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dmillaron I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day

In-orbit refueling, etc. Those are Starships not SLS being counted: 29:45

Talking about methane, in situ refueling (not just spacex, but they've been the most vocal): 41:25

Complexity/redundancy: 46:28 (looong pause and laughter)

Comments on engine design: ~48:00 (you have to be aware of Raptor/SS booster design to get the criticism)

dmillaron I was scared To say this to NASA (But I said it anyway) – Smarter Every Day

My TLDW: He's (not so) indirectly critical of Space X's Starship program and tribal groupthink. He may be "scared" of NASA because he's calling out one of their giant Artemis contracts.

Some longer takeaways:

- Simplify. We went to the moon 50+ years ago, but we are reinventing the wheel in some significant ways in Artemis. Why? We are supposedly going to the moon in two years, but we have never attempted a cryogenic refuel in orbit (this seems like a biggie).

- Communicate a lot. Why aren't people talking about the seemingly giant increase in complexity to accomplish the same mission we had in the 60s (land on the moon)? People need to have safe/comfortable way to raise questions and concerns.

- Have many layers of redundancy. Apollo had 6-7 backup procedures for what to do if they couldn't launch the lander off the moon.

- Test. small tests, big tests, real tests, skin-in-the-game tests. Some tests can be eliminated by simplifying or, in the case of big systems/tests, doing small tests on the riskiest components.

- Humans have ingrained biases. Will be situations astronauts haven't experienced where their instincts may be wrong.

dmillaron A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert Sapolsky

This is perhaps why many frame this debate around what free will is: "free will is an illusion" vs "free will does not exist." It bends away from fatalism. The science and theory behind determinism seems plausible to me, nonetheless I feel like I can make decisions in my life. That's what matters, and that's what will keep society from unraveling were this to be truly realized by the masses.

dmillaron How to Read a Paper [pdf]

I used to write research at Goldman. Our chief economist would often give this book as an end-of-year gift. I found it useful in my writing: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo256745...

dmillaron Fedora Workstation 39

Real tiling (ala i3) or just Kwin snapping?

dmillaron Guide to Adopting AV1 Encoding

OPUS should have an honorable mention here. Same case could be made for OPUS vs AAC/AC3/etc.

dmillaron Kalman filter from the ground up

tomato tomato

dmillaron Kalman filter from the ground up

PSA: If/when using these tools, know the difference between Kalman filter and Kalman smoother. And be especially careful when using to make forecasts, forward estimates, predictions, etc.

Beyond the scope of this comment and post, but mind two-sided filters (as the Kalman smoother/HP filter uses) as you could be incorporating future/unknown data into your model.

dmillaron Ts_zip: Text Compression Using Large Language Models

Zstandard (zstd), with a properly trained dictionary, could do well against larger (than alice29) texts. I doubt you'd see ~0.4 bpb, but 1-1.5 seems achievable. And it would be ~100% accurate with no GPU or other overhead necessary.

A quick experiment using a small selection of truncated texts yielded 1.8 bpb against alice29. I imagine other texts could do better.

dmillaron Trafilatura: Python tool to gather text on the Web

Maybe bs4 + newspaper3k rolled into one? But still, what's the gap?

dmillaron Polars: Company Formation Announcement

Great stuff. After using datatables in Python, I was excited by the performance but disappointed by the support (hey, everyone has different priorities). I had started my own DataFrame library in Rust that could be used as a pandas corollary/drop in. I wanted out-of-core, efficiency, threading, memmapping, and sql also! My long-abandoned implementation was a SQLite wrapper, as opposed to Arrow, but this looks exciting. Will be watching.

dmillaron The Camera-Shy Hoodie

Great 2600 vibe

dmillaron My mindfulness practice led me to meltdown (2021)

The next four hours were a hellscape of terror, panic and paranoia...

Finally, after hours, the attack smoldered and I drifted off. It was the worst night of my life.

The next morning, while making coffee...

dmillaron Hundreds of changes made to latest editions of Roald Dahl's books

Contempt and patronization of modern human intelligence.

dmillaron I love building a startup in Rust but wouldn't pick it again

Perhaps not the case here, but there are a couple of things I would add to this sentiment.

First, if you love Rust uniquely, I'd argue it might still make sense to use Rust to build your first product iterations. If your initial team commonly loves Rust, and can't agree on "love" for another common language, perhaps Rust is the best language. Burnout will happen exponentially faster if developers are lamenting the language (n.b. Rust is commonly lamented). I think there are enough language/platform options these days for this to be an unlikely scenario, but this is to say don't discount your passion for a language because it doesn't iterate fast enough.

Second, if the problem your startup is trying to solve is solidly in the performance and security realm, it makes sense to start in Rust. If your pitch is something like "pandas but fast and memory efficient" it also makes sense to start your project in something like Rust.

dmillaron Homebrew 4.0.0

TIL homebrew updated(s) itself automatically

dmillaron Ketamine disrupts late sensory information transfer in corticothalamic network

From the conclusion: *Because of their spatio-temporal structure and stereotyped pattern, sensory-evoked and induced gamma oscillations represent potential reliable and suitable variables for the development of innovative therapies preventing the psychotic transition.*

dmillaron Ask HN: How to get into algorithmic thinking and leetcode?

1. Keep doing LC easy until they are easy, read and re-read comments and solutions until it sticks. You can get it, but it will take work.

2. Even though you have MSc (in CS or similar I presume) go back and do an algos class on coursera (or similar).

dmillaron Helix: A Neovim inspired editor, written in Rust

It could be cleaner. My understanding is that you need different extension(s) to manipulate files requiring elevated access (e.g. sudo).

dmillaron Should you trust your gut?

Didn't Malcom Gladwell already answer this question in Blink? Like nearly everything in life, the real answer is "sometimes."

dmillaron Ask HN: What's happening with Gmail spam filtering?

fwiw, companies that are selling/giving away your email address are wise to this 'hack.'

dmillaron France experiencing worst drought on record

Obligatory Theodore Roosevelt quote for Americans, but I sense applies wider in this case: “Americans learn only from catastrophes and not from experience.”

dmillaron New embedded programming language with C as a host language

It seems like what i imagine a cython poc looked like, plus html?

dmillaron Programming Fonts

Cool. But when I first load the page, what font am I looking at? Also, no Menlo?

dmillaron Show HN: Warp, a Rust-based terminal

so alacritty two?

dmillaron The New York Times buys Wordle

I suppose we/(I?) should get started on an independent version. There's no way the Times doesn't some how paywall or otherwise ruin this.

dmillaron Ask HN: I'm looking for a good book on the fundamentals of CS

K&R. It's short, quick to get through, and the exercises are great for beginner CS. At the end you'll have a good working knowledge of C, which will act as an excellent base to move into other languages/disciplines.

dmillaron Show HN: I discovered a trading algorithm that returns ~24.85% annually

Trading $100 vs $1000 vs $1M vs $1B worth of these ETFs.

dmillaron Show HN: I discovered a trading algorithm that returns ~24.85% annually

There's no overfitting in the traditional/model sense here. This is a pretty rudimentary momentum strategy (long best performers). Implementing this on any kind of scale would be expensive to trade since it rebalance's daily.

For momentum, Jegadeesh-Titman paper is much of the foundation for these types of strategies, if you're interested. But as others have pointed out, the "smart money" saturated this trade decades ago.

dmillaron Show HN: I discovered a trading algorithm that returns ~24.85% annually

trading costs, liquidity, structural changes in the economy etc. del prado's machine learning in finance book gives some good insight into common backtesting pitfalls/thinking that are present here. the "safe" assumption if you find a systematic strategy that backtests well is that your actual, go-forward sharpe ratio will print 50% of what your backtests suggest.