Hacker News: comicjk

New comment by comicjk in "Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades"

comicjk — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:25:36 +0000

It's worth remembering that "fusion = abundant power" is a guess about technology that hasn't been finished yet. Fusion power might turn out like solar panels (easier to build than expected) or like nuclear fission reactors (harder to build than expected).

New comment by comicjk in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

comicjk — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:20:01 +0000

A Fire Upon The Deep is a fantastic novel for programmers to read, and I think the prequel A Deepness In The Sky is even better. There are some amazing old-school coding jokes in there, like that everyone thinks the universal time counter started at the first moon landing, but programmer archaeologists know it was really 15 megaseconds later.

New comment by comicjk in "Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis"

comicjk — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:18:47 +0000

People always need to be reminded, though. It seems to be in human nature to fear bad publicity, and the people who fear it less end up with disproportionate power as a result.

New comment by comicjk in "Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters"

comicjk — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 00:44:22 +0000

Not everything on Wikipedia is true, but the parts Elon Musk hates most are probably true.

New comment by comicjk in "Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer in mouse models"

comicjk — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:42:59 +0000

This context is very important.

"Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest."

"Then, when one of those people is elected to parliament, or Congress, and start to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or declares that All Research Should Be In The National Interest (whatever that is), I wonder how much we reap what we have sown."

New comment by comicjk in "Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (2024)"

comicjk — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 19:21:35 +0000

The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the upper atmosphere, and then years for the earth to heat up to its new equilibrium temperature - catastrophe, but not likely the end of all life.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-geoengineering-risk-termin...

New comment by comicjk in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

comicjk — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:19:52 +0000

I gave my engineering students a CO2 removal design problem once, and at the end, asked why the theoretical efficiency had increased in the time since the textbook was written. The answer was that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was higher.

New comment by comicjk in "More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”"

comicjk — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:57:12 +0000

It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things they're not naturally fast at, such as quantum chemistry.

New comment by comicjk in "More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”"

comicjk — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:31:56 +0000

Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computational_chemistr...

New comment by comicjk in "Webb telescope helps refines Hubble constant, suggesting resolution rate debate"

comicjk — Sat, 31 May 2025 16:32:37 +0000

Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.

New comment by comicjk in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

comicjk — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 23:02:19 +0000

What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake because it doesn't include people who have given up on looking for work... but the U-4 unemployment metric, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the main U-3 metric, does include these people.

New comment by comicjk in "Kudzu, the vine that never ate the South (2015)"

comicjk — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:15:25 +0000

Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point out that most efficient way of moving carbon-bearing solids per ton-mile is the bulk carrier ships we use for shipping coal.

New comment by comicjk in "Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?"

comicjk — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 15:27:13 +0000

Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria

Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.

New comment by comicjk in "The First Animal Ever Found That Doesn't Need Oxygen to Survive"

comicjk — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 14:52:38 +0000

Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because they grow: in order to grow they must pull CO2 from the air, use the C as building material (instead of respiration fuel), and dump the O2.

https://www.pthorticulture.com/en-us/training-center/basics-...

New comment by comicjk in "Kobold letters: HTML emails are a risk"

comicjk — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 16:02:49 +0000

That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer. The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer is better off if only the most gullible people reply. From the perspective of the person being attacked, the counterintuitive result based on selection bias goes away, and a more convincing scheme is more of a risk to you personally. (The assumption that scammers have limited time to write to each victim may itself become less true because of LLMs.)

New comment by comicjk in "The Texas Triangle: A rising megaregion unlike all others (2021)"

comicjk — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 18:30:09 +0000

Texas is not going to secede. In the 2020 election, the vote was 52:46 between Trump and Biden, meaning almost half the state supported the overall national winner. Compare this to the actual secession crisis election in 1860, where the vote was 75:24 against the pro-Union candidate, with Lincoln not even on the ballot in the state.

New comment by comicjk in "A rudimentary simulation of the three-body problem"

comicjk — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 01:53:30 +0000

The method you describe would be an example of what is called a "thermostat" in molecular dynamics (because the speed of molecules forms what we call temperature). Such adjustments to the speed can definitely paper over issues with your energy conservation, but you still have to be careful: if you rescale the speeds naively you get the "flying ice cube" effect where all internal motions of the system cease and it maintains its original energy simply by zooming away at high speed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_ice_cube

New comment by comicjk in "A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018)"

comicjk — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 14:31:37 +0000

Both the original writing, and the surviving manuscripts, have uncertainty bounds of decades in their dates. The oldest physical pages we still have come from the years 100-200 or so. And assuming that a description of an event can't be written before the event happened (a touchy subject in this case), then the original writing of the Gospels must have been after the start of the First Jewish-Roman War in the year 66. So the gap between the writing and our extant sources could be pretty short, or could be over a century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript#Earliest_e...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Composition

New comment by comicjk in "A Camel Through the Eye of a Needle, and Other Wild Tales of Translation (2018)"

comicjk — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 02:16:59 +0000

The "camel means rope" story, while cute and not implausible, is basically a guess. All the earliest available sources say "camel" - there is no actual evidence of this mistake beyond speculation (though it is admittedly an ancient speculation, as early as Cyril of Alexandria). The Wikipedia page has a much more balanced summary than this page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle

New comment by comicjk in "Research shows plant-based polymers can disappear within seven months"

comicjk — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 19:30:38 +0000

We're talking about negative externalities, of which pollution is a perfect example: the effects of pollution are spread across everyone, no matter who emits it, so no one has an individual incentive to change their buying habits. It's a coordination problem, which can be solved democratically by the voters demanding an overall change in incentives (such as an appropriate tax on single-use non-biodegradable plastics).