Hacker News Reader

ed_westinon Autonomous aerial hygromorphic bio robots to seed the planet

Link to the Nature article "Autonomous self-burying seed carriers for aerial seeding" (February 2023): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3

ed_westinon Nobel Prize Winner Who Doesn't Believe Climate Crisis Has Speech Canceled

"In May 2023, Clauser joined the board of the CO2 Coalition, a climate change denial organization."

"In its first four years, the CO2 Coalition received over $1 million in contributions from foundations that support conservative causes and from energy industry officials."

ed_westinon Best books, courses to learn fundamental concepts on Operating Systems?

Posted yesterday, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Operating Systems" July 2023 (Open access to the Proceedings of the 2023 USENIX Annual Technical Conference) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36792157 https://www.usenix.org/system/files/atc23-jiang-yanyan.pdf

ed_westinon Measuring the “distance” of a matrix from a diagonal matrix

"Let A be a N×N symmetric positive semi-definite matrix with N≥2. Let D be a diagonal matrix of dimension N. I would like to measure how much A "is far" from D, i.e. I am trying to find a way to quantify how A differs from a diagonal matrix. More generally, the aim is to come up with a measure that captures the overall "level of orthogonality" of A, such that if I have another positive semi-definite matrix B, with the same dimension, I can argue that A is more or less close to being orthogonal than B, which means I am interested in a relative statement. To be more explicit: I would like to quantify how A is close to being an orthogonal matrix, and how B is close to being an orthogonal matrix, not how A and B are orthogonal to each other. Any suggestion (even partial) is welcome"

ed_westinon Notes on a New Philosophy of Empirical Science (2011)

bitter lesson pdf can also be found here: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...

ed_westinon The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

found https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/black-souls-white-skins