Hacker News: billiam

New comment by billiam in "God sleeps in the minerals"

billiam — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:31:25 +0000

these dramatic and colorful massive specimens are perfect for an art museum, but as a recovering mineralogist I feel like the true beauty of the world of minerals in Earth is shown on the microscopic level, where you can see both the incredible order and incredible randomness of the (mostly) crystalline solids that make up minerals. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_section

There is an idea that minerals are these inorganic substances but fully two thirds of all minerals identified were originated from direct or indirect interaction with living things on Earth. In fact a recent hypothesis holds that minerals have evolved since the formation of the solar system very much like living things, getting more and more complex via selective processes. See https://hazen.carnegiescience.edu/research/mineral-evolution

New comment by billiam in "Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI"

billiam — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:17:51 +0000

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.

New comment by billiam in "Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI"

billiam — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:08:10 +0000

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.

New comment by billiam in "ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC"

billiam — Fri, 09 May 2025 16:50:09 +0000

Just pointing out that this silly exercise was mostly powered by nuclear reactors in France that (besides fission) transmute Uranium into Plutonium.

New comment by billiam in "El Cono: The mysterious sacred 'pyramid' hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest"

billiam — Wed, 07 May 2025 23:40:51 +0000

This site is becoming the Buzzfeed of tech. Better moderation please.

New comment by billiam in "How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment"

billiam — Thu, 01 May 2025 05:02:45 +0000

Clown take. The use of Signal or any app on a non-secure device by SecDef for what we know he messaged about in his office is absolutely a primary national security threat. Firing offense for any senior Pentagon official dealing with highly classified traffic. Nothing to do with politics.

New comment by billiam in "All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding"

billiam — Thu, 01 May 2025 04:44:41 +0000

Afloat like Weekend at Bernie's. I lived through multiple efforts to prop up the corpse while making sure it would never ever be as good as Chrome.

New comment by billiam in "Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4"

billiam — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 22:19:54 +0000

New headline: AWS RDS is not CockroachDB or Spanner. And it's not trying to be.

New comment by billiam in "The Russian Paradox: So Much Education, So Little Human Capital"

billiam — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 23:20:18 +0000

The demographic time bomb that is the Russian population (human capital, to use an inhuman term) has been recognized since the late 80s. I am surprised how much that productivity along with health has plunged in the last decade. It is not as some suggested a lagging indicator of the aftermath of the Soviet empire but the continuing collapse of the Russian empire, of which the Soviet Union was just a phase. Despite the best intentions of would be autocrats in the West to pump it up, Russia is transitioning from a pretend developed nation to a much smaller developing country on a large land mass.

New comment by billiam in "Polypane, The browser for ambitious web developers"

billiam — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 21:19:13 +0000

If dominance wasn't at least enhanced or supported by owning the browser engine, Google wouldn't be doing Chromium.

New comment by billiam in "Greenpeace must pay over $660M in case over Dakota Access protest activities"

billiam — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 14:08:54 +0000

As is the jury selection process, especially in low population areas. And jury instructions from the judge. This seems to be a particularly egregious example, and I think on appeal this will will be corrected.

New comment by billiam in "20k federal workers take "buyout" so far, official says"

billiam — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:31:19 +0000

If you are a federal employee that got an email from these scumbags, look at who is extending this "offer." Trump, who has stiffed everyone who ever did work for him, and Musk, who still is being sued by lots of Twitter employees especially execs, for their unpaid severance. They are the most untrustworthy people ever to serve in the federal government.

New comment by billiam in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

billiam — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:31:47 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by billiam in "Asteroid Impact on Earth 2032 with Probability 1% and 8Mt Energy"

billiam — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 22:34:29 +0000

fingers crossed!

New comment by billiam in "Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon"

billiam — Wed, 22 Jan 2025 19:30:38 +0000

I just can't fathom the lack of self-awareness of people who championed Ross Ulbricht's cause, seemingly because he looks like them, codes like them, and sat in the same public library they frequent or became associated with a techno-libertarian identity. Hundreds of drug and gun dealers are sentenced every week, some certainly unjustly. Where is the outrage for them?

New comment by billiam in "The Origins of Wokeness"

billiam — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 20:25:50 +0000

Wow, Paul Graham just kinda set the standard for cognitive dissonance on HN. In short, sins of elision, omission, and exaggeration in this post and elsewhere in his absurdly entitled world make it clear that he is himself the prig here.

New comment by billiam in "Show HN: Tetris in a PDF"

billiam — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 21:35:14 +0000

and this is why I can't read HN at work anymore........

I have increasing confidence that when AIs finally destroy the Internet the delivery vehicle will be the file format that was created, as the Internet itself was, as a form of digital paper.

New comment by billiam in "Adaptation to a Viscous Snowball Earth Ocean as Path to Complex Multicellularity (2021)"

billiam — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 19:17:32 +0000

I think the rare Earth hypotheses get it backward, it all looks unlikely when you only have one data point. I think that complex life finds a way and it all looks like a six cushion bank shot in retrospect.

New comment by billiam in "Adaptation to a Viscous Snowball Earth Ocean as Path to Complex Multicellularity (2021)"

billiam — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 18:09:30 +0000

This is more of a hypothesis than a well-rounded and evaluated theory. I could argue that rather than the viscosity of seawater the isolation of hydrothermal vents during the Snowball Earth period was the primary driver of eukaryote evolution and diversity. Isolation makes evolution speed up, and homogeneity slows it down in general. Fascinating to think about it though.

New comment by billiam in "Nullboard: Kanban board in a single HTML file"

billiam — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 18:28:33 +0000

The mental model my kids have for work is that typing or even thinking is itself a finished product. For my generation that idea of a conscious action of saving your work on a computer made me think more about what I was doing and how I was doing it. But I am an old.