Hacker News Reader

st26on Having Alzheimer’s at 38 (2015)

Not all sunshine & roses. Here's a dark factoid for you- my memory is a bit fuzzy on when you chose mother's blood vs amniotic fluid sample for the test, but at the time I learned about all this, the odds of taking the amniotic fluid sample causing spontaneous abortion, were higher than the odds of the fetus having the more common trisomy conditions. For any particular fetus, the test was more risky than the disease.

st26on Having Alzheimer’s at 38 (2015)

Do we know if latent precursors combine, or is it really spontaneous/random?

st26on Version Control Before Git with CVS

Rule of thumb, one man's useless version control feature is another man's saving grace. I've never needed to open multiple changelists simultaneously in one work area, but I'm sure someone loves that feature.

st26on Modeling Potential Income and Welfare – Benefits in Illinois (2014) [pdf]

Speaking purely hypothetically, if the benefit value was small enough, it would never make sense to not work, no matter the flaws in the program. We take it for granted that one can live off welfare, even if not well- that assumption/precondition itself could be what pedro_hab is marveling at.

st26on Cargo bikes as symbolic markers of egalitarian gender roles

FWIW, a good pannier bag will fit a day or two's groceries just fine. I have both a trailer and a pannier, but the pannier is less hassle for small trips.

st26on Cargo bikes as symbolic markers of egalitarian gender roles

Does anyone know why dads riding these are called "soft"? I've never ridden a cargo bike, but it takes strong legs & constitution to regularly tow a kid or utility trailer more than a few miles.

Is it just that whole notion that fathers who are involved with their children are not masculine?

st26on Is the Alzheimer's “Amyloid Hypothesis” Wrong? (2017)

What made it so previously unthinkable?

Admitting you have invested twenty years of research and you're not an inch closer- in fact you went down the wrong path entirely- would be a pretty bitter pill to swallow, both for researchers and patients.

st26on How to get kids to pay attention

My dad hit us sometimes when we were being dumb, but otherwise he was great

People possibly react strangely to that for a few additional reasons?

- Culturally now, "hit" can refer to anything all the way up to criminal domestic violence, blunt weapons, and hospital visits.

- Kids routinely cover for their parents, even when they are the second kind- the kind that just lose their temper, beat their children unconscious, etc.

Less vague terms like "spanked", "slapped", etc might cause milder reactions...

st26on Homes 'Earn' Minimum Wage or More in Almost Half the Nation's Largest Cities

Let's be real- maybe there's a cabal of homeowners trying to jack up the value of their house with government policy for their own gain. Or, maybe the homeowners don't like skyscrapers and do like seeing the mountains, in fact perhaps that's why they moved there in the first place pre-boom.

st26on Why We Should Say Yes to Drugs

Trans fats perhaps, which we still allow in foods, and don't even need to be included on the nutritional label %'s if the amount is low.

They're still everywhere, despite the fact we're pretty sure they are unhealthy at any dose.

st26on Montreal Moving Day: what happens when a whole city moves house at once

Thanks for the reply. Still hard to imagine! The cabinets and counters in particular, the mind boggles. I completely agree, it sounds like a huge pain point.

st26on Montreal Moving Day: what happens when a whole city moves house at once

Are the cabinets, countertops, sinks, etc very different in German apartments? (Simpler, less customized, more minimal) You're practically describing a full kitchen remodel in the US, which might run $10,000-20,000, or so I hear, with at least a week of labor...

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

I don't disagree that it would be great & all. But there's things working against it, that software doesn't really have to deal with (or at least has solved) is my point.

And let's be honest, a state of the art block ported to the latest process isn't going to be 40 man-hours to customize, you're probably looking at more like a couple man-years unless it's very well designed... Which is why reusable core shops are a viable business. And how vibrant of an open source community would you have, if it took a small team a year just to customize & implement the open source design to their application? You would have very few users.

Now, you could argue that because a lot of the real work is in the customization that they could open source the core. But where does the customization end, and the core, the root functionality begin?

I think a more realistic pitch would be an open source testbench or behavioral model that verifies your core is fully spec compliant.

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

The key is the solution is so application specific. Write code once, it runs anywhere forever more. But IP blocks are not really like that. Especially advanced IP (USB1.1 vs USB3.1) need to be heavily customized for each application. So John user can't just download a block from Sourceforge and use it.

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

Indeed. But what if every statement in those boatloads of open source software were race conditions, and varied with each machine, frequency, temperature, voltage, workload, etc?

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

IMO start with QFP, yes. It's not trivial and has a lot of hand work, but critically you can both see & fix your mistakes.

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

Reflow trash PCB's. Focus on packages like TQFP, and discrete components of human-visible sizes.

st26on Darpa invests $100M in a silicon compiler

It's been a little while since I did proto boards, but I remember a vast chasm between industrial & hobbyist, that basically forced me to wrangle packages I had no desire to deal with. You could get 4GB DDR2 DIMMs, or you could get a DIP 8kB SRAM. For a microchip you could get TQFP-32, or BGA-1000. So on and so forth. I remember a useful chip that came in nothing but QFN-16.

It seemed like it wasn't I need fancy gear to make blinky lights, but rather for anything better than 8-bit, kilobyte, and low MHz, the only parts available was the fancy commercial stuff.

st26on We Should Be Building Cities for People, Not Cars (2016)

I think at its core it misses a huge portion of the problem, which is that bad public transit is 10x worse than just sitting in a bit of traffic

It's chicken and egg. Public transit needs ridership to get better. It won't get ridership until it's better.

The large stick of presenting more of the previously hidden costs of driving, is partly banking on public transit getting better as more people are nudged towards it.

st26on Colorado Lawmakers Seek to Make Flying Drones Over Wildfires a Felony

Or, you know, you could just not make fake ID's.

st26on The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber (2016)

Risk is inversely related to skill and ability

Ahem, objective hazard?

st26on Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

That's fine, but if the consumer pays the real cost up front, people will behave appropriately for whatever that cost is. By hiding the real cost, we distort the market and people make different choices.

st26on Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables.

Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.

st26on AMD Tackles Coming “Chiplet” Revolution With New Chip Network Scheme

A more modular package brings a variety of benefits. Small chips are cheaper per unit area, because yields are higher. Reuse in different products can also lower development costs. Different IP can live on the most appropriate technology node- mature & cheap, new & fast, etc. IP can be developed on different schedules. IP from completely different companies can be integrated more easily. (see the intel-AMD partnership, it's "chiplet")

It's really not that complicated an idea- modular packages are more flexible! What's new is making it work within a compelling power, price, and performance envelope.

st26on AMD Tackles Coming “Chiplet” Revolution With New Chip Network Scheme

Hypothetically, yes. But FPGA's are very area-hungry; a big powerful one isn't going to fit nicely into a modestly sized package along with lots of other chips.

st26on AMD Tackles Coming “Chiplet” Revolution With New Chip Network Scheme

What is old is new again. We'll probably go in this direction for a decade or three, breaking things up. Then we'll go the other way again, integrating everything into one chip again.

st26on AMD Tackles Coming “Chiplet” Revolution With New Chip Network Scheme

Steppings are minor revisions, perhaps analogous to a kernel patch revision. So they do have to manufacture B2 die and B1 die and they are not interchangeable- but they are 99.999% identical.

st26on Darpa Literally Reinvented the Wheel for Army Combat Vehicles

And, if you're lucky, also end up with ten neat brand new ideas that are spawned by the RnD that lead to entirely new things.

All the tech that went into this wheel, might coincidentally open other doors, that lead to still other doors...

st26on How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country

Of course, buses require less asphalt & car parts per passenger mile, and trains use no asphalt at all...

st26on How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country

Easier to keep produce fresh when you shop more regularly, too.