Hacker News: KurSix

New comment by KurSix in "Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active"

KurSix — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 09:56:35 +0000

That's wild to think about. You could be standing inside the largest canyon in the solar system and have absolutely no idea

New comment by KurSix in "Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active"

KurSix — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 09:55:42 +0000

I wonder how long the conditions would need to persist for anything biological to actually take advantage of them

New comment by KurSix in "Giant canyon on Mars is still tectonically active"

KurSix — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 09:54:48 +0000

The fact that they managed to narrow this down to a strike-slip event 20-40 km underground using data from a single seismometer is pretty impressive

New comment by KurSix in "A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting"

KurSix — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:33:50 +0000

I wonder how much of that was simply being early versus having genuinely better opportunities

New comment by KurSix in "Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death"

KurSix — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:47:20 +0000

Quite a contrast with the story

New comment by KurSix in "Rabbits were a medieval royal luxury in England until the Black Death"

KurSix — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 09:39:22 +0000

So hares are the locals and rabbits are the French immigrants

New comment by KurSix in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

KurSix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:22:48 +0000

Clearly you haven't seen their natural habitat: suburban shopping centers.

New comment by KurSix in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

KurSix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:15:45 +0000

The big assumption is that technological intelligence is a fairly predictable endpoint once evolution produces the right kind of general intelligence

New comment by KurSix in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

KurSix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:14:38 +0000

Fifty thousand years is basically nothing evolutionarily, yet from the outside Earth would look like it had undergone a planetary regime change driven by one species

New comment by KurSix in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

KurSix — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:12:36 +0000

Interesting that biodiversity and biomass are almost orthogonal. A tropical forest can have hundreds of important tree species, while a boreal forest can put a huge fraction of its total mass into three or four

New comment by KurSix in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

KurSix — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:55:13 +0000

I think the weirdest part of that scenario is that science might become something closer to archaeology

New comment by KurSix in "We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians"

KurSix — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:48:01 +0000

I'm not sure the scarce resource will be people capable of understanding the AI's work. It may be institutions willing to tolerate the cost of understanding it

New comment by KurSix in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

KurSix — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:57:47 +0000

HBM isn't dramatically better in every dimension. You get huge bandwidth and good energy efficiency per bit transferred, but not necessarily a meaningful latency improvement and capacity expansion becomes tied to the package

New comment by KurSix in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

KurSix — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:55:48 +0000

Yeah, the scale is kind of mind-bending. You're taking something that's already extremely fragile, grinding most of its thickness away, handling it through several more process steps, and somehow doing that cheaply enough for mass-market products.

New comment by KurSix in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

KurSix — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:53:33 +0000

Sanctions can absolutely create the incentive to build a domestic supply chain, but incentive doesn't automatically translate into catching up on the same timeline

New comment by KurSix in "Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM"

KurSix — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:52:32 +0000

China has had a very strong incentive to recreate lithography and fab equipment for years, but a lot of the specialized HBM packaging chain was probably much lower priority until relatively recently

New comment by KurSix in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

KurSix — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:59:19 +0000

You probably can't make this reliable across every modern car without breaking something, but that's different from technically impossible

New comment by KurSix in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

KurSix — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:57:46 +0000

It should be as mundane as pulling the SIM card from a phone (or must be)

New comment by KurSix in "Data collected by cars and sold to third parties"

KurSix — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 05:54:08 +0000

At that point "opt out" starts to feel like a UI feature rather than an actual description of what the car is doing

New comment by KurSix in "Programming is Art"

KurSix — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 10:54:20 +0000

If AI makes code more stylistically uniform, it might actually make those deeper choices more visible