Hacker News: desertrider12

New comment by desertrider12 in "Why Doesn't Anybody Realize We're Going Back to the Moon?"

desertrider12 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:41:57 +0000

According to the article [0] that's been making the rounds, NASA didn't make any changes to Artemis 2's heat shield after getting data from 1's re-entry. NASA did change the trajectory for 2, and they made the compound "less permeable" but that change was made before 1 flew.

[0] <https://idlewords.com/2026/03/artemis_ii_is_not_safe_to_fly....>

New comment by desertrider12 in "Tell HN: I'm 60 years old. Claude Code has re-ignited a passion"

desertrider12 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 08:53:14 +0000

ChatGPT came out a little over 3 years ago. After 5-10 more years of similar progress I doubt any humans will be required to clean up the messes created by today’s agents.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Terence Tao, at 8 years old (1984) [pdf]"

desertrider12 — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 04:51:38 +0000

That’s funny. When I was little I found “format” in my mp3 player’s settings. Thought it would customize the UI or something, but instead I ended up with no music for the rest of the road trip.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles"

desertrider12 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:56:56 +0000

Braid also has the stars which are so well hidden that I can’t imagine anyone finding them without a walkthrough (though some people obviously did in order to make the walkthroughs).

The Witness is different, it really does teach you everything you need to 100% it. I cheated on the ship puzzle but it’s totally possible to figure out.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem"

desertrider12 — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 18:37:40 +0000

We know angle EBD equals BAC, since the sum of triangle ABC's interior angles is 180 degrees and the sum of the 3 angles at B are also 180 degrees. We also know angle DEB is 90 degrees since DE was constructed to be perpendicular to CB. Finally, D was placed at a distance c from B. The two triangles have the same angles and the same side lengths opposite the right angles, so they must be congruent.

New comment by desertrider12 in "OpenAI probably can't make ends meet. That's where you come in"

desertrider12 — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:19:55 +0000

This has precedent in the US, like when the government nationalized failing freight railroads and merged them into Conrail. But after the more recent bank and auto bailouts I wouldn't expect to see this happen again. The shareholders would really prefer to have money thrown at them but also keep their stake.

New comment by desertrider12 in "How many dimensions is this?"

desertrider12 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:53:17 +0000

Well, consider my ass bitten ;) Your analogy to infinite series helps.

New comment by desertrider12 in "How many dimensions is this?"

desertrider12 — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:35:40 +0000

> the gaps are reduced to zero and the curve crosses through each and every point within its build envelope

I think that's oversimplifying an important point. If you build a Hilbert curve in a 1x1 square, the vertices of the curve always have rational coordinates. So all points on its line segments must always have at least one rational coordinate. There's no way it can cross through every point in a square region of R^2.

A better way to say it might be "the gaps are reduced towards zero and the curve will pass arbitrarily close by every point in its envelope". That still explains why its Minkowski dimension must be 2.

New comment by desertrider12 in "The Algebra Gatekeepers"

desertrider12 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 17:45:03 +0000

The article says that administrators are giving in to the demands of very involved, upper-middle class parents. What other incentives would an administrator have to keep low-income and minority students out of 8th grade algebra?

New comment by desertrider12 in "On doing hard things"

desertrider12 — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 05:30:12 +0000

You have probably thought about this already, but shorter cranks (150mm or so) might let you avoid bending your knees as much.

New comment by desertrider12 in "François Chollet: The Arc Prize and How We Get to AGI [video]"

desertrider12 — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 06:26:46 +0000

The Cyc project basically achieved what you're talking about, even without approaching AGI. They manually programmed concepts and relationships between things into a huge knowledge graph. Then they had heuristics for choosing the appropriate version of facts for a given context (e.g. level of rigor). It was arguably able to use a library of abstractions similarly to what Chollet is talking about, but couldn't learn new ones automatically through exploration or play.

New comment by desertrider12 in "First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV"

desertrider12 — Fri, 09 May 2025 06:17:50 +0000

There was also an interesting article here a month ago about the history of betting on conclaves. https://nodumbideas.com/p/betting-on-the-pope-was-the-origin... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43290892

New comment by desertrider12 in "Apple's Software Quality Crisis"

desertrider12 — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 23:58:18 +0000

It’s more horrible now. Syncing now opens a Finder window with an inconsistent look and feel, and sometimes fails to copy new songs in a synced playlist. The playlist view has the album art taking up half the screen, but there’s no way to shrink that section. And there’s no visual indication for whether shuffle is on - it has no grey box around it when enabled.

I kind of think they made it shitty on purpose to push everyone towards a subscription. Many of these issues apply to locally stored songs and playlists, which is how I use it.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Ugandan runner Jacob Kiplimo completes first ever sub-57 minute half marathon"

desertrider12 — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:05:43 +0000

Look at gravel or mountain biking! If you live near some farmland, ranches or a national forest, there are likely miles of public dirt roads that hardly get any car traffic. trailforks.com is a good place to start to see what's near you.

New comment by desertrider12 in "DeepSeek-R1"

desertrider12 — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 07:07:32 +0000

IMO this is the thing we should be scared of, rather than the paperclip-maximizer scenarios. If the human brain is a finitely complicated system, and we keep improving our approximation of it as a computer program, then at some point the programs must become capable of subjectively real suffering. Like the hosts from Westworld or the mecha from A.I. (the 2001 movie). And maybe (depending on philosophy, I guess) human suffering is _only_ real subjectively.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Meta announces 5% cuts in preparation for 'intense year'"

desertrider12 — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 18:31:14 +0000

Imagine if avatar Gavin Belson had done the "metaverse legs" product reveal, with the animation running at 10 frames/second and a few legless avatars in the audience throwing up confetti. It would be almost too ridiculous to put in the show because the show itself would look like it was being cheap with the effects. But Meta had spent $36 billion on the metaverse at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njvp-E8gzqA

New comment by desertrider12 in "Pink Floyd's 'The Wall': A Complete Analysis"

desertrider12 — Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:45:18 +0000

I don't think the self indulgence is unbearable until The Trial and "you stand accused of showing feelings of an almost human nature". The Trial is comedy/satire but since the rest of the album is serious and autobiographical, I roll my eyes at what a diva he sounds like there.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel"

desertrider12 — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:04:56 +0000

That's because Larrabee wasn't totally canceled, it was just pivoted from a gaming GPU to an HPC accelerator in the form of Knights Corner/Landing. The idea of having lots of x86 cores with wide SIMD units didn't change, but it was a lot more successful in the HPC world because anybody could compile an old MPI or OpenMP application with AVX512 and it just worked.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Don't squander public trust on bullshit"

desertrider12 — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:21:50 +0000

I do want to believe what you're saying because it means fewer life-years lost but... the other explanation is that covid plus the countermeasures to it really did impact people's health (not just the fatalities) and increased net mortality. We can check back in a few years but so far this explanation seems likelier to me.

New comment by desertrider12 in "Don't squander public trust on bullshit"

desertrider12 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 06:49:09 +0000

When do you expect the death deficit to show up in mortality data? So far it looks like most (but not all) countries had an increase and then returned to the previous trendline: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-deaths-per-year. For the world's total deaths per year, it definitely looks like the area under the curve increased due to covid.