Hacker News: david_draco

New comment by david_draco in "Neurons outside the brain"

david_draco — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:38:23 +0000

> What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)? [...] What does it mean that that I feel my anxiety in my gut? And that I clearly feel when I’m speaking from my head or my heart (or both)?

An unjustified logical jump here seems to be that where you feel your thoughts and feelings are coming from is where the responsible neurons are. The assignment of the feeling of origin may be a separate mechanism.

New comment by david_draco in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

david_draco — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 20:15:14 +0000

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visted Europe and openly said to Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign-policy chief and other EU ministers: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does not want to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, fearing that the U.S. would then shift its full attention toward Beijing.

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/10/28/china-is-... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyxk4ywppzo

New comment by david_draco in "Why Wikipedia cannot claim the Earth is not flat"

david_draco — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 12:04:51 +0000

Now apply to each topic at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_a...

New comment by david_draco in "The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe"

david_draco — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 15:38:34 +0000

A browser using 32 GB for 8 tab isn't necessarily wasteful, there is a lot of caching one can do to make back/forward buttons extremely fast. It would be wasteful to not allocate that memory if it is otherwise free and unused. Usually browsers use up what is available. The more interesting metric would be whether starting another high-RAM application will lead the browser to give up most of the 32 GB.

New comment by david_draco in "If all the world were a monorepo"

david_draco — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:19:24 +0000

And if I don't know, can I know?

New comment by david_draco in "Hardening Firefox – a checklist for improved browser privacy"

david_draco — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 14:57:41 +0000

I'm surprised Firefox Multi-Account Containers isn't mentioned. Seems ideal to me to keep Web Universes separate.

New comment by david_draco in "Cognitive load is what matters"

david_draco — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 17:31:08 +0000

Unit and Integration testing is great for decreasing cognitive load too. When you are staring at an error stack trace of a complex code base, and go through mentally what could have played out to cause this, it's great to have confidence in components due to testing. Hypothesis/QuickCheck is allows dropping entire classes of worries.

New comment by david_draco in "Lab-grown salmon hits the menu"

david_draco — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 02:56:16 +0000

The words "good" and "very bad" indicate that the world is less important to that person than themselves. I'd be okay with a bit of personal harm if it helps against climate change.

Ultra-processed food does not have an agreed-upon definition, and is the new "junk food" with the pretense of being more scientific. Is bread and pizza ultra-processed food? Studies do not agree on their definitions, sometimes including ingredient lists, sometimes not, sometimes it is required that the product is made in small shops with love and not in large factories. The mechanism of how ultra-processed food are supposed to cause harm remains undefined.

New comment by david_draco in "Llama-Scan: Convert PDFs to Text W Local LLMs"

david_draco — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 22:53:15 +0000

Looking at the code, this converts PDF pages to images, then transcribes each image. I might have expected a pdftotext post-processor. The complexity of PDF I guess ...

New comment by david_draco in "Planetfall"

david_draco — Thu, 22 May 2025 19:38:30 +0000

> there’s also an official, built-in map of the planet, carefully crafted

Is there a mathematical framework for how to optimize a map for gameplay to be most enjoyable?

New comment by david_draco in "Show HN: LocalScore – Local LLM Benchmark"

david_draco — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:58:05 +0000

I don't know if I should trust and run this code. If it was associated to Mozilla I would. It says it is a Mozilla Builders project, but https://builders.mozilla.org/projects/ does not list it. I don't see a way to verify that localscore.ai is associated with Mozilla.

New comment by david_draco in "Put a data center on the moon?"

david_draco — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:20:24 +0000

Yes. Meteorites are being systematically collected to get impact statistics in areas that are tectonically undisturbed. They seem equally good places: Antarctica, Atacama desert, Greenland. In terms of bandwidth and maintainance they seem preferable to the moon. See the Arctic Code Vault in Svalbard.

New comment by david_draco in "LINUX is obsolete (1992)"

david_draco — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 06:22:21 +0000

and MINIX is the most common operating system, thanks to Intel https://www.networkworld.com/article/964650/minix-the-most-p... :)

New comment by david_draco in "Kalman Filter Tutorial"

david_draco — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:14:05 +0000

As far as I am aware, there is no symbolic computing tool yet for probability distributions? For example, multiplying two multivariate Gaussian PDFs together and getting the covariance matrix out. Or defining all the ingredients for a Kalman filter (prediction model and observing process) and getting the necessary formulas out (as in sympy's lambdify).

New comment by david_draco in "Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)"

david_draco — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 12:56:59 +0000

Step 10, add the bug as a test to the CI to prevent regressions? Make sure the CI fails before the fix and works after the fix.

New comment by david_draco in "Run Python in the Browser Effortlessly"

david_draco — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 17:07:45 +0000

Wake me up when it supports numpy&scipy.

New comment by david_draco in "Show HN: FixBrowser – a lightweight web browser created from scratch"

david_draco — Wed, 25 Dec 2024 12:45:06 +0000

I guess this implies that rescaling the window, or rotating your phone, will not update the view. Then you'd have to reload the page. That trade-off seems okay to me.

New comment by david_draco in "GIMP 3.0 is on the way"

david_draco — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 12:49:58 +0000

Doesn't seem to be open source: https://opensource.org/licenses?ls=affinity

New comment by david_draco in "OpenZFS deduplication is good now and you shouldn't use it"

david_draco — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:22:30 +0000

In addition to the copy_file_range discussion at the end, it would be great to be able to applying deduplication to selected files, identified by searching the filesystem for say >1MB files which have identical hash.

New comment by david_draco in ""Stockholm Syndrome" was invented by police to discredit a female hostage (2020)"

david_draco — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 12:32:14 +0000

A recent similar example is dying of "Excited Delirium" https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4951, which was made up by police and the taser manufacturer