Hacker News: bouchard

New comment by bouchard in "For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides"

bouchard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:53:20 +0000

What field are you in that you'd actually wait two years, rather than retract your submission and go somewhere else?

New comment by bouchard in "One KW wind turbine without civil engineering"

bouchard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 21:45:22 +0000

Their "technical validation (CFD)" document looks like AI slop...

New comment by bouchard in "For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides"

bouchard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:59:53 +0000

Rejections from journals are not uncommon and sometimes it's for somewhat questionable reasons.

Uploading the manuscript to a preprint server and/or submitting to another journal, which Adamala is doing/planning to do, is the normal response.

Sending it to journalists beforehand is what I consider an overreaction.

New comment by bouchard in "For first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides"

bouchard — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:59:01 +0000

> “It’s an unusual way of doing things,” says Kerstin Göpfrich, a synthetic biologist at Heidelberg University.

That's being kind; it's a complete overreaction, simply put.

New comment by bouchard in "Show HN: A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia"

bouchard — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 14:53:13 +0000

> Yes 1-based indexing is a mistake. It leads to significantly less elegant code - especially for generic code - and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

Some would argue that 0-based indexing is significantly less elegant for numerical/scientific code, but that depends on whether they come from a MATLAB/Fortran or Python/C(++) background.

A decision was made to target the MATLAB/Fortran (and unhappy? Python/C++) crowd first, thus the choice of 1-based indexing and column-major order, but at the end of the day it's a matter of personal preference.

0-based indexing would have made it easier to reach a larger audience, however.

> and is no harder to understand than 1-based indexing for people capable of programming.

The same could be said the other way around ;-)

New comment by bouchard in "We rendered and embedded one million CAD files"

bouchard — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:52:36 +0000

The approach could be helpful for searching though large 3D model libraries like GrabCAD for some visual placeholder part by just describing it.

The generality of the part descriptions made me chuckle.

> A bevel gear with a circular base and a series of angular, tapered teeth extending radially outward. The teeth are uniformly distributed around the circumference, allowing for meshing at an angle with another gear. The gear's face includes a set of holes, varying in size and symmetrically arranged around the central bore, likely for weight reduction or mounting purposes. The central opening likely acts as an axle or shaft attachment point. The design facilitates the transmission of rotational motion between intersecting shafts, typically at a 90-degree angle.

Zotero 8

bouchard — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 18:05:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-8/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735616

Points: 245

# Comments: 58

New comment by bouchard in "Nvidia's $20B antitrust loophole"

bouchard — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 19:23:39 +0000

This is a about Groq, not Grok (Musk's chatbot).

Former NASA chief says US needs to start over with moon landing plans

bouchard — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:27:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/we-have-lost-a-lot-of-time-former-nasa-chief-says-us-needs-to-start-over-with-moon-landing-plans-or-risk-losing-to-china

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193325

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

Engineering Design Optimization by Martins and Ning

bouchard — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 12:54:26 +0000

Article URL: https://mdobook.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46106858

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

F-35 beat Gripen fighter jet 'by a mile' in 2021 Defence Department competition

bouchard — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 15:35:09 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/f-35-gripen-dnd-competition-9.6992167

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46058398

Points: 5

# Comments: 3

New comment by bouchard in "Comments on "Glauert's optimum rotor disk revisited""

bouchard — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:42:37 +0000

Comments on the claims made by Penn State's PR department in "Student refines 100-year-old math problem, expanding wind energy possibilities"

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43162544

Comments on "Glauert's optimum rotor disk revisited"

bouchard — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:42:37 +0000

Article URL: https://wes.copernicus.org/preprints/wes-2025-105/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035298

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

UnPlotter: Extract numerical data from PDF figures

bouchard — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 13:25:33 +0000

Article URL: https://www.unplotter.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926494

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bouchard in "YASA beats own power density record pushing electric motor to 59kW/kg benchmark"

bouchard — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 02:46:38 +0000

Meh, depends what's the goal. Exceeding predicted performance is not a screw up, it's just providing a minimum guaranteed performance aka playing it safe (under promise, over deliver).

Also, we don't know by how much the most optimistic predicions were exceeded.

Makes for nice marketing ;)

New comment by bouchard in "YASA beats own power density record pushing electric motor to 59kW/kg benchmark"

bouchard — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:13:39 +0000

Depends if you make overly conservative assumptions in your modeling...

New comment by bouchard in "Is Fortran better than Python for teaching basics of numerical linear algebra?"

bouchard — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 10:12:10 +0000

Using greek symbols as public-facing function arguments, etc. is definitely not recommended, and not that common (at least in my experience).

It's best used for internal calculations where the symbols better match the actual math, and makes it easier to compare with the original reference.

New comment by bouchard in "Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model"

bouchard — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:47:22 +0000

Never thought I'd see the name LimeWire again, wow

New comment by bouchard in "US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible"

bouchard — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:16:25 +0000

Looking at interview footage of Stockton Rush, it seems he really wanted to be a disruptor and accomplish something which everyone else (i.e., experts) deemed impossible. He thought he could do what SpaceX did for space, but for underwater exploration.

New comment by bouchard in "US Coast Guard Report on Titan Submersible"

bouchard — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 16:10:39 +0000

The Netflix documentary has some extra interviews with employees, clients, etc. which are interesting. (1hr 51min runtime though)