wood_spirit

A tangent, but HNers interested in an article on collision detection might know: are there any similar articles that show how to compute the intersection of two capsules (as in the space that that a sphere moving in a straight line in a time step occupies) in 3D? My own hobby 3D game got stuck on that hurdle and I couldn’t find any examples anywhere :(

Yes I remember the shock to hear that The Hermit, who kinda run The Register forums, died on the same day I had a chat with him. He quietly messaged me to give me some advice that was spot on. I had no idea and there was no hint that he was at the tail end of a protracted illness. They closed the forums and the website continued to change and be less of a community after that.

Could not the main compilers get involved and add builtins so an ifdef makes the common path on the main compilers like gcc use builtins and the slowdown only hurts those using the less mainstream compilers? If it takes off the other compilers would quickly add the feature.

A counter point is that in the most recent episode of Wild Homestead https://youtu.be/FvNEbZPojlc?si=krX1eEroRB28O5DQ the intrepid log cabin builder gets a big electric chainsaw and loves it. And it looks great.

So either this isn’t a comparable chainsaw, or else the first impressions are misleading and the gorge of misery lays ahead, or tech is getting better?

Excellent excellent vlog btw, warmly recommended.

The AI agent will subtly serve you ads. OpenAI calls it “publishing partnerships”:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments

I would be surprised if paying for the AI agent would stop it from also taking money from advertisers, just like buying a copy of Microsoft Windows doesn’t stop meaningless ads showing in the start menu etc.

Yes this is OpenAIs pitch

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments

Drones are easy to control from iPhones. I look forward to a flying car that is as easy to control declaratively and letting the computer fly the plain

A few years ago I saw on a tropical island some open ended poly tunnels growing salads and things that, in my own open air garden, are very heavily predated. They had a simple but very effective solution: they ran misters for a few minutes every hour. This made an environment that the plants thrived and insects left alone. And they lost very little water (on an island where fresh water was conserved generally) even though the tunnels were not closed at the ends. Fungus wasn’t mentioned when I asked about them. It was very simple tech level but I was struck by the smarts and knowledge behind it.

There are two sides to every story

I’m curious as I hadn’t seen it before and it’s gripping: Is the patterns showing in a polar plot of the prime numbers a recent discovery or is it long known and just used as an illustration? What is it called and what is its history?

iirc the go-to data structure for this kind of problem is called a “vantage point tree” (vp tree).

Another approach that I haven’t explored is to prep the array of words to search into a tree. normal words in Latin languages have lots of common prefixes and suffixes so you can dramatically reduce the amount of nodes (see my own old blog which compresses a scrabble dictionary https://williame.github.io/post/87682811573.html - same prefix suffix sharing our work on non-scrabble rotations too). Now walk the tree doing Levenshtein but checking multiple words at once?

This is a tangent, but I enjoyed reading the few amateur author given-away-for-free ebooks that I’ve bumped into online, but I don’t know where to go to find more. What are the go-to sites where amateur authors publish?

Is it not friendly and normal to ask young wait staff what they are studying on the assumption that they are students earning their way though college? (And most young wait staff are? Except for California, where they are aspiring actors?)

Almost always you store some kind of log with timestamps when decisions were made or events generated or whatever.

Is there any library that can translate utc to local time where it addresses time offset changes based on the knowing the utc when the future time was decided upon?

Atlassian are positioning themselves as the solution, as though leaders should invest in more atlassian-centric work tracking to improve developer experience. But my experience is that developer friction very much comes from using the atlassian stable of horrendous products. Jira? Jira align? This didn’t win out over fogbugz due to awesome developer experience and productivity!

Evolution often fails.

Of all the species that have existed on Earth at some point over the past 3.5 billion years, over 95% have gone extinct. That's part of the natural process of evolution.

(Stat from https://www.theworldcounts.com)

(Sorry should add: childcare is organised and heavily subsidised in Sweden too, and all families can easily afford it if working. There are even “night care” facilities for the children of parents who work night shifts.

The normal way to spend the 16 months is for the mother to take the first 6 months off after birth to care for the baby, and the father to take the next 6 months, and the child to go to a day playgroup after a year ish. And then the rest of the time is sometimes taken as one day a week for a while when the kid is older but before they start school. Lots of ways to vary it though)

The article doesn’t feel anything like the author has any direct experience of Sweden or the Swedish welfare and childcare system (which is awesome btw; great country to be a parent as well as a child)

In Sweden parents get 16 months of parental leave, to be taken before the child is 12. You get paid, but not your full salary. https://www.forsakringskassan.se/english/parents/when-the-ch...

A few years ago the “left” politics were trying to encourage dads to take parental leave, as mothers taking it all was making the women in the workforce less equal. And if money was the carrot then making some of the dads entitlement non-transferable was the stick.

More recently the “right” is now in government and my gut reaction to hearing about this new change in policy is that it is probably trying to subtly reverse that? Seems likely.

Gah this makes me feel old! Blender was uni (but was too bloated to run on my PCs back then) and sketch up is new!

Previously

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40873471 (151 comments)

Over time cheaper countries and regions of countries get improved standards of living etc and stop being cheap.

The Poland that joined the EU is so different from the Poland of today etc. It is subtle and not instant so perhaps younger people don’t see it so easily?

Can they make it use uuid7 for ids for better insert_becomes_append performance?

Those political middle and upper managers who are good at growing headcount are also good at shifting blame. They explain their lack of profit by either not enough headcount or else some other part of the company is letting the down (and they should take over that function so they can succeed next time) etc

The APL game of life video is another awesome thing worth reposting :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1041500

Actually yes I too couldnt see any pictures on my phone nor get any real info. In my case I couldn’t spot a video either. Just lots and lots of ads. Very low info clickbait, which is a shame because I would appreciate an actual article on this subject :(

Another fascinating time capsule is Sandby fort on the island of Öland in the Baltic.

It was a field that was rumoured to be haunted. Archeologists examined it and discovered a round defensive iron-age settlement that had been razed.

All the inhabitants were found killed in their houses and left with their artifacts. In their mouths were coins to pay the ferryman, but too little, as though condemning the killed to limbo.

http://www.sandbyborg.se/en/home

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40688703 which links to the court filing

Rory Stewart, a well known British politician turned pundit, often talks compellingly about how giving money directly to women is the way to lift countries out of poverty.

The charity he is involved in: https://www.givedirectly.org/team/rory-stewart/

Great list! Let’s add Euros and universal health care too!

Interesting question. And where does the main commercial/military established night vision tech sit in comparison to the animal world too?