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wumms

665 karma · joined May 11, 2017

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wumms··on Show HN: Subvocal – Talk to your computer without making noise
For me: whispering = evolution, silent = revolution. I'd like to see some studies demonstrating its safety.
wumms··on Gilgamesh by Simon Armitage review – an ancient epic is brilliantly translated
Will watch Darmok tonight.
wumms··on Three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics
(From [0])

'A man may do an immense deal of good, if he does not care who gets the credit for it.'

"QI hypothesizes that a Jesuit Priest named Father Strickland deserves primary credit for this family of sayings. This claim is based on the diary entry dated September 21, 1863 written by Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff and multiple attributions thereafter. However, similar maxims may have been developed independently."

[0] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/12/21/doing-good-selfless

wumms··on Incremental rust builds up to 92x faster than cargo/rustc
Median 19x faster

Min 3.7x faster

Max 83x faster

(Calculated from 25 benchmarks: https://github.com/indexable-inc/blaze/blob/main/docs/benchm...)

wumms··on Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis
From the article:

"Human cartilage also responded

The researchers then examined cartilage taken from people with osteoarthritis who were undergoing total knee replacement surgery.

After one week of treatment with the 15-PGDH inhibitor, the human tissue contained fewer chondrocytes expressing 15-PGDH. Activity in genes associated with cartilage degradation and fibrocartilage also declined compared with untreated tissue."

[...]

"The findings do not yet establish that the treatment can regrow cartilage or prevent osteoarthritis in people. The mouse results and experiments on human tissue represent important early evidence, but clinical trials specifically testing cartilage regeneration will be needed to determine whether the approach is safe and effective for patients.

An oral 15-PGDH inhibitor has already reached clinical testing for a different age related problem: muscle weakness."

wumms··on When code is a maze, smart developers make maps (2025)
Got seg fault (gcc 15.2.0 on nixos 26.05) when writing to

    M[Z] = ...
Had to add:

    char fmt[] = "%d";
and change to:

    scanf(M=fmt,&C);
Works now:

    char*M,A,Z,E=40,J[40],T[40];main(C){char fmt[]="%d";for(*J=A=scanf(M=fmt,&C);
    --            E;             J[              E]             =T
    [E   ]=  E)   printf("._");  for(;(A-=Z=!Z)  ||  (printf("\n|"
    )    ,   A    =              39              ,C             --
    )    ;   Z    ||    printf   (M   ))M[Z]=Z[A-(E   =A[J-Z])&&!C
    &    A   ==             T[                                  A]
    |6<<27<rand()||!C&!Z?J[T[E]=T[A]]=E,J[T[A]=A-Z]=A,"_.":" |"];}
wumms··on Commercially Available Bike Generators Are Not Sustainable (2011)
> Our dashboard also includes a 220V circuit. That makes it compatible with grid-powered devices (110V in the US, 240V in the UK).

Retro-look nit: all are outdated nominal voltages. The US is 120 V (since the 1960s), while the UK and EU are 230 V (since the mid-1990s).

wumms··on Cottage Computer Programming (1984)
> computers take over a lot of the trivial thinking we do, freeing us to be creative
wumms··on OpenTrafficMap
> What is concerning is that vehicles appear to broadcast a MAC address.

Somewhat related: 'Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you': https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...

wumms··on Artemis II safely splashes down
What is coming into view from the top center at 08:26:25 [0], right after the commentator says, "the weather conditions remain go"? It stays visible for more than seven minutes before disappearing behind the horizon.

[0] https://youtu.be/X9Miy8ngusQ?t=30382

wumms··on Velxio 2.0 – Emulate Arduino, ESP32, and Raspberry Pi 3 in the Browser
Nice work! One minor point for me: it wasn’t immediately clear that you need to press Compile before Play gets enabled (e.g. Arduino IDE let's you upload right away and compiles if needed)
wumms··on Launch HN: Kita (YC W26) – Automate credit review in emerging markets
Germany (~5% of SMEs underfunded [0]) isn’t underbanked; it’s just bureaucratically annoying; so more of an UX problem (which Kita helps address) with a somewhat similar outcome.

The US ("63M underbanked businesses") are already targeted: "Automate document review for business loan applications so you can fund more enterprises without scaling your back office." https://www.usekita.com/united-states

[0] https://www.eib.org/files/publications/20230340_econ_eibis_2...

wumms··on Launch HN: Kita (YC W26) – Automate credit review in emerging markets
Sidenote: unlike in Tagalog, Kita means “day-care facility for children” in German, so names like Kita Capture and Kita Credit Agent could carry unintended connotations.
wumms··on LoGeR – 3D reconstruction from extremely long videos (DeepMind, UC Berkeley)
Street View cars added Velodyne LiDAR around 2017 [0][1], but it's optional. I found no data on 'LiDAR vs image only'-percentage.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/googles-street-view-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View

wumms··on Notes on Baking at the South Pole
Crunchyroll uploaded E01 for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt573QIevIM
wumms··on An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published
Writing system [0]: "In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles on 11 May 2009 [1], Serafini stated that there is no meaning behind the Codex's script, which is asemic; that his experience in writing it was similar to automatic writing [2]; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey was the sensation children feel with books they cannot yet understand, although they see that the writing makes sense for adults. However, the book's page-numbering system was decoded by Allan C. Wechsler and Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski, as being a variation of base 21."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus#Writing_sy...

[1] I could not find a source for that talk

[2] Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing

wumms··on Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]
> His primary school principal described him as ‘a happy little fellow who has a clear understanding of the fact that he is different’.
wumms··on Git's Magic Files
Also, files that are added to .gitignore after they’ve already been committed will still appear as modified. To stop tracking them, you need to remove them from the index (staging area):

    git rm --cached <file>
wumms··on Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia
If they get the read speed up to a couple of GBit/s (~100x current max write speed), 4.8TB might be a good fit for 32k movies.
wumms··on Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia
They mention it in the article:

> Microsoft began to build on their work in 2017. Although Kazansky’s approach maximizes durability and the density of data, in the latest work, Microsoft has gone for practicality. They explore a method that enables data to be written faster and decoded more reliably than did Project Silica’s previous iterations, says Black, and it uses cheaper borosilicate glass, rather than harder-to-make fused silica.

Following your link, I found a prototype of the media storage system (2023) with just 2828 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnK-uB4OsgU

wumms··on The Pentagon just threatened to blacklist Anthropic
Pentagon might ask contractors to certify they don't use Anthropic's Claude (wsj.com)

13 points by fortran77 20 hours ago | 6 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057294

wumms··on Microsoft team creates data-storage system that lasts for millennia
Current write speed (No read speed given):

    Blu-ray (1×)            ~36   Mbit/s
    MS-Glass (single beam)  ~25.6 Mbit/s
    MS-Glass (multi-beam)   ~65.9 Mbit/s
That's ~7-18 days per 120mm x 120mm medium (4.8TB). Glass prices stable for now. Also, the authors make no statement about horizontal vs. vertical storage.
wumms··on A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
> Imagine some future event even more powerful

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

wumms··on On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]
Reminds me of: Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning
wumms··on A web server on a single floppy disk
Sorry, nitpick: 720kB DD 1.44MB HD
wumms··on Twin – The AI Company Builder
> Today we're launching Twin publicly, after a 1-month beta where users deployed more than 100,000 fully autonomous agents. We're also announcing a $10M seed round led by LocalGlobe.

So... 20%?

wumms··on Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video
Whoops! Mistook the "You're about to speak with an AI."-progress bar for processing delay.
wumms··on Show HN: LemonSlice – Upgrade your voice agents to real-time video
You could add a Max Headroom to the hn link. You might reach real time by interspersing freeze frames, duplicates, or static.
wumms··on 430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found
Website has problems, NYT version: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/26/science/archaeology-neand...
wumms··on Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability
Combining Pareto and Murphy might result in 4 hours head start for the thief though.
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