Hacker News Reader

roflmaostcon Dr. TVAM – Inverse Rendering for Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing

Yes exactly! In the beginning people used also the Radon transform. But it cannot account for effects such as scattering or refraction properly.

roflmaostcon Dr. TVAM – Inverse Rendering for Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing

You need a powerful light source such as a LED laser or a high power LED. Also the setup is not super trivial. To set up for non optics people.

roflmaostcon Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

We presented this work at SIGGRAPH ASIA 2024. But I think they do not record it?

Maybe in some time we also do an online workshop about it.

roflmaostcon Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

Shameless plug, we use Mitsuba 3/Dr.JIT for image optimization around volumetric 3D printing https://github.com/rgl-epfl/drtvam

roflmaostcon Microsoft won't support Office apps on Windows 10 after October 14th

I'm using PowerPoint online to make a presentation where .pptx is required.

It's annoying. A lot of features (video cropping, changing slide master title, ...) do not work in the online version. I literally had to ask a colleague to edit the slidemaster title for me.

Also, it's quite slow in loading pictures, videos.

roflmaostcon Noise-canceling single-layer woven silk and cotton fabric

heating difficult? Why would that be?

roflmaostcon A “meta-optics” camera that is the size of a grain of salt

This is no news?

Has been published in 2021. Also here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29399828

roflmaostcon 20 years of Google Scholar

anti-spam is only an issue if people dump their email anywhere. I usually register my mail on webpages as first.last+webpage@mail.com and once they would spam this mail, it gets blacklisted.

I literally get only 1-3 real spam mails per month without any filter.

roflmaostcon The OpenFlexure 3D printable microscope

There is a similar project called UC2 where the emphasis is on modularity of the different configurations (simple building blocks) https://github.com/openUC2/UC2-GIT

roflmaostcon XMPP: The Gem of Instant Messaging

Haha yeah. Within Pidgin I used ICQ, XMPP (over my own VPS), Skype, Facebook messenger, ...

Now I have to use different apps for Signal, Element, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, ...

roflmaostcon DB48X: High Performance Scientific Calculator, Reinvented

somehow doesn't work on my Ubuntu Firefox 131.0.3 but works on my Arch 132.0.

roflmaostcon LLMs Aren't Thinking, They're Just Counting Votes

> This voting system approach works surprisingly well within the bounds of common knowledge and frequently discussed topics - it mimics correct answers based on training data. However, it begins to fall apart when a question is sufficiently out of bounds of the training data.

Those blogs are always philosophical. Same is true for myself, I don't have formal training in biology or group theory and hence I talk nonsense when it comes to that. The only difference is: I can say that I don't know it whereas LLMs are hallucinating still too much.

> LLMs Aren't Thinking, They're Just Counting Votes

Same is kind of true for neurons in your brain. (let's see if I'm hallucinate or if it's true :p)

roflmaostcon Six top Alzheimer's researchers accused of fraud

> I am highly interested in ALS research (retired engineer, not a scientist), once I found that in the same lab of a star scientists of the ALS domain, two papers were published in the same year that contradicted each other. The name of the star scientist was listed as author in both papers. He probably never read any of these papers.

could you please share the two papers?

roflmaostcon Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

Yeah, I'm confused too. Running some sort of VPS would totally do the job, no?

roflmaostcon Ultra high-resolution image of The Night Watch

Related to it, there is a company doing that for microscopy. Did an internship once there

https://gallery.ramonaoptics.com/gallery

roflmaostcon Low Cost Mini PCs

difference might be that a Raspberry Pi consumes < 10W.

An old PC draws easily 5-10 times more energy.

Depending on your location, the yearly cost of running a Pi is around ~10$. The big machine then 50-100$. So energy wise, a small power efficient machine might be more expensive but the running cost could be lower.

roflmaostcon OpenAI is good at unminifying code

I've never seen a law forbidding decompiling programs. But, some programs forbid to decompile applications by the license agreement. Further, you still don't have any right on this source code. It depends on the license...

roflmaostcon Vim Racer

Well you can search for the shortest command combination to reach that position, at least to some extent.

roflmaostcon Pi calculation world record with over 202T digits

2400 Watts times 85 days

roflmaostcon I setup my terminal for max productivity

I kind of converged during my studies (5 - 10 years ago) to a setup with arch+zsh+vim+awesome and I love it.

But recently I switched to fish shell which seems to be a lot nicer in terms of setup and default options. Also a faster launch time.

Also I'm a bit disappointed because I noticed that oh-my-zsh messed up my history file and I lost 300k shell entries (75% of my history) and because of an unlucky backup incident a lot of my history is lost forever :(

roflmaostcon Xz/liblzma: Bash-stage Obfuscation Explained

Maybe.

But maybe there is not many (critical) ones out there. Otherwise, I believe we would encounter more often those kind of situations.

roflmaostcon Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise

That's the same Hans Jansen mentioned here: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo...

roflmaostcon Why isn't preprint review being adopted?

Yeah, such a system would be great.

A bit like Google Scholar. Papers are indexed and you can access the references easily. And you would be able to comment and review certain lines. Everyone could add notes that certain equations are wrong, etc. In best case authors would engage in the discussion too.

But obviously this won't work because some papers are behind paywalls :/

roflmaostcon Show HN: Matrix Multiplication with Half the Multiplications

Two matrices with size NxN each can be multiplied naively with the schoolbook algorithm in O(N^3).

It's clear that the algorithm needs at least O(N^2) because to access each element of the matrices once, you need a double for loop, which is O(N^2).

  for i in rows
      for j in cols
          # do something with element matrix1 [i, j], matrix2[i, j],...

so it has to be j >= 0

roflmaostcon AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead

The title is click baiting.

Prompt engineering is still important.

From a philosophical point, it always makes a difference how you phrase a problem. If you formalize a problem in Lean code, it's easy to understand for a proof assistant but not for most humans (even mathematicians or programmers).

So rephrasing the problem in human language makes it easier to grasp and comprehend. And given the dataset the AI is trained on, there might be certain style it prefers. If you train it on Lean code, better input lean code. Also, more context makes it usually easier to solve the problem.

roflmaostcon I Know What Your Password Was Last Summer

+1 You can even make proper sentences which makes it easier to memorize them more quickly For KeePassXC I have something like: ilikeeatingicecreamonsundaysaftermovies

Much safer than anything like Xak1k99u??.1 which no one can remember efficiently

roflmaostcon Show HN: Alzheimer's Buddy: Use Flashing Light and Sound at 40Hz

For me, I can exclude this. I only notice it on the now broken screen, four other screens are fine (where I did not run it).

Also my slow-mo phone video confirms it.