Hacker News: cactusfrog

New comment by cactusfrog in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

cactusfrog — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:04:16 +0000

Eastern Washington has a lot of hot desert

New comment by cactusfrog in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

cactusfrog — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 01:34:09 +0000

I think UV and Ruff showed us how much better Python tooling could be. Just setting a higher bar has move. OS forward

New comment by cactusfrog in "Skip the Tips: A game to select "No Tip" but dark patterns try to stop you"

cactusfrog — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:17:36 +0000

Sometimes I want coffee before I make my coffee

New comment by cactusfrog in "US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private"

cactusfrog — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:20:49 +0000

I would be surprised if the code was hidden from other people engineers.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Datacenters in space aren't going to work"

cactusfrog — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 15:07:56 +0000

We have tons of space on earth. Cooling in space would be so expensive.

New comment by cactusfrog in "APT Rust requirement raises questions"

cactusfrog — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 16:25:54 +0000

Thank you for the explanation

New comment by cactusfrog in "APT Rust requirement raises questions"

cactusfrog — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 16:12:48 +0000

Could the rust code be transpired to readable C?

New comment by cactusfrog in "GitHub: Git operation failures"

cactusfrog — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 22:04:12 +0000

There’s this Gitlab incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc

New comment by cactusfrog in "The fate of "small" open source"

cactusfrog — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 20:35:03 +0000

This author assumes that open sourcing a package only delivers value if is added as a dependency. Publicly sharing code with a permissive license is still useful and a radical idea.

New comment by cactusfrog in "The history of cataract surgery"

cactusfrog — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 13:45:22 +0000

A lot of times those 5% people go blind :/

New comment by cactusfrog in "Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?"

cactusfrog — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 04:11:38 +0000

I hope humans are like Cyanobacteria in that in destroying the environment we create the substrate for something grander.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Apple Silicon GPU Support in Mojo"

cactusfrog — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 21:35:40 +0000

What language do you think they should have based Mojo off of? I think Python syntax is great for tensor manipulation.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Statistical Physics with R: Ising Model with Monte Carlo"

cactusfrog — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 13:06:46 +0000

The issue with R is that there is too much dsl. This is great for one-off analysis but makes building a cohesive large code base really difficult.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Launch HN: Ghostship (YC S25) – AI agents that find bugs in your web app"

cactusfrog — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 02:46:27 +0000

I know about ghostship, but I don’t immediately associate the word ghost ship with that disaster. I’ve always thought of them as the spooky abandoned ships that float around and I think it’s a good name.

New comment by cactusfrog in "An engineering history of the Manhattan Project"

cactusfrog — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 13:45:29 +0000

One of the best books I’ve ever read is The Making of the Atomic Bomb Book by Richard Rhodes. If you want an extremely in-depth history of the science and people behind Manhattan project, I would highly recommend reading it.

New comment by cactusfrog in "People stuck using ancient Windows computers"

cactusfrog — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 19:31:24 +0000

I wonder how many nuclear power plants run on windows xp.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Does the Bitter Lesson Have Limits?"

cactusfrog — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 22:42:45 +0000

This is really interesting. I think force fields in molecular dynamics have underwent a similar NN revolution. You train your NN on the output of expensive calculations to replace the expensive function with a cheap one. Could you train a small language model with a big one?

New comment by cactusfrog in "Fintech dystopia"

cactusfrog — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 04:47:37 +0000

I think the biggest problem with fintech is that the financial system is already decentralized, and full of tech. It really just seems like it involves using unregulated technology, which allows the skipping of restrictive regulations. This might actually be a good thing, but once a path has been proven to be non destructive the banks can just take over the market by begging the government for deregulation.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)"

cactusfrog — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:40:06 +0000

I worked an MIT programmer who bragged about the Scheme curriculum. He was also the worst programmer that I’ve worked with. He really liked clojure and would constantly complain about Python syntax, and ended up quitting abruptly when his hand spun Datomic based system was rejected.

I think there is a trap in thinking that a strange way of being taught puts one at an advantage. It is really annoying to work with people who believe they are more enlightened than others.

New comment by cactusfrog in "Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling"

cactusfrog — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 04:23:23 +0000

My process control theory textbook has a chapter on neural networks and a lot of the language in control theory has an AI like tinge to it. I think this AI language is native to control theory so it might not be as overblown as it first sounds.