Hacker News: billyjmc

New comment by billyjmc in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

billyjmc — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:51:51 +0000

Not if you play roguelikes.

New comment by billyjmc in "Apple Maps claims it's 29,905 miles away"

billyjmc — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 15:08:22 +0000

Almost certainly. GPS is not only easily jammed, but easily spoofed. If the car believed GPS instead of its own eyes, so to speak, then there’s significant potential that you’d see glitches more often. It could also be something of a safety risk when using its self-driving capabilities.

New comment by billyjmc in "Syntax highlighting is a waste of an information channel (2020)"

billyjmc — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 01:51:33 +0000

Will Chrichton gave a talk at Jane Street about his research that led to the development of this plugin. It’s a pretty good talk:

https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/rust-for-everyone/

As I recall, he also explains how Rust is uniquely positioned to enable this kind of syntax formatting.

New comment by billyjmc in "You are the scariest monster in the woods"

billyjmc — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 14:53:26 +0000

Computers have been making decisions for a while now. As a specific personal example from 2008, I found out that my lender would make home loan offers based on an inscrutable (to me and the banker I was speaking to) heuristic. If the loan was denied by the heuristic, then a human could review the decision, but had strict criteria that they would have to follow. Basically, a computer could “exercise judgement” a make offers that a human could not.

New comment by billyjmc in "Living microbial cement supercapacitors with reactivatable energy storage"

billyjmc — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 15:35:04 +0000

Energy is how much work you can do. Power is how fast you can do it. When you express these in terms of densities, it’s how much energy a certain quantity of material can store, and how quickly that energy can be released from a certain quantity of material.

If you short out a AA battery, it will get warm for a little while. If you short out a 14500 Li-ion battery (which is the same size and comparable energy density), you might get a small explosion as it dumps its energy very quickly.

New comment by billyjmc in "Uv: Running a script with dependencies"

billyjmc — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 02:57:11 +0000

What’s your use case for locking dependencies on a single script?

One things that’s useful to my organization is that we can then proceed to scan the lockfile’s declared dependencies with, e.g., `trivy fs uv.lock` to make sure we’re not running code with known CVEs.

New comment by billyjmc in "QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch"

billyjmc — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 20:33:44 +0000

I suspect there is a legal difference between offering a feature in the style of Quake (and calling it out as such) vs. baking it into your App’s branding.

New comment by billyjmc in "Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors”"

billyjmc — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 19:55:38 +0000

This is news to me, but I’m unsurprised. Why people use so much strongly scented products is absolutely baffling to me.

New comment by billyjmc in "Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense"

billyjmc — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 20:58:19 +0000

I believe it’s an Independence Day movie reference.

New comment by billyjmc in "Show HN: Workout.cool – Open-source fitness coaching platform"

billyjmc — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 16:29:31 +0000

It could potentially help with discoverability. As it stands, I’d imagine it takes a very particular sort of search query (either “open source fitness” in Google or “fitness” on GitHub) to have a chance at finding this. Unless your target audience is only the intersection of FOSS-advocates and fitness folks, you might be limiting adoption.

With that said, the website works just fine on my phone.

New comment by billyjmc in "Peano arithmetic is enough, because Peano arithmetic encodes computation"

billyjmc — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 17:37:49 +0000

Incidentally, this also proves that GP is the main character.

New comment by billyjmc in "A receipt printer cured my procrastination"

billyjmc — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 21:33:44 +0000

This is nearly what you’re looking for (well, not that close, but it’s got the right spirit):

https://blog.singleton.io/posts/2022-10-17-otp-on-wrist/

New comment by billyjmc in "Researchers develop ‘transparent paper’ as alternative to plastics"

billyjmc — Fri, 06 Jun 2025 23:26:11 +0000

I’m a chemist. Bromine isn’t bromide, and lithium bromide is a simple nontoxic salt. If this is as simple as is described in the news article, then it’s likely a pretty “green” process overall.

New comment by billyjmc in "Evertop: E-ink IBM XT clone with 100+ hours of battery life"

billyjmc — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 00:33:59 +0000

There’s a video, too, but the framerate wasn’t usefully playable. I’ve seen worse, but you wouldn’t ever want to play it this way.

New comment by billyjmc in "Making any integer with four 2s"

billyjmc — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 22:13:02 +0000

But repeated application of the unary minus basically results in a no-op. So it’s somewhat exceptional in that regard.

New comment by billyjmc in "Jane Street's Figgie card game"

billyjmc — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 04:40:11 +0000

I don’t think it requires conspiratorial thinking to believe that seed oils are less healthful than more traditional sources of cooking oils / fats (for one reason or another). Regardless of that, given that seed oils can be produced cheaply and incorporated in to foods to increase profit, “seed oil infiltration” into foods is very real.

New comment by billyjmc in "Why Is Warner Brothers Discovery Dumping Old Movies On YouTube?"

billyjmc — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 18:43:04 +0000

That’s my experience with movies on YouTube so far, yes.

New comment by billyjmc in "Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history"

billyjmc — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 02:00:56 +0000

Well, it is technically open source, open weights, and closed training set, right?

(My recollection is that the training code is MIT licensed.)

New comment by billyjmc in "Phased Array Microphone (2023)"

billyjmc — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 23:45:09 +0000

Phyphox is a great sensor suite app for undergrad Physics experiments, and it includes a spectrum analyzer. Also, it supports both iOS and Android.

New comment by billyjmc in "Phased Array Microphone (2023)"

billyjmc — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 20:26:22 +0000

Coriolis corrections are thrown into sniper ballistic calculations, too. Not a huge effect in most conditions, but not zero, and there have been a lot of long shots in the past two decades.