Hacker News Reader

zevetson CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers

https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cance...

Page 2 has the figure. Getting people to not smoke has been the most effective treatment in our lifetime.

Public health is a really big deal, and RFK et al are a disaster for the nation.

I think this is a major mistake for Zig's target adoption market - low level programmers trying to use a better C.

Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.

zevetson Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?

For better or worse, Fortran is still a popular language to write clever PDE schemes in, as it maximizes "time to first, fast-enough-running code".

But for anything with a userbase of more than ~15 people, C/C++ are widely preferred.

zevetson Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?

Julia's choice to encourage people naming their variables greek letters is bad though. There's a whole group of students who struggle with the symbols, but understand the concepts (a residual). Julia, when used to its full capabilities, gains an enormous amount of its power from a huge amount of clever abstractions. But in the 1st-course-in-numerical-methods class context, this can be more offputting than the "why np?" stuff this article mentions.

For teaching linear algebra, MATLAB is unironically the best choice - as the language was originally designed for that exact purpose. The problem is that outside of a numerical methods class, MATLAB is a profound step backwards.

zevetson In Defense of C++

Alternatively, any implementation of operator+ should have a notional identity element, an inverse element and be commutative.

zevetson Safe C++ proposal is not being continued

I can do it, and I do similar such things in C++ - but the biggest benefit of "safe defaults" is the standardization of such behaviors, and the resultant expectations/ecosystem.

zevetson Safe C++ proposal is not being continued

Please do this.

But first: we need to take step-zero and introduce a type "r64": a "f64" that is not nan/inf.

Rust has its uint-thats-not-zero - why not the same for floating point numbers??

zevetson 4k NASA employees opt to leave agency through deferred resignation program

It's slightly less cynical than that - it takes about eight years to design a space mission and rocket, but doing the detailed design is expensive as hell, so in order to meet a budget, they then change the mission, so they can go back to the vastly more affordable task of talking about doing work, vs doing work

zevetson We’re secretly winning the war on cancer

its metabolic rate. im always cold.

zevetson We’re secretly winning the war on cancer

My actual co-pay is $10/mo for the good stuff, plus warfarin (eliquiis/xeralto were too weak for me :/) which is ~$12 for a 90 day supply from the mail order PBM pharmacy. I average about $1500/yr in out-of-pocket medical expenses. My company self insures, and has an extremely generous insurance plan.

Plan B is wait until 2028, when it goes off patent. I think I can keep my job til then. I've learned from the HR folks that they just signed another 3 yr contract with the insurance company, so I'm not forseeing any major changes to coverage. This drug is super pricey, as it was originally targeted towards people with acute cancers, but now the largest market is the chronic disease patients, but they never lowered the price.

I suspect the insurer/PBM are making a small fortune off of my care. They are also being sued by the pharmaceutical industry for using a "co-pay maximizer" which caps (patients) out-of-pocket co-pays, and goes after the pharmaceutical companies' "charities" which help patients purchase their products, which the insurer then takes a cut from.

And the weight gain isn't fluid, it's definitely body fat. I think the weight gain is from the "baseline" treatment being a mutagenic chemotherapy, and the likely fact that my (previously) enlarged spleen was impinging on my stomach limiting my appetite, and the lived fact that it massively slows your metabolism, as I'm always a bit cold.

zevetson We’re secretly winning the war on cancer

I take four pills a day and the primary side effect is weight gain. The earlier 1950s era treatment made me exhausted 24/7. There's a new trial that has a new target, and looks to solve the remaining symptoms of the disease, with effectively no side effects

The big problem is that it's a chronic blood cancer, so the pills have a list price of $180k/yr. Who knows if my insurance will cough up for a second big-money prescription/

zevetson Administering immunotherapy in the morning seems to matter. Why?

This is bad science. Patients schedule when they go to immunotherapy appointments. People who go in the morning are still working/doing things, where once you get _really_ sick, you end up scheduling mid-day, because its such a hassle to do anything at all.

zevetson Show HN: Rust Vector and Quaternion Lib

It's honestly surprising so many programming languages ignore the needs of "floating point" users. Rust has ints that aren't 0, but no std type for floats that aren't NaN? In some sense, ieee754 floats are better than ints, as the float error modes have NaNs are just HW supported error tagged enum types.

I think its from a CS education which treats the "naturals" as fundamental, vs an engineering background where the "reals" are fundamental, and matrix math _essential_ and people live on one side of this fence.

zevetson GDP shock: Venture Capital's government bailout begins

Jonathan McDowell, the astronomer and debris tracker:

https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post...

They may be _meant_ to last a lot longer, but as you launch a larger constellation, you end up finding more and more edge cases which your original design missed. Even if it's a generous 10yr lifespan - 10% depreciation is pretty brutal, especially if your customers are expecting a certain coverage quality, as then you need more redundant satellites in orbit.

zevetson GDP shock: Venture Capital's government bailout begins

I think it's also important to justify why VCs use EBITDA.

Excluding depreciation makes sense when you are dealing with assets with an unknown highly variable lifespan - e.g. software - some of which lasts decades without being touched, others of which experiences breaking changes on a monthly basis. Similarly, excluding interest on debt makes sense if you're borrowing heavily to feed your sales funnel, but otherwise making very real profits on your sales.

However - none of these are true for some of these "new-wave" startups, which are trying to justify an (internet-based marketing) hype cycle to juice their valuations via the "dumb money".

zevetson GDP shock: Venture Capital's government bailout begins

I think it's operating on the assumption that the VC donor money, and the valley's pivot to defense spending is the VCs getting "ahead" of the problem that "AI" isn't going to produce trillions in _profits_ for investors.

zevetson GDP shock: Venture Capital's government bailout begins

The grift began a while ago - when "startups" like SpaceX started using EBITBDA to claim profitability on starlink. But the depreciation costs of LEO are substantial, and starlink satellites have an empirical MTBF of ~5.5 years.

And at a depreciation rate of 15-20%, that "D" term starts to get pretty expensive, pretty darn quick.

zevetson Jack Daniel's says Canada pulling US alcohol off shelves 'worse than tariff'

The problem with this administration is that you can't tell if they are 1) fools (resources != profitable resource extraction) 2) on drugs (elon's pupils during his oval office press conf) 3) hilariously corrupt ( zeroing out IRS, SEC enforcement) 4) captive by insane ideologies (the neo-nazis they willingly associate with, trump's strange pro-russia views) 5) all of the above

zevetson Partnering with the Shawnee Tribe for Civilization VII

Old World, made by some ex-civ people, is really quite excellent

zevetson MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

Babbage is wrong!

He is answering what a computation engine will do, but not what a "wise" person would do, which is the _the_ test of AI.

The goal of wisdom (and good teaching) is to first correct the faulty assumptions of the questioner that leads them to ask a bad question, and then once they ask a good question, then and _only_ then, provide the answer to the question.

zevetson Stroustroup: We need better performance testing [pdf]

I want to use std::expected because I want clear, explicit error handling, not performance.

There is a time and place for performance optimized code - but usually where the hot loop is well known, and its a tiny minority of the program.

zevetson Ask HN: Do you use an optimization solver? Which one? Do you like it?

I use IPOPT, and I like it quite a bit.

zevetson Wafer Scale Compute: Setting Records in Computational Fluid Dynamics

This is incredible. The death of Moore's law is going to yield wild stuff in ASIC land.

Why did they choose not to support double precision floats? They are pretty needed for fluids/hpc work.

zevetson Why are we using black box models in AI when we don’t need to? (2019)

I think this argument fails to understand that purpose of black-box models is to be impossible to understand, as it shields the operator from pre-emptive accountability.

Then, since they are supposedly the 'only way' to provide whatever function the market is 'demanding', then clearly we must abandon any notion of accountability, as this need 'must' be met.

This logic is perhaps most evident in google/facebooks content moderation dilemmas, where both companies refuse to define any sort of non-vague actionable standards about what they censor (or fail to promote) as 1) they can't provide them and 2) they don't want to be held responsible for what they actually are.

Then, as outrage has grown over facebook/google's terrible content moderation and censorship policies, and the need for accountability has grown, both companies have been forced to hire ever more moderators and censors, because the technologies as claimed just don't work well enough.

zevetson Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture

This is a great piece of polemic.

zevetson Tesla owners should pay more for insurance, AAA says

I think this is actually the automation hardware being expensive. If you smack into a car with a normal bumper, everything might be fine, but if its full of radars and lidars, fender benders will be pricey.

zevetson A Bitter Ending

Academia brings out the worst in people. It is a culture where the primary reward is ego, and this article is a testament to its noxious power.

Amos not crediting his student is unforgivable.

zevetson Class Breaks

I would prefer software infrastructure be developed rigorously as well, as I think would most people. But that will lead to regulations or at best, expensive insurance company mandated standards.

But before we celebrate its demise: the side effect will also be the same ones seen in the civil engineering world: creative ideas take decades to come into existence. As you mentioned in your other comment, there was a time when railroad building was exciting, and in that time, people died doing exciting engineering. Civil engineering tools are now orders of magnitude better than they were years ago, but there hasn't been an explosion in creative structures, even at the lowest level. I also think many of the perks (ie: salary) of the software engineering industry are intimately related to the 'move fast and break things' culture. When that leaves the industry, it may be less of a good riddance than you think.

This may be my perspective as an outsider though, I don't work in software. But I have considered making the jump to software engineering, because 'moving fast and break things' sounds fun.

Fundamentally we agree, but I'm a pessimist.

zevetson Class Breaks

Abandoning general purpose computing is too crazy, as it amounts to throwing away software. The anonymous internet is a dead-man walking, but silicon valley is as complicit in this as the government will be.

However, software engineering will change into a much more regulated environment. Writing software for the web will eventually become like writing software for the space shuttle: slow, rigorous and very expensive.

It will also kill the hacker culture, as hacking together a piece of software will become like hacking together a bridge: illegal.

zevetson Class Breaks

It also means any political figure who "dies in a self driving car accident" will instantly become part of a conspiracy theory.