Hacker News: chemicalnovae

New comment by chemicalnovae in "WeightWatchers files bankruptcy"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 08 May 2025 01:49:27 +0000

The parent said exercise though right, not weight loss? Exercise can/does lead to weight loss but it's certainly not the only benefit and might not even be the most important one.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Scented products cause indoor air pollution on par with car exhaust"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 05:07:30 +0000

Sure, and most small organic molecules are an order of magnitude smaller than that definition.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 04:03:53 +0000

> And? That span is within an individual's lifetime, which is not very long in the context of human history. As of now there's zero sign any entity with regulatory power is doing anything about microplastics.

Primarily, I _am_interested with health outcomes within my and my children's lifespan so that's the sort of time span I'm primarily concerned about. If the comparison to asbestos hold's true then we still have a _long_ time (long enough that any potential deleterious effects will be felt by all currently living and soon to be living members of my family) before any sort of regulatory action will be taken regardless of the health impacts.

> Also, why are you trying to deliver a point without looking up most of the examples I've listed? Do you expect that to be a convincing argument?

Because I'm _not_ your fact-checker. You're other examples may well follow a much quicker time-frame between discovery and strong regulatory action; I don't really care one way or the other, since at least one example shows a course of history which would play out poorly for those of us alive _now_ and exposed to increasing levels of environmental plastics.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Bioaccumulation of Microplastics in Decedent Human Brains"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 02:15:13 +0000

I didn't go and look up the others but this argument by similarity, at least when applied to asbestos says the exact opposite to the claim you're trying to make. It's generally considered that industry/government was aware of the issues relating to asbestos in the '30s (and _started_ doing things about it then) but it wasn't until the 70's/80's (depending on the country) that its use was mostly stopped (and in places like Australia it wasn't outright banned until 2003).

New comment by chemicalnovae in "AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 09 May 2024 03:14:08 +0000

He might not have been able to explain why _but_ I'd bet anything he would have wanted to if he could.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Spot Bitcoin ETF receives official approval from the SEC"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 05:21:30 +0000

Isn't crypto used in these places simply a more convenient form on pinning to the USD than due to any inherent properties of the crypto itself?

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Polars"

chemicalnovae — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 01:07:27 +0000

> Please, (a) for your own sake and (b) for the sake of open source innovation, use the tool that you admit is better.

This is...such a strange take. To follow your logic to an extreme, everyone should use a very small handful of languages that are the "best" in their domain with ne'er a care for their personal comfort or preference.

> for your own sake

They're sticking with Pandas exactly for their own sake since they like being able to use Copilot.

> for the sake of open source innovation

Ohh by all means let's all be constantly relearning and rehashing just to follow the latest and greatest in open source innovation this week.

Tools are designed to be _used_ and if you like using a tool _and_ it does the job you require of it that seems just fine to me; especially if you're also taking the time to evaluate what else is out there occasionally.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "NERV Disaster Prevention"

chemicalnovae — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 23:13:57 +0000

100%, I had to pop into the HN comments after opening it because I wasn't sure which it was!

Though perhaps there is something we're missing that the target audience would more quickly identify it as real.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "The diamond world takes radical steps to stop a pricing plunge"

chemicalnovae — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 02:10:50 +0000

I mean...maybe: https://www.space.com/diamond-rain-atmosphere-uranus-neptune

New comment by chemicalnovae in "U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-Ops"

chemicalnovae — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 05:41:13 +0000

I mean, maybe deep fakes are _better_ at sowing distrust of information than other forms of propaganda but it seems disingenuous to treat it completly differently.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Fun with Gentoo: Why don't we just shuffle those ROP gadgets away?"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 23:12:58 +0000

Don't be embarrassed, its what computers are for! I've done the same thing recently too. It honestly feels like a better use of a high-core desktop CPU than have it sit idle 99% of the time.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Ask HN: Have You Left Kubernetes?"

chemicalnovae — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 12:58:21 +0000

Take a look at k3s[0] for lighter k8s.

[0] https://rancher.com/docs/k3s/latest/en/

New comment by chemicalnovae in "LaMDA is not sentient"

chemicalnovae — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 07:30:03 +0000

The essence of this is true of basically every PhD in a quantitative field. I think its one of the things that makes people walk away after starting.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Speed boost achievement unlocked on Docker Desktop 4.6 for Mac"

chemicalnovae — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 20:14:38 +0000

Lots of chatter here about alternatives that all seem to miss the point that the alternatives suffer from the same filesystem performance issues that this release claims to improve. Might not be an issue for you but if you've ever had to work with a volume mount with a ton of small files (like php or node dependencies) then this could be a real life saver.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Facebook paid billions to spare Zuckerberg in data suit, shareholders allege"

chemicalnovae — Fri, 24 Sep 2021 00:22:54 +0000

> The entire point of a corporation, as a governance structure, in general is to limit liability for its shareholders. That's true for all corporations not just facebook. Its the reason people establish corporations instead of running businesseses informally as an individual.

Except they're not doing it to protect Zuckerberg or Sandberg as shareholders they're doing it to protect them as decision making executives. More to the point if they didn't have liability due to the structure of a corporation they would never have been in "danger" and therefore the pay-off would have been unnecessary.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Internet Archive Infrastructure"

chemicalnovae — Tue, 02 Mar 2021 10:26:45 +0000

Probably yes, but only if it was happening a lot; I don’t know what the cross-over point would be though that you’re better off just keeping the drives spinning...

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Ask HN: Best books under 200 pages for developers?"

chemicalnovae — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 01:42:45 +0000

I was first put onto this book by my PhD supervisor while writing up my dissertation. Revolutionised the way I wrote English for the better.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Valve announces Half-Life: Alyx with first and only tweet for account"

chemicalnovae — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 07:41:50 +0000

I'm torn between wanting it to be VR exclusive so that it takes full advantage of the interesting differences between VR and reg. gaming, and wanting it to be non-'VR exclusive' so that I might actually get a chance to play it without having to fork out for VR gear that I otherwise have little interest in.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Foie Gras, Served in 1k Restaurants in NYC, Is Banned"

chemicalnovae — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 08:48:48 +0000

It seems the shark might disagree with you on that.

New comment by chemicalnovae in "Bird populations have declined since 1970 across nearly all habitats"

chemicalnovae — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 03:19:26 +0000

More to the point then, is there anything that sits between the high quality generalist journals and generalist scientific magazines (Nat Geo. and the like)?

I can and do read Nature and Science, but outside of my PhD field I find it pretty slow going and often feel like I'm missing out on what could be interesting findings due to not having sufficient background to fully understand the problem space.