Hacker News Reader

yummypainton Functional Ultrasound Imaging (fUSI) from scratch

I wonder if you could image through the eyeballs? Someone must have tried it

yummypainton Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics

Like Disney World

yummypainton What would a serious AI product look like?

I think this is getting at the inherent tension between what people actually want from AI, and what makes a profitable AI product. People want control and data in their own hands, companies want the opposite. Improving an AI product means making it behave less like a product. So why are we hunting for products? We should be going after solutions without predication on profitability for some party.

yummypainton Palantir's Co-Founder Wants Us Less Judgmental About Deadly Iran School Strike

There was a time when it appeared nuclear war was the future of warfare. Thank goodness we refused accept that as fact.

yummypainton Splash-free urinals: Design through physics and differential equations

I was expecting you to say the opposite thing! In North Carolina they are so low that the stream angle ends up much steeper than intended, like trying to use a boy's urinal. I'm tall, but still fit normally in cars etc. There should really be more variation in mounting height, or bring back those tall ones that work universally. I guess it's cheaper to make them small but mounting the flush handle below penis height is asking for trouble.

yummypainton Black Hole of Los Alamos: Seller of surplus nuclear research materials (2011)

My Dad and I used to drive down there when I was a kid. We would call ahead to make sure they would be open and Ed would write a welcome message for us on the whiteboard. Put my first decent vacuum systems together with parts from there that would have otherwise been cost prohibitive. Such a great place to look around in.

yummypainton Any Human Ever – One life, drawn at random from all who have ever lived

The x-axis being log scale by default visually exadurates the effect if you are thinking about it in terms of area under the curve. This confused me also.

yummypainton VMs won't contain cyber-capable agents

Until now, human dev time has arguably been the bottleneck preventing more use of formal verification methods in software. Making it possible will likely involve completely rearchitecting many components, but that has become more realistic now. It would be interesting to see how close we can get to formally verified Linux if we are willing to make compromises on complexity

yummypainton Who Needs DRAM? We Have Fiber

Reminiscent of acoustic memory on early calculators

yummypainton SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth

In NC there is a state rule that bans HOAs and local authorities from stopping people building cisterns to catch and store rainwater

yummypainton Cyberdecks, going analog, and convivial technology

For general compute they will lose to a laptop, but that isn't supposed to be their purpose. I think the best use cases require extra hardware that would make a laptop too bulky or awkward. For example a deck with a VNA, SDR, scope, and arbitrary waveform generator for field work with radio equipment. The traditional computer capabilities are sort of extra. Any sort of diagnostic "cart" with a dedicated computer and a bunch of test equipment could be a candidate for miniaturization.

yummypainton BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

That's what I'm asking... Why not? I'm alluding to what seems to be a culturally self-imposed refusal to seek legal remedies among makers and hackers. We have Jeff Geerling (who I generally like and agree with) disappointingly referring to the GPL as a "social contract," as though it can have no legal force behind it.

The biggest companies in the world use licenses to weild power over people, but heaven forbid people use the same body of law to their benefit.

yummypainton BambuStudio has been violating PrusaSlicer AGPL license since their fork

Where is the lawyer involvement? Why has no TRO been filed to prevent Bambu from selling in the US? This is a problem with a legal solution, yet we collectively just wring our hands and wish for a technological solution.

yummypainton The death of the brick and mortar toy store

This is exactly the business model of Poor Richards in Colorado Springs. They have a pizzarea, book store, and toy store. It's been around for decades and is a local institution.

yummypainton Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada

Because the procedure for changing the constitution is in the constitution. That would have to be followed at least once.

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

yummypainton Throwing AI-generated walls of text into conversations

There is something about the asymmetry of effort that is particularly galling. If a person couldn't be bothered to write something, then I can't be bothered to read it.

If someone contributes a software component, they are responsible for it whether they developed it properly or slop coded. The difference is that I will refuse to look at the slop, much less debug it or help with troubleshooting.

People who blindly copy paste from agents are completely replaceable, and should be at the top of the list when layoff season hits. They drag the whole org down.

yummypainton Microsoft to stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts

Recent updates to Microsoft account sign-in now support passkeys with device biometric authentication, making phishing virtually impossible.

So according to Microsoft biometric authentication will make people immune to being tricked. Pretty ironic stance.

yummypainton 'We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs'

I have dozens of volunteer red maple trees about shoulder to head height in my yard. I have been trying to find information about training them at this size. Do bonsai methods for Japanese maples work? Can two red maples be joined together to make an arch? I need to learn more about plants

yummypainton Email obfuscation: What works in 2026?

That seems like a very expensive way to crawl the internet

yummypainton If you thought the code writing speed was your problem; you have bigger problems

Just because an LLM can turn high level instructions into low level instructions does not make it a compiler

yummypainton LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

I'm also a Libreoffice user and have been since its inception. It's good software and I recommend it to people. The fact is just that gnumeric is better than calc. Not just in terms of features or feel either. I have personally lost data in calc spreadsheets that gnumeric handles without issue.

yummypainton LibreOffice blasts OnlyOffice for working with Microsoft to lock users in

I think I've tried every spreadsheet program still being maintained at this point. Try gnumeric, it's a clear cut above everything else.

Mandatory Excel rant: Excel can't be trusted with data destined for publication. It's bloated, buggy as hell, user hostile, and has set genetics research back with its utterly braindead autocorrect. The default plot options are the exact polar opposite of how data are presented in science, and almost impossible to make serviceable. Everything Excel touches ends up looking like a hastily thrown together 6th grade science project. Libreoffice is also riddled with serious bugs and also loses data, but hey it's free and not a decades old flagship product from a multi billion dollar tech company.

yummypainton Child's Play: Tech's new generation and the end of thinking

The fact that Edison is pervasively over-credited is really another example of the highly visible executive claiming personal credit for the labors of employees.

yummypainton The Waymo World Model

By leveraging Genie’s immense world knowledge, it can simulate exceedingly rare events—from a tornado to a casual encounter with an elephant—that are almost impossible to capture at scale in reality. The model’s architecture offers high controllability, allowing our engineers to modify simulations with simple language prompts, driving inputs, and scene layouts. Notably, the Waymo World Model generates high-fidelity, multi-sensor outputs that include both camera and lidar data.

How do you know the generated outputs are correct? Especially for unusual circumstances?

Say the scenario is a patch of road is densely covered with 5 mm ball bearings. I'm sure the model will happily spit out numbers, but are they reasonable? How do we know they are reasonable? Even if the prediction is ok, how do we fundamentally know that the prediction for 4 mm ball bearings won't be completely wrong?

There seems to be a lot of critical information missing.

yummypainton ICE expands power of agents to arrest people without warrants

It's not too late for a political solution. If Congress stopped abdicating it's constitutional duty all these problems could be solved quickly. If you're in the US, visit your representatives offices IN PERSON, calling is a distant second best.

yummypainton Canada's deal with China signals it is serious about shift from US

These people aren't temporarily insane, they have always been this way. The same hatred and stupidity have been prevalent in US dinnertable discussions for decades, but much less in the actual halls of power because we used to have more collective sense to not grant people like that authority over others in general. If the rest of American society regains its agency, the toxic %25 will just go back to corroding the country as they were before. They are secure in knowing they will not be treated in the way they would treat others if given the opportunity.

yummypainton How to make a damn website (2024)

I found it odd they specifically said not to make a git repo for the page, GitHub is one of the easiest ways I know to publish a website. It just can't be commercial etc

yummypainton Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’ (2022)

A key property of QCD is that unlike electrodynamics, the forces between interacting objects increase with distance (quark confinement). This is what breaks the usual style of expansions used to simplify problems. It's hard to overstate how important this is.

One of the implications is that there are many interactions where most possible Feynman diagrams contribute non-negligibly. The advances in theory arguably have much more to do with improvements in techniques and the applied math used, such as in lattice QCD and Dean Lee's group for instance.

yummypainton Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?

If it's the computer of an older family member or something, just put Firefox and ubo on their system for them and be done with it. They will use whatever software is preloaded, and being shown how to use it is a much lower barrier to entry than the cognitive load of finding, vetting, installing, and configuring new software.

I used to try to patiently explain why people should do xyz. Now I explain to people why I'm going to change xyz on their device, and if they don't slam the breaks I just do what needs to be done right then. If someone doesn't know what an adblocker is they are getting one so they can see for themselves and reflect on what companies have been putting them through for years to make some incremental amount of money.

yummypainton ICE Offers Up to $280M to Immigrant-Tracking 'Bounty Hunter' Firms

Part of the problem is that software engineers aren't real engineers. Engineering disciplines formally recognize their responsibilities to the public, and are expected to refuse to build dangerous or harmful systems.

The mechanical engineers who design cars and the civil engineers who design the roads and bridges they traverse are held to these standards, and hold themselves to these standards. The software engineers who write code that actually controls vehicles in practice have no such culture. Relevant professional organizations like the ACM should be leading the charge, but they aren't because their membership doesn't care.

One solution is to license software engineers. What do people working in the industry think about that?