HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

dbcooper

4,592 karma · joined December 7, 2011

submissionscomments
dbcooper··on The little holes in your bread are telling you something
Absolutely. I will never waste my time with slop that doesn't get to the point. This is a lousy blog post about bread, not a great novel.
dbcooper··on Arm Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU: desktop-class mobile gameplay with AI-native graphics
Samsung is using AMD in upcoming premium chips? Small market share again.
dbcooper··on Audacity 4.0
Release video looking at the new UI (Qt6 based):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTQymidLYIM

dbcooper··on Moderna reports first positive Phase 3 for mRNA neoantigen therapy in melanoma
A comment from Derek Lowe:

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/merck-and-moderna-...

>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.

dbcooper··on New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.
Zero data on Greenhouse gas CO2-equivalent per kWh. A combined-cycle gas power plant is going to have lower impact per kWh than the 200+ coal plants in the US.
dbcooper··on Show HN: Docx-CLI: agents read/edit Word docs using 1/2 the time and tokens
There have been a few similar posts on HN recently for working with MS Office docs:

https://github.com/iOfficeAI/OfficeCLI

https://github.com/rcarmo/python-office-mcp-server

https://github.com/espressoplease/smalldocs

It would be great to see some benchmarks for token use, correctness, features etc.

dbcooper··on Claude Science
A "standing review agent" seems to be one of the main differences beyond the new connectors and in place visualisation tools.

>A standing reviewer agent. This runs in the background during a session, checking citations against sources, flagging numbers it can't trace back to evidence, and catching figures that don't match the code that supposedly generated them. That's not something Code or Cowork do automatically — you'd have to ask Claude to double-check itself as a separate step.

dbcooper··on Fable flags "cancer" as a biosecurity risk
I had the same experience with a prompt about an antibody's structure and properties.
dbcooper··on 1-Bit Bonsai Image 4B Image Generation for Local Devices
A few implementations listed on LM Studio. Any recommendations for which one to use?
dbcooper··on Wi is Fi: Understanding Wi-Fi 4/5/6/6E/7/8 (802.11 n/AC/ax/be/bn)
Love this site for communicating the properties of WiFi protocols.
dbcooper··on Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance (2025)
Yes, very questionable. They also missed New Zealand which is the largest exporter of dairy products (~ 21%).

Nature Food is one of those also ran journals that sully the brand. None of my colleagues in related fields bother with it.

dbcooper··on Gap between national food production and food-based dietary guidance (2025)
The Netherlands is almost legendary for its agricultural productivity. Its greenhouse operations were the model for NZ capsicum production and other efforts. It also leads food science research in some areas. Wageningen is perhaps the best in that field.
dbcooper··on The Illuminated Man: an unconventional portrait of JG Ballard
"The 60 Minute Zoom" is a good short story to start with.
dbcooper··on Show HN: Antenna – RSS reader with a built-in MCP server
Will this convert websites into RSS feeds? Can I run a daily update on them?
dbcooper··on A Brief History of Fish Sauce
Interesting video on the history of Worcestershire Sauce (fermented anchovy base):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5QhGnEKUM

Addendum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvF2m57_Usg

dbcooper··on A Brief History of Fish Sauce
Worcestershire Sauce (fermented anchovy base) with eggs is a classic combination for a reason.
dbcooper··on Afrika Bambaataa, hip-hop pioneer, has died
A friend of mine has worked in TV and film for decades. Many times he has told me about rumoured offenders (typically after they are arrested), but other than avoiding working on productions with them what are his choices? Trying to do a completely ridiculous "citizen's arrest"?
dbcooper··on Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies
For those interested in radioligand therapy against FAP antigen expressing cancer, Ratio Therapeutics is recruiting for a Phase 1/2 Open-label Study (NCT07156565).

Eligibility requires history of relapse and refractory soft tissue sarcoma. Recruiting in US and Canada.

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07156565?tab=researcher#...

dbcooper··on Google workers seek 'red lines' on military A.I., echoing Anthropic
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...
dbcooper··on Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
Would it be possible to ship a high performance, lean "modern" Windows, with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?
dbcooper··on 2026 will be my year of the Linux desktop
https://x.com/EnterpriseCPU/status/1972103355012124891?s=20
dbcooper··on Panoramas of Star Trek Sets
From the Roddenberry archive:

https://roddenberry.x.io/2271-uss-enterprise-ncc-1701-major-...

dbcooper··on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
A key limiting factor for dietary use of single cell protein is the high mass fraction of nucleic acid, which limits daily consumption due to uric acid production during metabolism. High rates of RNA synthesis are unfortunately necessary for high protein productivity.

The paper notes:

>It is important to note that MP products often contain elevated levels of nucleic acids, constituting ~8% of the dry weight [17], which necessitates consideration when assessing their suitability for human consumption. To address this, a heat treatment process is employed at the end of fermentation that reduces the nucleic acid content in the fermented biomass to below 0.75/100 g, while simultaneously deactivating protease activity and F. venenatum biomass. However, this procedure has been observed to induce cell membrane leakage and a substantial loss of biomass, as evidenced in the Quorn production process [17], which also utilizes F. venenatum as the MP producer. Our experimental trials have encountered similar challenges, achieving a biomass yield of merely ~35%, and observed that heating process increased the relative protein and chitin content (Figure 2D,E), which may be related to the effect of membrane leakage, while the intracellular protein of the FCPD engineered strain was less likely to be lost to the extracellular. Thus, concentrating the fermentation broth to enhance protein and amino acids content in successive steps to produce a highly nutritious water-soluble fertilizer appears to be an effective strategy for adding value to the process (Figure 1).

The challenges of developing economic single cell protein products, that are suitable for human consumption, are described in chapter 3 here:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Martin-Hofrichter-2/pub...

dbcooper··on Microsoft Download Center Archive
wushowhide.diagcab
dbcooper··on Microsoft Download Center Archive
There's a tool for blocking selected driver updates that still works on Windows 11. Very handy.
dbcooper··on The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia
Nick Mullen should be the guest of honor at this event.
dbcooper··on US startup Substrate announces chipmaking tool that it says will rival ASML
What chemistry would they use for the photoresist type resins?
dbcooper··on Health officials in the US are sounding the alarm over drug-resistant bacteria
Can't even read the abstract without paying. That's a new low.
dbcooper··on Firefox 143 for Android to introduce DoH
Yep. Enable extensions in edge://flags/. Then you can use ublock origin. You can install any crx file extension if you enable developer mode.
dbcooper··on Firefox 143 for Android to introduce DoH
I'm running it on a device with a Qualcomm SM8635 Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chipset, and it just crawls. The UI is very unresponsive, and page load times are terrible.

For youtube background play Brave is much better.

Page 1 of 18Next →