<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: dbcurtis</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dbcurtis</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:08:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dbcurtis" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Copper transport drug restores memory and clears toxic Alzheimer's proteins"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Alzheimer’s is driven by the buildup of toxic proteins called amyloid-beta.<p>Isn't the current thinking that amyloid-beta buildup is a marker, not a cause?  The therapy may be working here, but it isn't clear whether clearing amyloid-beta proteins is the mechanism or an outcome.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:17:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543499</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543499</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543499</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It was part of the culture in the 1960's, and only started to change somewhat during the 1970's.  Everybody had ash trays, even in non-smoking households, so that you could bring them out for guests.  Nobody gave it a second thought.  Clay ash trays were common elementary school arts & crafts projects.<p>One of the things that reminded me of how much a part of the culture it was, is when we visited the Computer History Museum.  The SAGE system display had several operator consoles -- each with an ash tray and an automotive-type cigarette lighter in the panel.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 05:58:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176025</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176025</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48176025</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Two EA-18 fighter jets collide at Mountain Home airshow, pilots ejected safely"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Do we know if the pilots are OK?  Yes, ejection can save your life, but even in a best-case scenario the forces on the human body are incredibly ugly.  I know a former combat-rated RAF pilot that had to eject from a Harrier because of a low-altitude bird strike. After 6 months in the infirmary, he emerged 2cm shorter, combat rating gone forever.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 00:10:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174308</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174308</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174308</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "GenCAD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Which CAD program? I'm confused<p>Clue here:
> Our proposed GenCAD architecture...<p>So, at this point, it seems like this will work with all CAD programs, since they have yet to encounter any systems that they can't work with. More seriously, my guess would be whatever one is available for free in their lab.  Kind of standard operating procedure for academic projects -- do a proof of concept, make a video that avoids known bugs, get a grade, push source to git, graduate.  Good ideas come out of that... production code... eh... maybe.<p>More likely someone ends up in the situation that my kid did, previous graduate student's git repo is stale by 2 versions of C++, and 4 versions of ROS, and neither of the two unit tests still work after porting.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 18 May 2026 00:04:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174272</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174272</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174272</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No.  I got it set for distance vision.  There are modern implants that are "multi-focal".  But they work by spreading out the light, so everything is less bright at any distance.  My two pieces of anecdata are: 1. A friend with multi-focal implants says that he needs a very bright light for reading now.  Which is one of the reasons I avoided multi-focal.  2. My optometrist got multi-focal, and he noted that it required retraining his brain somewhat, because now instead of accommodation providing focus, focus requires mental attention to the subject of interest.<p>Cataract implant technology is moving very fast, and my data is about 5 years old, so YMMV.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:43:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927750</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927750</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927750</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Is my blue your blue?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It seems to me there is a broad range of "normal", as in well within the standard spec sheet tolerances for humans.  It is more about what is average or median.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:37:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927675</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927675</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927675</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Is my blue your blue?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Who else tried with both eyes?  A few years ago I had an implant to treat cataracts.  It was notable at the time that the "new" eye was less yellow-tinted than the aged-in-place eye.  I was told that the lens does yellow with age.  Over time, my brain mostly adjusted, but on this test I did notice a subtle hue difference between eyes.  Did anyone else try that experiment?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2026 21:33:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927597</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927597</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927597</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "YouTube now world's largest media company, topping Disney"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Rarely(never?) have I found new knowledge on youtube, however its a great source of joy/emotions/slop.<p>I suspect you are not looking very hard.  I have learned a tremendous amount about everything from stone cutting to metalworking to welding to Kalman filters to linear algebra.  There is a lot out there.  The main annoyance I have is keeping AI slop out of my feed so that I can instead learn from genuine experts.  There is a huge amount out there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 14 Apr 2026 23:33:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772849</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772849</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47772849</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Uncharted island soon to appear on nautical charts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The burning question is whether or not it qualifies as a new DXCC entity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 04:23:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747577</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747577</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47747577</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Where does all the milk go?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>? No, you need to educate yourself.<p>The gestation period of a cow is approximately 9 months, similar to humans, by coincidence.  Only a cow that has given birth to a calf will produce milk.  The normal lactation period is 305 days before the cow is "dried up" before giving birth again. 10,000 pounds of milk is considered a good lactation total. Typically, cows are bred to calve once per year.  Typically going through 10 lactations before that one way trip to MacDonald's.<p>Dairy bulls are notoriously nasty creatures, so artificial insemination is almost universal in the dairy industry.  The "tract" that you speak of is the cow's colon.  The technician is careful to guide the pipette so as not to injure the animal, and the colon provides convenient access to feel what is going on inside.<p>If you are squeamish about such things as cow's colons, then vet school is not for you.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:22:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708491</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708491</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708491</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Where does all the milk go?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>That will vary by person.  My father-in-law bred and milked pedigreed Holsteins.  They had a 1 gallon pasteurizer and would just dip a gallon out of the bulk tank for household use when needed.  So, most of the time they had pasteurized, non-homogenized.  On occasion, the pasteurizer would break, so for a while they would drink raw milk.  But of course understood the risk, and also knew darn well where the milk had come from and how clean the milking facility was.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:10:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708290</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708290</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47708290</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The thing about LR parsers is that since it is parsing bottom-up, you have no idea what larger syntactic structure is being built, so error recovery is ugly, and giving the user a sensible error message is a fool’s errand.<p>In the end, all the hard work in a compiler is in the back-end optimization phases.  Put your mental energy there.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:26:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602182</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602182</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602182</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was just going into the second quarter of compiler design when the dragon book came out. My copy was still literally “hot of the press” — still warm from the ink baking ovens. It was worlds better that anything else available at the time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2026 15:20:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602104</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602104</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47602104</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "ICAO issued new power bank restriction on flight"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It seems to me that compared to your phone, a power brick dangling off a charging cable is much more likely to slip off your lap unnoticed and get wedged in the seat hinge only to get subsequently punctured.<p>I recently took a flight where I had a laptop, my phone, a power brick, a new power brick for my wife, a second phone (for reasons) and a battery for a piece of ham radio equipment in my backpack.  As I got on the plane, I was thinking I was probably one of the risker passengers on board :)  Anyway, when I use the brick, I keep it zipped in a jacket pocket with just the charing cable coming out in an effort to keep it from finding its way to a place that it shouldn't.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:08:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558537</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558537</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47558537</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>he he... is that the equivalent of when I was a kid we differentiated by "drive-in", "paper-napkin restaurant" and "cloth-napkin restaurant" in order of how much trouble you would be in if you embarrassed your parents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 20 Mar 2026 23:41:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462364</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462364</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47462364</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It is easy to underestimate how much one relies on senses other than vision.  You hear many kinds of noises that indicate road surface, traffic, etc.  You feel road surface imperfections telegraphed through the steering wheel.  You feel accelerations in your butt, and conclude loss of traction from response of the accelerator and motion of the vehicle.  Secondly, the human eye has much more dynamic range than any camera.  And is mounted on an exquisite PTZ platform.  Then turning to the model -- you are classifying obstacles and agents at a furious rate, and making predictions about the behavior of the agents.  So, in part I agree that the models need work, but the models need to be fed, and IMHO computer vision is not a sufficient sensor feed.<p>Consider an exhaust condensation cloud coming from a vehicle's tail pipe -- it could be opaque to a camera/computer-vision system.  Can you model your way out of that?  Or is it also useful to do sensor fusion of vision data with radar data (cloud is transparent) and others like lidar, etc.  A multi-modal sensor feed is going to simplify the model, which in the end translates into compute load.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:47:24 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129410</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129410</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129410</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "The Waymo World Model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>No, I don't think that will be successful.  Consider a day where the temperature and humidity is just right to make tail pipe exhaust form dense fog clouds.  That will be opaque or nearly so to a camera, transparent to a radar, and I would assume something in between to a lidar.  Multi-modal sensor fusion is always going to be more reliable at classifying some kinds of challenging scene segments.  It doesn't take long to imagine many other scenarios where fusing the returns of multiple sensors is going to greatly increase classification accuracy.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:25:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916286</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916286</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916286</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thanks! That is much farther back than I thought, even 200 kYA.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:46:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783468</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783468</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783468</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "430k-year-old well-preserved wooden tools are the oldest ever found"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When is the first evidence for cooking?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:19:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783063</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783063</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783063</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dbcurtis in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I have a wallet with a pocket for an airtag.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 26 Jan 2026 22:52:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772791</link><dc:creator>dbcurtis</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772791</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772791</guid></item></channel></rss>