a full-throated but unwitting rejection of postmodernism, by holding that meaning is really implicit in texts, and that only some identity groups can legitimately produce and/or interpret texts. So they have moved on from Derrida's nihilism and are establishing a new priesthood even while canonizing him.)

Edit: I'd also like to emphasize that the ability to make somewhat accurate measurements, quantify misfits between modeled (i.e. theoretical) and observational data, and the ability to downweight, modify and/or reject hypotheses is also a major factor that allows for progress in STEM fields vs. the liberal arts, which limits the proliferation of bad-faith narratives that can use the offenses and defenses of post-(and post-post-)modernist theory.

cossatoton David Graeber’s Possible Worlds

Graeber's posts on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber

cossatoton Faculty reflect on two decades of rapid expansion

You've got to look at the scholarly work rather than their faculty web pages. Campos has written a number of recent papers in the broad area of higher ed economics (particularly law school), but in the grand tradition of American law professors also clearly feels entitled to write about things such as public health that are well outside of his formal training.

Campos's google scholar page: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=1Geb1zAAAAAJ...

James C. Scott is an influential scholar on power structures and the often antagonistic relationship between governors and the governed. His book Seeing Like a State in particular is widely read and mentioned on HN frequently.

What is most interesting about this article is that there is, at least among the quoted faculty, zero support for the administrative growth and a universal sentiment that it is harmful to the University and places undue burdens on faculty and students, and the quotes are quite vitriolic (this is not normally how professors talk in public about their schools). The Administration's explanations are hilariously weak (Additionally, the growth may have partially stemmed from student requests. Hannah Peck, the assistant dean of student affairs at Yale College, told the News that the Student Affairs team added four new health promotion positions as part of the YC3 program. “Students have consistently requested more mental health support on campus and we are thrilled to be able to provide it,” Peck wrote. So, that's 4 out of >1,500!).

It really does look like a struggle for power and billions of dollars in revenue, and the faculty are losing.

cossatoton How my genius roommate changed my perspective

When I worked as a bike mechanic in my late teens, we referred to this approach as 'shade tree mechanic work'. I loved it, because of the creativity involved. However, I grew to have a great respect for the work of other mechanics, who were more interested in taking more pains, ordering the right tool or part if it wasn't around, and typically having a somewhat better outcome.

I think there is room for both. Definitely during the prototype phase of a project, or on projects where there are very hard time constraints (epoxy is drying, etc.), or when you're out in the woods or whatever, working fast and creatively can be most beneficial. However as you transition into the finished product, it's often better to do use fresh and appropriate materials, do more QA/QC, write a robust test suite, and put a bit of polish on it (especially if it's for public consumption).

cossatoton Show HN: My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare

9 months go by fast

For the father at least...

Congrats!

cossatoton Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

A simple look at the time series shows that this is not the case in many places (e.g., Oregon, where I live): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/oregon-covid-cas...

cossatoton Pfizer's oral Covid-19 antiviral cuts hospitalization, death by 85%

Vaccination is in large part about beating the epidemic, i.e. the population-scale prevalence of the pathogen, by preventing most of the infections and therefore disease transmission. This pill is about treating disease symptoms, but while doing nothing to limit disease spread.

So while on a personal level, there may not be dramatic differences in death rates etc., on a population level the differences are huge.

cossatoton I made my own garum

Following Kenji Lopez-Alt, I’ve put it in Bolognese sauce where it does surreptitiously add a bit of umami and body.

cossatoton A catalog of wealth-creation mechanisms (2009)

Fur exports from North America to China were the major reason for the European exploration of western North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, and into the earliest 19th century. The Chinese elite used fur pelts to line their robes. Sea otter, which has the highest follicle density of any mammal, was the most favored (and I believe imperially mandated for the highest ranking mandarins) and the pelts were incredibly valuable. The Spanish and English exploration of the Pacific Northwest was largely done by trade expeditions which would trade various goods for pelts with the various Native tribes, and then sail to Canton to trade the pelts for Chinese goods. The Russians more or less enslaved some of the tribes of the Aleutians (the Unangan people) and brought them as far south as central California in their trade ships; the Unangan hunters hunted from sea kayaks by day.

Both the North West Company (British) and John Jacob Astor (US) set up transcontinental overland trade networks in the late 18th and early 19th century focused on the fur trade, with China being a primary customer for pelts.

I think in the first few decades of the 19th century, Chinese Imperial fashions changed and much of this system collapsed, although not fast enough to prevent the near-eradication of the sea otter population.

A good pop history of the US Overland component is Astoria by Peter Heller. It is also addressed a bit in more scholarly work such as the Columbia's River: Voyages of Robert Gray, by J. Richard Nokes.

cossatoton Watering and draining planets – math and data

Most of it is. The higher parts of the coast ranges and the bulk of the Sierra Nevada are not covered.

cossatoton Defending human civilization from supervolcanic eruptions (2015) [pdf]

I'm a geologist who has worked a little in Enhanced Geothermal Systems and (independently) in volcanology though I am a specialist in neither (I mostly work on earthquakes, and probabilistic seismic hazard analysis). I think this paper is quite interesting but the caveats are briefly noted though actually enormous.

A key one is here: Beyond human intervention, huge pulses of heat energy into the magma chamber may at times precipitate eruptions, with brief periods where the heat flux is so large that engineering solutions would be impractical. If heat flow were sufficiently massive then it may be impossible to mitigate supervolcanic eruptions.

From what we know about more well-studied volcanic systems (which are volcanic arc systems like the Cascades in the US or Mount Fuji in Japan), the heat flux into the upper magma chambers comes in the form of episodic injections of extremely hot basalt from the deeper magma plumbing systems (5-20? km depth). The size of these injections likely scales with the size of the volcanic system, so for a mantle plume they may be enormous. The heat flux is not steady state and the shallow crust/ upper magma chamber does not just heat up linearly with time until the eruption threshold is reached. We definitely have no control over the deep basalt plumbing systems and can't drill anywhere near that deep and hot (Deepwater Horizon, which by most metrics is the deepest well drilled, reached 12 km depth in cold crust, not getting above 120 deg C [1], but in the Yellowstone area this would be almost certainly well above 500 C (perhaps 900-1100 C)...

Additionally the failure mode for hydrothermal cooling of the volcano is really bad. Explosive eruptions are basically triggered by the release of volatiles in magmatic systems (expanding gases in a magma froth as H20 and C02 come out of solution). As is stated a few times, the increase in temperature with depth above the magma chamber basically follows the increase in boiling point of water, so the system is essentially on a critical threshold. Perturbations to this can be quite bad because any volatilization of fluids in the system can cause a small phreatic (partially hydrothermal) eruption that could remove some shallow mass, which decreases the confining pressure at deeper depths and causes further volatilization due to decompression, leading to a runaway cascade of larger and larger eruptions culminating in a major magma-chamber-emptying eruption.

They mention this here: in any realistic system there is a possibility that, as we artificially extract heat energy out of the magma chamber, we could cause phase changes (e.g. volatiles coming out of solution) that would reduce the overall density causing expansion and cracking in the overburden, possibly opening a channel to the surface and precipitating an eruption.

Now also consider that n=3 over 2.1 million years. If this is a Poisson process, then the probability of an eruption in any given year is ~1.4e-6, or 1 in 1.4 million. Though the most recent 3 events are quasiperiodic (mean 0.7 M years apart, stdev 0.075 M years), before these 3 eruptions, the eruptive center was in a different spot farther to the southwest, and there was a 2.3 M year quiescence between events[2]. I don't think there is any clarity over whether the next major eruption would occur in the same magma chamber as the previous several events or would form to the northeast towards Red Lodge, MT. So even in a periodic, geographically stationary system, which is sort of the most dangerous scenario, we could say that we're 90% of the way to the next eruption which therefore has an annual chance of happening of 1 in 140,000.

I think that any sort of mitigation efforts are still going to try to address a rather low probability event with uncertain technology, possibly in the wrong geographical location, and could trigger the event we are trying to forestall. At a certain cost of billions (pocket change w/r/t the costs of an eruption, sure), and the major modification of the first and probably most famous National Park (and therefore the permanent slandering of otherwise promising geothermal technology in the eyes of environmentalists). Not sure what the value proposition of all of this is but maybe our efforts could be spent elsewhere...

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-42496-0 [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/summary-eruption-...

cossatoton Nvui: A NeoVim GUI written in C++ and Qt

I like having gvim or macvim as the default text editor to open files when the are clicked from Dolphin/Finder/etc so that I can read and edit the file with vim and my config, rather than whatever the OS default low power GUI text editor is. Maybe I could rig up something to open a new terminal and then open vim in that but vim in a GUI works quite well.

cossatoton Brussels battles old prejudices as it frees unloved river from its vault

Some forms of environmental pollution or toxicity, like bacteria, can result in an infection that makes you sick, or not. Other forms, like heavy metals (common in industrial sites), can cause serious chronic problems through prolonged or repeated exposure, but are not necessarily going to cause much harm from a single low-ish dose.

cossatoton Give to Thunderbird

As discussed in the comments it looks like the Cisco VPN client (when I zoom in I think it's that and not Thunderbird, too): https://twitter.com/andrewheumann/status/745332192457396224

cossatoton M8.2 earthquake near Perryville, Alaska

The slip patch (where the two tectonic plates slip past each other) of the earthquake did not reach the sea floor, so it didn't generate a big tsunami [0]. If the purple colors in the finite fault map (indicating >2 m slip) reached the trench (the top of the first figure, or the red line in the second), then the earthquake would have displaced much more seawater.

These finite fault maps are made using automated processing of the seismic waves from seismographs around the globe. It's pretty amazing to me that the resolution is so good, from what are not that different than sound waves. These tend to be pretty accurate, not just precise, and are validated from additional studies using different datasets over the subsequent years.

[0]: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000f02w...

cossatoton People may one day drill for copper as they now drill for oil

(Geologist here, although not an ore expert.) This is neither literally true nor particularly accurate. You are more correct in that it is related more broadly to magma (by definition not released by volcanoes, as it would then be lava; magma is subterranean).

The metals in most ore deposits are, originally, present in magma but concentrated in solution in superheated fluids (mostly water, but also CO2, H2S, H3SO4, etc., or any chemically stable mix of these). These fluids are expelled from magma as the magma cools and are mobilized through fracture networks and pore spaces in the ambient rock, both in the igneous rocks that have just cooled and crystallized, as well as in the surrounding rocks. As the fluids cool, the metals (and other solutes) come out of solution and precipitate as minerals. Some of these will be 'native' gold, copper, etc. that are mostly pure metals, but with the exception of gold, most of the metals will be in different oxides, silicates, sulfides, and other compounds.

These minerals may be re-dissolved at any time in the geologic future when conditions are right. This is usually when there is infiltration of hot, potentially acidic fluids deep in the crust from later magmatism or other geologic processes (the rock could be buried many kilometers during sedimentation or mountain building episodes, which will heat it up dramatically). The re-mobilized fluids can travel tens or hundreds of kilometers along fracture networks in the crust, and then as they cool, they re-deposits the ore as new minerals (not necessarily the same type). This can, and does, happen repeatedly so that the ore deposits of interest could be many generations, thousands of kilometers and millions of years from the original magmatic source.

In other instances the ores may form at the Earth's surface due to weathering of rock that contains the elements of interest. The most prominent example is probably aluminum ore, which is typically a rock called bauxite that was originally a soil formed from the weathering of highly aluminum-rich igneous rocks in tropical conditions. Bauxite requires an enormous amount of processing to separate out the aluminum, which is why aluminum recycling is so economical. The energy requirements for bauxite refining are enormous so the ore has historically been transported halfway across the world from the tropics to places like the Columbia River hydropower facilities in the US Northwest and the geothermal powerhouse of Iceland (this is part of why Seattle became an aerospace center).

The prodigal gold and silver mines of the Sierra Nevada are also the result of surface weathering. The ore (I think mostly native silver and gold but I am not sure) was actually in little flakes in river beds in Nevada some 40 million years ago when Nevada was a high plateau higher than the Sierra (which was probably not as high then); the rocks in the river headwaters weathered to sand and clay and little bits of metals, and the rivers spilled down into California and left big sedimentary deposits at the base of the mountains, big alluvial fans and stuff. Then Nevada got broken apart by tectonics into a bunch of rifts and the rivers went away. The California miners just had to separate the very heavy gold and silver particles from the much lighter sand and gravel using flumes, rather than crushing and chemically separating solid ore like we typically think of with mining.

cossatoton Why wood has gotten so dang expensive

Maize is a cultigen and can’t reproduce without human intervention so it cannot get to be invasive.

cossatoton Trials begin on lozenge that rebuilds tooth enamel

Usually the IP goes to the employer (i.e. the university) rather than the individual researcher.

cossatoton Digital Ad-Tax

This is an interesting and well-reasoned post.

In addition to that, I was pleasantly surprised to see some interactive Python functionality towards the end, to calculate the total tax rates by major tech companies after modifying the tax schedule. Looking at the source, it looks like it's using Pyodide.

cossatoton Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over (2020)

It seems like the bread (UI, or QE depending on your 1040) is keeping the peace and the circuses are threatening to blow it apart.

cossatoton The Real Book

Back in the days when I was a teenager

Before I had status and before I had a pager

You could find the Abstract listenin' to hip-hop

My pops used to say, it reminded him of Bebop

I said, "Well, Daddy, don't you know that things go in cycles?

Way that Bobby Brown is just amping like Michael"

-- Q-Tip, A Tribe Called Quest, Excursions

cossatoton The Railsification of SaaS

sharelatex.com (a LaTeX collaboration site) shared the same issue.

cossatoton Book Review: Fussell on Class

Fussell’s primary objective with this book is neither to inform or entertain, but to tease the readers about their class and attendant insecurities. Teasing well of course requires more accuracy than simple satire because the readers have to recognize enough of themselves to feel targeted.

cossatoton An Interview with Sci-Hub’s Alexandra Elbakyan on the Delhi HC Case

A whole lot of us post our papers on our websites. Those that don't are typically afraid of getting their employers in legal trouble, or don't know how to set up a website beyond the faculty bio page that their department makes for them.

cossatoton Scientists begin building highly accurate digital twin of our planet

Quanta had a decent write-up of challenges faced by some researchers about a month ago: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-hard-lessons-of-modeling-...

Of course there are many ways that things went wrong, and not everyone made the same mistakes.