Hacker News: ediamondscience

New comment by ediamondscience in "Analysis of artificial deranking of front page HN submissions"

ediamondscience — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 22:59:32 +0000

I think I understand. It looks like there's a difference between the raw ranks and the actual rank because of some additional algorithm that sits on top of the "raw" algorithm? It sounds like there's additional filtering happening looking at the comments, etc to try to keep people from engaging in internet fights. Is that what you mean when you call the down ranking artificial?

New comment by ediamondscience in "Analysis of artificial deranking of front page HN submissions"

ediamondscience — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 19:33:55 +0000

I understand what these graphs are saying about the things they're measuring, but I'm not sure that I understand how it comes to the conclusion that this story has been artificially deranked? I'm no algo expert, I'm just curious how others are interpreting this.

New comment by ediamondscience in "AdFection: Targeted ads turned into a pipeline for zero-click mercenary spyware"

ediamondscience — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:41:07 +0000

It's kinda funny that a website with an article titled "Online ads weaponised to deliver ‘zero-click’ spyware" immediately loads a splash that asks users with adblock installed to disable it.

New comment by ediamondscience in "Linux desktop market share has hit over 10% in North America"

ediamondscience — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:53:43 +0000

I don't know if the BSD folks would be happy to see it mentioned or unhappy that it's at 0%. At least you know that most of those users are human

New comment by ediamondscience in "Commodore Made a Digital Detox Phone That Isn't Dumb"

ediamondscience — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:37:44 +0000

I'm all for something dumber than the average little black skinner box. The price doesn't really bother me as much as the side loading restrictions. If I'm going to pay $600 for a novelty phone I better be allowed to do whatever I want with it. Locking that behavior behind some fuzzy logic yes/no algorithm based on God only knows what LLM seems pretty tone deaf to what a lot of people have been saying about owning their own hardware over the last decade or so.

New comment by ediamondscience in "Understanding the Kalman filter with a simple radar example"

ediamondscience — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:05:33 +0000

I read and enjoyed your book a few months ago when a friend recommened it to me. I've been interested in control theory for a few years, but I'm still definitely a beginner when it comes to designing good control systems and have never done it professionally.

I've been in the process of writing a tutorial on how PID filters work for a much younger audience. As a result, I've been looking back at the original tutorials that made stuff click for me. I had several engineers try to explain PID control to me over the course of about a year, but I don't think I really got it until I ended up watching Terry Davis (yeah, the TempleOS guy) show off how to use PID control in SimStructure using a hovering rocket as an example.

The way he built the concept up was to take each component and build on the control system until he had something that worked. He started off with a simple proportional controller that ended up having a steady state error with the rocket hovering beneath the target height. Once he had that and pointed out the steady state error, he implemented the integral term showed off how it resulted in overshoot. Once that was working, he implemented the derivative control to back the overshoot off until he had something that settled pretty quickly.

I'm not sure how you could do something similar for a Kalman Filter, but I did find it genuinely constructive to see the thought process behind adding each component of the equation.