Hacker News Reader

i_am_proteuson Claude Code weekly rate limits

We do not know if that is less than 5% of users or less than 5% of paid users?

We do know that PR teams enjoy framing things in the most favorable light possible.

i_am_proteuson Australian anti-porn group claims responsibility for Steams new censorship rules

Christian Science Monitor (nonprofit run, the religion really is siloed to the "Christian Science Perspective" section and the reporting is good and as independent as it comes)

i_am_proteuson New records on Wendelstein 7-X

>The fact that W7-X results are on a par with JET is remarkable because JET had three times the plasma volume of Wendelstein 7-X.

What's important here is that W 7-X is a stellarator, a different type of fusion reactor from almost all prior reactors (they are tokamaks), with a smaller volume than the co-record holder.

That a stellarator gets these results with a much smaller fusion volume is promising for the performance of future larger stellarators, since fusion reactors typically become more efficient as they get larger.

i_am_proteuson A Mysterious Website I Stumbled Upon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776

i_am_proteuson Altman fluffs superintelligence to save humanity as OpenAI slashes prices

Good point!

The good news would be that GPT-4o average energy usage per query would be lower than 20 Wh.

The bad news is that there's a quadratic increase in energy usage with the increase in a model's maximum context window. GPT 3.5 -> GPT 4 was an increase from thousands of tokens to hundreds of thousands of tokens.

i_am_proteuson Altman fluffs superintelligence to save humanity as OpenAI slashes prices

>GPT-4o query consumes around 0.3 watt-hours for a typical text-based question, though this increases substantially to 2.5 to 40 watt-hours for queries with very long inputs.

Given a context window of 128 kilotokens, and how the energy usage range (0.3 to 40 Wh) increases by a factor of 133 from "single query" to "worst case," this suggests linear scaling of energy usage with context length.

Given the common user pattern of "chat with the LLM" the 0.3 Wh figure seems reductive. As the chat grows in length, the length of the "query" becomes the length of the entire chat.

Assuming context compression for long chats, the figure we're looking for per-question energy use should be the energy use for a query half the length of max context tokens.

For GPT-4o: 20 Wh

i_am_proteuson Amelia Earhart's Reckless Final Flights

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic)

Indicates that the two o's are separate syllables.

i_am_proteuson Samsung is paying $350M for audio brands B&W, Denon, Marantz and Polk

If you aren't running direct-heated triodes, leave the heaters on and switch off the B+ :)

i_am_proteuson MinC Is Not Cygwin

One reason would be if anyone does not want to, or is not able to, enable virtualization (WSL requires this).

i_am_proteuson How University Students Use Claude

Why do the in-class testing without computers?

We use an airgapped lab (it has LAN and a local git server for submissions, no WAN) to give coding assessments. It works.

i_am_proteuson An Overwhelmingly Negative and Demoralizing Force

CLRS

(Serious comment! It's "the" algorithms book).

i_am_proteuson Ploopy Classic 2 open source trackball

It takes about a week to get used to it. Many years later, I am so completely comfortable with the ergonomics that I don't even think about the interface: pointing is natural, and my wrist pain is long gone in the past :)

i_am_proteuson A Man Out to Prove How Dumb AI Still Is

>Chollet, a French computer scientist and one of the industry’s sharpest skeptics

I feel like this description really buries the lede on Chollet's expertise. (For those who don't know, he's the creator of and lead contributor[0] to Keras)

[0]https://github.com/keras-team/keras/graphs/contributors

i_am_proteuson Ploopy Classic 2 open source trackball

L-Trac is still in production, made by P.I. Engineering, "The No Slogan Company"

i_am_proteuson Matrix Calculus (For Machine Learning and Beyond)

Those looking for a shorter primer could consult https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.01528

i_am_proteuson Ask HN: Where are the good Markdown to PDF tools (that meet these requirements)?

Quarto should "just work" for this. There's an option to wrap code blocks.

i_am_proteuson Executive wealth as a factor in return-to-office

If you move to Mountain View, you need to be able to afford to live in Mountain View. That takes a lot of remote jobs off the table, or substantially diminishes their prospects.

If you live in Omaha and work remotely, far more remote jobs are available.

i_am_proteuson Vinyl carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home

The vocabulary term "net" means profit after expenses. Certainly the retail price would be higher.

i_am_proteuson The vinyl-carver sparking a craze for cutting records at home

If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records.

If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.

Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.

i_am_proteuson Penn to reduce graduate admissions, rescind acceptances amid research cuts

Stanford does have faculty housing: it's made available for the tenured faculty member to rent for life. The school owns the house. The professor builds no equity.

The alternative, given the cost of housing near Stanford and faculty salaries, would be for faculty to live over an hour distant. The university acknowledges the benefit of having faculty live nearby, and also recovers the rent money and keeps the property.

i_am_proteuson Bosch's brake-by-wire system may be the next big leap in automotive tech

At that point, engine brake with the clutch.

i_am_proteuson National Institutes of Health cuts support to universities

This is not true, you might have misread the guidance- it's retroactive to the date of the decision (7 February) and not retroactive to other existing grants (https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...)

Last paragraph:

For any new grant issued, and for all existing grants to IHEs retroactive to the date of issuance of this Supplemental Guidance, award recipients are subject to a 15 percent indirect cost rate. This rate will allow grant recipients a reasonable and realistic recovery of indirect costs while helping NIH ensure that grant funds are, to the maximum extent possible, spent on furthering its mission. This policy shall be applied to all current grants for go forward expenses from February 10, 2025 forward as well as for all new grants issued. We will not be applying this cap retroactively back to the initial date of issuance of current grants to IHEs, although we believe we would have the authority to do so under 45 CFR 75.414(c).

i_am_proteuson Transformer – Spreadsheet

There's some pedagogical value at the "fundamentals" end: exposing how automatic differentiation turns calculus into matrix algebra, especially for CS students who are weaker in math.

For the rest of it, there's pedagogical value in giving students worksheets (I prefer ipynbs for coding, but hand calculations are good for algorithms) to follow along with the lecture because if you don't do this, in 2025, 1/4 of the class will be on their phones (and the other 3/4 won't show up to lecture).

If you can work through the papers/source code on your own and aren't afraid of the math, these aren't for you.

i_am_proteuson Cameras of 1930s Era

I get pretty decent, if high-contrast results pushing 320TX and 400TX to 3200.

Pushing does increase grain; but using a larger format (6x7 or 4x5) reduces the apparent grain in resultant prints.

I can't say enough good things about HC-110 as a developer: pushes well just by increasing development time, shelf-stable for years as a concentrate, and not particularly toxic compared to other developers.

i_am_proteuson Cameras of 1930s Era

1930s films were slower (lower ASA/ISO) than "modern" films. Focusing mechanisms were worse: the SLR was developed in the 1930s; most cameras used in that era were rangefinders (or 'point-and-shoot').

Cameras and lenses were technically capable of high-quality images, but actually making such a photograph required skill or luck; the results were otherwise blurry and poorly-focused. Studio portraits in those days used extremely bright lights to compensate.

i_am_proteuson The U.S. needs a shipbuilding revolution

Interested readers may enjoy Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman, which chronicles, amongst other things, how Henry Kaiser led the rapid construction of the shipyards used to build the merchant fleet that helped the United States win the second world war.

The book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/208564/freedoms-for...

i_am_proteuson Commercial jet collides with Black Hawk helicopter near Reagan airport

The current embassy is indeed in DC proper, but it isn't directly across the river from DCA.

It's about a mile upriver, near the Watergate.

i_am_proteuson Nobody cares

It happened in NC, too: https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/10/duke-universit...

i_am_proteuson Ships must practice celestial navigation

There's no real need for celestial navigation on land, the same way there's no need for celestial navigation in most coastal waters: if you can see lines of bearing to known landmarks/navigation markers, you can obtain a fix.

i_am_proteuson Perplexity got ads

The "right way"[0] to use Kagi is the unlimited search tier ($10/mo) and then aggressively rank domains in searches. Within a few weeks, the search quality improves tremendously, because I have filtered out the domains responsible for low-quality results, and up-ranked the domains I find to be most useful.

[0]My opinion. Probably true.