Hacker News Reader

xaellisonon Skymont: Intel’s E-Cores reach for the Sky

there's never a time I've been glad an article used Excel's 3D surface plot lol

xaellisonon Ask HN: Does anyone use sound effects in their dev environment?

I worked for a company where the main workflow was to download an entire postgres dump at the start of the day and work off that. It took 25 min. I aliased our download command to play run a profane version of `say "beep beep"` after it finished. Then one time it spoke up during our stand up and everyone heard. It got more polite thereafter.

xaellisonon Micrograd.jl

as a major julia enthusiast I gotta say this is not how you get people to check it out buddy

xaellisonon Human brain organoid bioprocessors now available to rent for $500 per month

that's not very vc-minded of you /s

xaellisonon The creatives pushing nail art to sculptural new lengths

maybe I can offset your disappointment by sharing a very cool nail exhibit I saw a few years back :) https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/writhing-sculptures-j...

xaellisonon Humane's daily returns are outpacing sales

indeed, it's more of an emergency landing

xaellisonon Robot dentist performs first human procedure

the article says that

xaellisonon Robot dentist performs first human procedure

1. I want a human drilling because I want empathy in my care 2. 90% detection rate on cavities isn't great

xaellisonon Wild new Wi-Fi routers turn your home network into a security radar

Pros: this is just like the Dark Knight! Cons: privacy nightmare

xaellisonon Show HN: A modern Jupyter client for macOS

yeah this is an immediate show-stopper for me, at least for professional usage

xaellisonon Pumped-storage hydroelectricity

It appears Enel "plans" a gravity system in ERCOT (May 2024) https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/22/enel-energy-vault-bui...

xaellisonon Did Turing prove the undecidability of the halting problem?

WE COME TO A NUANCED CONCLUSION. DOWNLOAD TO FIND OUT WHAT.

world's best abstract

xaellisonon Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons?

came to comment this :)

xaellisonon Escher's "Balcony" in Lego (2002)

I think it's a bit underwhelming, yes

xaellisonon Homoiconic Python

The whole point of homoiconicity is that a language (lisp) is implemented in itself. This is lisp implemented in python (not itself).

xaellisonon A skeptic's take on beaming power to Earth from space

"antennas so big that we cannot even simulate their behavior. " - does anyone know what that means?

xaellisonon Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production

I wonder what that will mean for charging infrastructure that suddenly has to deliver 10x power to enable that. Not sure that sort of charging could be as ubiquitously placed as gas stations

xaellisonon Hobby's algorithm for aesthetic Bézier splines (2020)

As the article mentions, the curves are unstable. This is delightfully apparent when you drag one control point in a circle around another. Interestingly, it can also make fairly sharp corners if the control points approach each other.

xaellisonon Have We Reached Peak AI?

I don't either put code in or use it's output directly. I treat it as a conversational oracle over stackoverflow / all documentation ever written :D

xaellisonon Show HN: Not sure you're talking to a human? Create a human check

If anyone successfully uses this in a dating app context please leave a note

xaellisonon Have We Reached Peak AI?

clearly they don't know any coders

xaellisonon Stephen Wolfram – 4-Hour Conversational Documentary on My Entire Arc of Life [video]

Scientific American I think did a balanced article about this character: https://web.archive.org/web/20231231040033/https://www.scien...

My favorite quotes:

when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”

“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”

xaellisonon Meta's Reality Labs loses record $4.65B ahead of Apple's Vision Pro launch

There's a difference between deep tech research (which truly can be revolutionary) and "revolutionary" consumer gizmos. I don't think the analogy holds.

xaellisonon How French was medieval England?

askbeeves.com

xaellisonon Show HN: Integer Map Data Structure

This limit comes from using int32s. Does anyone have an idea why on modern machines it isn't making use of int64s?

xaellisonon Capitalism and Cozy Games

forgive me for not engaging with your core ideas, but as far as I know the vernacular term is "cattle prod" and "cattle prick" sounds rather like something else

xaellisonon Coinbase tells judge that buying crypto is just like collecting Beanie Babies

Drug cartels might disagree with the 'nothing of value' statement

xaellisonon Computer Engineering for Babies (2021)

I read it as "for Barbies"

xaellisonon Space Solar Power Demonstrator ends first in-space mission

Two reasons. 1. A microwave receiver on earth is much smaller than many solar farms, so we don't use a lot of our finite land for energy generation 2. This could actually bring solar to some geographies which aren't well suited to solar due to weather

To achieve the energy transition, you need SO MANY solar panels and they will take up a lot of land. That land is most expensive near the very population centers which need the most power.

According to Jesse Jenkins, to power America, "the solar farms are an area the size of Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts."[1] (this isn't the most precise source I could find, but it's reputable)

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...

xaellisonon Lego Mechanical Computer

ok but gravity scales quite nicely as force right?