Hacker News: KineticLensman

New comment by KineticLensman in "Forgotten Woodlands"

KineticLensman — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:10:04 +0000

Yes. My in-laws in East Anglia lived near Ramsey Heights, which (just checked my OS map) is almost entirely below the 10m contour. The nearby Ramsey Forty Foot mostly exceeds the 10m contour. They are great places for lazy cyclists but the downside side is the relatively high winds that are uninterrupted by terrain, and which always seem to orient themselves to be a local headwind.

New comment by KineticLensman in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

KineticLensman — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:54:45 +0000

Lots of armchair experts incorrecting each other

New comment by KineticLensman in "IBM Bob"

KineticLensman — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 14:16:36 +0000

Can confirm. Per the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]: 'barm' is The froth that forms on the top of fermenting malt liquors, which is used to leaven bread, and to cause fermentation in other liquors; yeast, leaven. OR The froth or foam on the surface of beer OR English regional (chiefly Lancashire). A soft round bread roll, a barm cake.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/barm_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#2...

New comment by KineticLensman in "Kids go from curious to frustrated playing with AI-stuffed toys, UW study finds"

KineticLensman — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 13:01:15 +0000

I enjoyed The Diamond Age but the 'AI' is nothing like today's. The stories in Nell's primer are actually mediated by a human actor (not an AI), who becomes a mother figure for her.

New comment by KineticLensman in "Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?"

KineticLensman — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 17:37:21 +0000

I’ve been at a locals’ restaurant in Italy where the chef had sourced some truffles from a nearby wood. They were better than anything he could have got from a store

New comment by KineticLensman in "The safest job from AI may be writing"

KineticLensman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:53:20 +0000

"The reason LLMs use the same cadence and cliches is that their RLHF does not emphasize writing well, the way it emphasizes, say, coding. And the reason for that should be pretty obvious: coding is where the big money is at."

Software can be checked for being 'written well' by compilers / linters etc. There is no equivalent for well-written natural prose. Spelling and grammar checkers haven't a clue about prose semantics.

New comment by KineticLensman in "Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting"

KineticLensman — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:46:58 +0000

"How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming" - awesome title for an Astronomy book

New comment by KineticLensman in "Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need"

KineticLensman — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 12:37:34 +0000

I looked 'squeeze' up in the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]. The are numerous variant forms including 'squoze' and 'squozen':

"Also 1600s squeez, squeaze, squease, squese, 1600s–1700s squeese. Also with dialect preterite and past participle 1800s– squoze, past participle 1800s squozen."

The OED cites quotations from the 1930s, 1870s, and 1860s that include 'squoze' and 'squozen', for example ‘Orange?’ repeated Waitress No. 1. ‘Do you want it squoze?’ in the Baltimore Sun, 1 Sep 1931.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/squeeze_v?tab=forms#21076314

New comment by KineticLensman in "The Dutch are filling gas wells with cement"

KineticLensman — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:16:55 +0000

> It has gone from being a major producer of oil and gas

Given that North sea oil is a finite resource that has already peaked, it cannot form the basis of a long term energy strategy.

New comment by KineticLensman in "Explain it to me like I'm ten"

KineticLensman — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:00:02 +0000

Fair enough.

In my defence, I was coming at it etymologically, where (according to the OED), a perambulator is 'A person who walks or travels through or about a place' (hence 'walker') OR 'A carriage for a baby or young child, which may be pushed along by a person on foot. Now usually shortened to pram [...] a cradle mounted on four wheels'.

So 'mobile bed' is a perfect description

New comment by KineticLensman in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

KineticLensman — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 11:06:37 +0000

I can see his point that it is worth learning to think for yourself, but if you then try to publish your thoughts without understanding what else is out there (e.g. by reading about it), the results could be very embarrassing. This would seem to apply in both philosophy (which I'm assuming Schopenhauer was discussing) and (say) genre fiction.

Incidentally, having quickly scanned some of Schopenhauer's actual writing [0], I found statements such as "women are suited to being nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted" and women "are inferior to men in respect of justice, honesty and conscientiousness". If I'd come across these first I'd be very reluctant, rightly or wrongly, to uncritically accept his views on other subjects.

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/509571816/Schopenhauer-Arthu...

New comment by KineticLensman in "Yes/No/Cancel causes Aspirin sales to soar (2007)"

KineticLensman — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:47:09 +0000

Sydney Padua's awesome, mostly true, steampunk graphic novel "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" jokes about the error messages that might have produced by the difference engine. One example occurs when a character tries to stop a sequence that may or may not destroy a precious manuscript:

Annulation lever activated!

Do you wish to continue?

Engage STOP lever to continue. Engage CONTINUE lever to stop.

Time remaining 5..4..3...

New comment by KineticLensman in "The only road in London where you have to drive on the right"

KineticLensman — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:44:55 +0000

You'd also have things like bus doors now being on the wrong side (traffic-side), road curvature being wrong (e.g. motorway junctions and entry/exit ramps), let alone car mirrors and driver positioning.

New comment by KineticLensman in "Which Odyssey translation wins a blind reading test?"

KineticLensman — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:47:08 +0000

Thiss is a very good example. Consider the difference between "he's hard working" and "he's hard work". My wife ran into this when some German co-workers were describing a colleague.

New comment by KineticLensman in "The computer that helped win World War II"

KineticLensman — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 19:21:01 +0000

It's on the same site but there is some institutional nonsense that means getting onto the Bletchley site doesn't guarantee access to the NMoC, which is only open on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Don't ask me how I know...

New comment by KineticLensman in "Boffin claims Microsoft’s “quantum leap” is invalid due to “basic Python errors”"

KineticLensman — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:37:28 +0000

Used in WW2 to refer to radar engineers, bouncing bomb designers etc

New comment by KineticLensman in "The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers"

KineticLensman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:48:55 +0000

Yes. Especially for owls like the Great Grey, it shows how small the bird is inside all of those feathers.

New comment by KineticLensman in "The Genius of the Barn Owl's Feathers"

KineticLensman — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:20:14 +0000

What isn't mentioned is that owl feathers are generally less oily than many other birds. This makes them softer and thus quieter, but the penalty is that that they get water-logged faster. As a result, owls find it harder to hunt in wet weather, and extended rainy periods can cause real problems, especially in the breeding season, when youngsters need continual feeding.

(source: I used to volunteer at a Raptor conservancy).

New comment by KineticLensman in "The first British person in space"

KineticLensman — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:53:14 +0000

No, that was "Foot heads arms body", when Michael Foot became the chair of CND.

New comment by KineticLensman in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

KineticLensman — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:11:31 +0000

Birds have all sorts of optimizations that improve efficiency, some of which make them very different from mammals. Their lungs are different from ours in two respects. Firstly, they are relatively rigid and the pumping is done primarily by separate air sacs. Secondly, they have an outlet pipe so can take in new air while also expelling the old. The result is continuous oxygen exchange rather than a breathing-in/breathing-out cycle like mammals.

You can see the effect in how prey is eaten after a hunt. A mammalian sprint-predator like a cheetah has to catch its breath before eating what it has just caught. Its avian equivalent, like a Peregrine falcon, can immediately start eating.