Hacker News: briandw

New comment by briandw in "JetZero"

briandw — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 03:22:06 +0000

In a conventional aircraft you sit on the roll axis. In a blended wing body design you can have off-axis motion that can increase motion sickness. Rather than rolling with the longitudinal axis of the aircraft, you move up and down when the aircraft banks. Not necessarily a deal breaker, but an additional difference to deal with.

New comment by briandw in "What does the Riemann zeta function have to do with the distribution of primes?"

briandw — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 15:10:05 +0000

I’ve seen the connection between the Riemann zeta function and primes talked about but never an accessible explanation. Although I must say that the beginning was fairly easy to follow, I got overwhelmed about a quarter into it. Feels like I need a week of study to really comprehend the entire article.

New comment by briandw in "SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth"

briandw — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:02:50 +0000

Citation needed.

New comment by briandw in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

briandw — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:20:39 +0000

The point is that stress makes some things stronger. Stress doesn’t make a tea cup stronger because a tea cup is fragile. Stress makes a body or organization stronger if its not too much and the system can adapt. A body in zero g gets sick, but is healthy in 1 g.

New comment by briandw in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

briandw — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:12:32 +0000

I mean that when you have a system like this and you don’t stress it, it becomes more likely to fail catastrophically. It’s like the Dodo bird. It evolved in the absence of predators, so was easily made extinct. Had the island had dogs the entire time, the Dodo would have evolved to survive.

New comment by briandw in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

briandw — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 01:08:05 +0000

“Does the job” means all of those things. Figure out what’s important, find a way to measure it (could be also be qualitative.) How does the AI generated code do? If you simply say its no good because of the way it was created, it’s not a rational decision process.

New comment by briandw in "Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests"

briandw — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:28:55 +0000

Code is code. It either does the job or doesn't. If there is nothing that could convince you that AI generated code is trustworthy (for whatever definition of trust) then this is an article of faith, not a rational position.

New comment by briandw in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

briandw — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 16:43:55 +0000

These systems are antifragile. Just like what was exposed by the supply chain shock during covid. You optimize like crazy to squeeze every bit of efficiency (I know it's the military, so this is relative) out of a system when times are good / easy. Then the game changes a little and the entire thing comes apart. The US military has been operating in an uncontested space for far too long and there is major weakness in all the unprotected assets away from the front. Think about all the aircraft that are unprotected and near civilians. A project spiderweb in the US would be relatively easy and devastating. The US military needs to get their butt in gear and take action to close those vulnerabilities.

New comment by briandw in "Grok 4.5"

briandw — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 03:52:12 +0000

Gemini was giving us ethnically diverse images of Nazis. Was that profit driven or political?

New comment by briandw in "The Radiation Exposure Lie"

briandw — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 18:29:06 +0000

Irradiated doesn't even mean radioactive. It's like saying I don't want to be set on fire, so I won't eat cooked food.

I think the author would have no problem with mushrooms from Chernobyl given that they were under a specified level of activity.

New comment by briandw in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

briandw — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:29:53 +0000

Maybe. I see the real issue as being that people are scared by change and politicians are taking advantage of the opportunity to get more power.

New comment by briandw in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

briandw — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:57:40 +0000

It's a response to the FUD that is water usage in data centers. Data centers don't use a meaningful amount of water when compared to just about any other industrial application, or many recreational ones. Data centers used about 66 billion liters 2023. source: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32d6m0d1 Golf courses used 2 trillion liters in 2020. We won't even bring up almond production.

New comment by briandw in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

briandw — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:46:20 +0000

Cray used Fluorinert, a chlorofluorocarbon. So not exactly a environmentally friendly solution.

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:26:41 +0000

I'll do my best to restate the problem. If AI does all the work, then we won't have people who can understand the math that AI's are creating.

This is the real problem as I see it and it extends to most technical work. I didn't see that as the main argument of the article.

I was objecting to the old guard defending their turf.

Academia needs to contend with this problem, and start addressing it right now. People are not going to be able to beat AIs at math. So whats the solution? PhDs will have to be able to show competence in new ways. Publishing and review of mathematical work will have to change. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back.

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:13:51 +0000

So what was the substance that I missed?

New comment by briandw in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

briandw — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:59:58 +0000

You are describing the Jagged Frontier. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2023-10/SSRN-id...

New comment by briandw in "MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 20:47:52 +0000

Nothing will ever be cheep enough. “599 is dangerously close to 1100”? It’s 1100 is nearly double! I bought the neo for my daughter to use in HS and it’s perfect. Fast, great build and great battery life. Ill be buying a second one for my son, and paying just a bit more for both than the one air you mentioned. You should just buy a chromebook and save the 100-200$ for a plastic laptop.

New comment by briandw in "Fluid Simulation for Dummies"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:55:31 +0000

I don't know about the CFD, but I really enjoyed reading this blog back in my iOS days. Friday Q&A was especially good. He would take some part of Obj-C or Cocoa and build a simple version from scratch.

New comment by briandw in "Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics"

briandw — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 14:36:53 +0000

Most of the arguments here feel like gate keeping and resistance to change. I didn't see any arguments that were directly about advancing the state of knowledge of math.

“Current automated techniques can produce plausible but unreliable (or even incorrect) arguments which are difficult to distinguish from correct mathematical proofs.”

That seems like a problem for mathematics with or without AI.

Isn’t this a problem with human proofs as well?

“Many current models are also built on data obtained by systematically exploiting licenses and access arrangements that were not made with artificial intelligence in mind, or indeed by simply violating copyright protections”

Copyright? The copyright arguments have been hard to make in domains where copyright is much stronger, mathematical knowledge isn’t even subject to copyright.

“Technologies which affect the way in which mathematics is practiced may disturb the current system of incentives”

Resistance to change again.

“Proper evaluation is endangered if results are communicated through informal channels”

Gatekeeping again.

Blue Origin's New Glenn explodes durning static fire

briandw — Fri, 29 May 2026 01:45:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm8wRjD3xVA

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317961

Points: 2

# Comments: 1