Hacker News: MiguelVieira

New comment by MiguelVieira in "The four programming questions from my 1994 Microsoft internship interview (2023)"

MiguelVieira — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:50:34 +0000

An optimal algorithm is shockingly simple

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

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'"

MiguelVieira — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:39:52 +0000

I think of the film as a Daft Punk music video, and from that perspective it's great.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee"

MiguelVieira — Mon, 12 May 2025 20:07:24 +0000

Related: Recovering Grizzly Bears in California

https://docs.calgrizzly.org/docs/CGA-Feasibility-Study-2025....

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Nick Cave's thoughts on a ChatGPT poem (2023)"

MiguelVieira — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 14:03:40 +0000

"AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

New comment by MiguelVieira in "50 Years of Travel Tips"

MiguelVieira — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 18:18:10 +0000

I have a spreadsheet that I clone and edit each time I go on a trip. So if I go camping, skiing, to the beach, etc, I can look at my old checklists, find a similar one, then clone it and tweak it for my upcoming trip.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Chocolate intake and risk of type 2 diabetes: prospective cohort studies"

MiguelVieira — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 20:54:43 +0000

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

New comment by MiguelVieira in "How good are American roads?"

MiguelVieira — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:03:17 +0000

The National Forest Service alone maintains 265,000 miles of roads.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/science-technology/infrastructure/ro...

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Buy payphones and retire"

MiguelVieira — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 23:18:47 +0000

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Ask HN: What are your oldest "online" accounts still in use?"

MiguelVieira — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 13:31:53 +0000

My Amazon account order history starts in 1998.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "The extraordinary lives of coast redwoods"

MiguelVieira — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 21:32:18 +0000

> 96% of West coast redwoods' habitat has been lost.

To be clear, redwoods still grow in almost all of their former range. They were logged, but they grew back. About 4% was never logged and is old-growth.

You can see a map of the redwood range (light green) and remaining old-growth (dark green) here:

https://redwoodhikes.com

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Old vs. new growth trees and the wood products they make"

MiguelVieira — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 16:10:06 +0000

It's interesting to point out that the wood has tighter rings and is more durable not necessarily because it came from old trees, but because the old growth trees grew in mature forests where they were in the shade of other trees, and thus grew more slowly and had tighter rings.

Trees growing in full sunlight grow quickly and have more widely spaced rings. Balsa wood for example, which is very light and soft, comes from balsa trees that have evolved to grow very quickly in sunny gaps caused by fallen trees in tropical forests.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Multifault earthquake threat for Seattle region revealed by mass tree mortality"

MiguelVieira — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 12:52:55 +0000

Yes

https://www.reuters.com/science/huge-ancient-solar-storm-rev...

New comment by MiguelVieira in "The Last Egg"

MiguelVieira — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:07:14 +0000

Whoa I had no idea:

"To reduce the cost and increase the efficiency and reliability of transporting fuel and materials to South Pole Station, USAP established an overland traverse route from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. The traverse route is approximately 1,030 miles long and took several years of route-finding to prove and to mitigate areas with crevassing. This route is traveled by the South Pole Traverse (SPoT), a tractor train that hauls supplies and fuel using specialized sleds. SPoT tractors ascend more than 9,300 feet along the route to Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. On average, it takes 52 days for the round trip from McMurdo to Pole and back."

https://www.southpole.aq/activities/station-logistics.html

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Why flying insects gather at artificial light"

MiguelVieira — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:11 +0000

In Costa Rica I would find toads culstered at the bottom of street lamps, waiting to eat insects that would come crashing down.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)"

MiguelVieira — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 14:36:44 +0000

I like David Allen Sibley's definition of a tree: "If you can walk under it, it's a tree; if you have to walk around it, it's a shrub".

New comment by MiguelVieira in "New Webb image captures clearest view of Neptune’s rings in decades"

MiguelVieira — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:12:41 +0000

> 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it

It looks like that's comparable to fresh snow or a glacier?

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Inflation propagates unevenly"

MiguelVieira — Thu, 10 Mar 2022 14:16:20 +0000

Expected investment returns are already inflation-adjusted

https://www.csun.edu/~vcovrig/Asset_Aloc.pdf

Edit: I think your point still stands though. In situations where inflation is out of control or where you don't have access to stable investments, then spending your income as soon as you get it could be more rational than saving it.

New comment by MiguelVieira in "The road to success is paved with rejection letters"

MiguelVieira — Tue, 01 Mar 2022 21:06:43 +0000

"Well suppose" — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — "Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?"

....

"Well I'd try every darn one," Rader tells Lyle.

....

Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. "Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key."

New comment by MiguelVieira in "Is Euler’s Identity Beautiful? and If So, How?"

MiguelVieira — Fri, 04 Jun 2021 13:17:25 +0000

A favorite of mine is the Gauss-Bonnet theorem which relates the Euler characteristic of a surface (i.e. its topology) to its Gaussian curvature (its differential geometry).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss–Bonnet_theorem

New comment by MiguelVieira in "The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar"

MiguelVieira — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 13:28:36 +0000

But the best selling candy bar in the US is Snickers. So that would be your biggest competitor.