Hacker News: empiricus

New comment by empiricus in "The Physics of GPS"

empiricus — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 20:37:46 +0000

I found much more interesting the way the gps electronics work. What do you mean you need to know the exact moment you receive a message from a satellite with nanosecond precision? when the message itself is several seconds long.

New comment by empiricus in "Most people can't juggle one ball"

empiricus — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 18:20:40 +0000

A long time ago (pre-internet) I heard a normal person can learn to juggle in 1 day. It took me 2 days, but I learned to juggle 3 balls. But soon I realized what you said, the need for a consistent toss. Not sure of the reason, but I always make some errors with physical movements, they are never perfect. Even with typing, no matter how much I exercise, I cannot get bellow ~3% errors. Wondering if this is some kind of genetic effect, and how many ppl have similar issues.

New comment by empiricus in "Peptides: where to begin?"

empiricus — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 07:55:10 +0000

looks interesting, but has the classic "40 patients".

New comment by empiricus in "Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman Equation: Reinforcement Learning and Diffusion Models"

empiricus — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 09:54:59 +0000

Even this OpenAI course is from 2020? Are there no useful recent updates on the subject, especially now with everyone working and using RL?

New comment by empiricus in "Nvidia NemoClaw"

empiricus — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:37:37 +0000

you put the dog in crate with a COPY of your documents.

New comment by empiricus in "Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games"

empiricus — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:46:22 +0000

c# to webasm - should be 2 weeks of llm work :)

New comment by empiricus in "US Job Market Visualizer"

empiricus — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:39:09 +0000

Looks average to me. Maybe I don't know how the good ones look? Can you give some examples?

New comment by empiricus in "What makes Intel Optane stand out (2023)"

empiricus — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:01:57 +0000

This is actually insane. Do you mean 2-4 people in one department basically killed Intel? Roll to disbelief.

New comment by empiricus in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

empiricus — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:20:42 +0000

Thanks, but this seems to be optimized for the smallest number of gates, so it applies for simple microcontrollers and FPGA, and with limited precision. I was interested in actual state of the art used in modern CPUs and GPUs.

New comment by empiricus in "Faster asin() was hiding in plain sight"

empiricus — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:24:49 +0000

Does anyone knows the resources for the algos used in the HW implementations of math functions? I mean the algos inside the CPUs and GPUs. How they make a tradeoff between transistor number, power consumption, cycles, which algos allow this.

New comment by empiricus in "A deep dive into Apple's .car file format"

empiricus — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:40:48 +0000

Well, I mean just choosing better names, don't touch the actual code. and you can also add a basic human filtering step if you want. You cannot possible say that "v12" is better than "header.size". I would argue that even hallucinated names are good: you should be able to think "but this position variable is not quite correctly updated, maybe this is not the position", which seems better than "this v12 variable is updated in some complicated way which I will ignore because it has no meaning".

New comment by empiricus in "A deep dive into Apple's .car file format"

empiricus — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 09:18:35 +0000

Idea: pass the decompiled code through a "please rename variables according to their purpose" step using a coding agent. Not ideal, but arguably better than v03, v20. And almost zero effort at this time and age.

New comment by empiricus in "New Nick Bostrom Paper: Optimal Timing for Superintelligence [pdf]"

empiricus — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 23:55:14 +0000

But it is very simple. There are some limits to what we can do, based on the laws of physics, but we are so far away from them. And the limiting factor is mostly the fact we are pretty stupid. AI should not have the same limits as us, so it can do more potentially, starting with basic things like cure aging or kill everyone.

New comment by empiricus in "Silver plunges 30% in worst day since 1980, gold tumbles"

empiricus — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 21:38:10 +0000

This looks like an IQ test, but for who?

New comment by empiricus in "Show HN: Differentiable Quantum Chemistry"

empiricus — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:18:29 +0000

Hi, thanks for the recommendations. I looked a little at the book, basically at the end we can compute some properties for small molecules sitting alone in space? What about arbitrary molecules, interacting? Or computing reaction rates? In a solvent? My understanding is that there are some algorithms for all of these, and there is probably progress made, but I never seen (online) anyone complaining that we cannot compute even this basic chemistry. I feel like we should care more about this problem.

New comment by empiricus in "Show HN: Differentiable Quantum Chemistry"

empiricus — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 10:22:20 +0000

Trying to read the math behind quantum chemistry, it is never clear to me which parts are fundamental, which parts are tricks, which parts are needed just for close form expressions, which parts are computational approximations, and which are the limitations? For a subject that should be fundamental for future technological advances, and highly dependent on the growth of computation resources, it seems to me exceptionally opaque and I suspect not well presented?

New comment by empiricus in "Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community"

empiricus — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 17:01:57 +0000

Well, it is quite difficult indeed, but I am curious what will happen in the next 20 years, with China very interested in this, and some renewed interest in the west too. I am also not sure which is more unrealistic, cheap nuclear or fusion.

New comment by empiricus in "Greenpeace pilot brings heat pumps and solar to Ukrainian community"

empiricus — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 13:59:33 +0000

If electricity is cheap enough, you can take CO2 from air and make fuel (not sure what is the threshold? 5-10 times cheaper then now?). then you can use that fuel where you need its energy density. I agree that it seems pretty dumb to ignore China (and soon India) CO2 emissions. Again, if you manage to make nuclear cheap enough, you could just gift reactors to everyone that needs them. It can be argued that cheap and safe nuclear was not really tried.

New comment by empiricus in "Indifference is a power (2015)"

empiricus — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 15:37:03 +0000

Actually when one is old enough, the lethality around becomes much more visible.

New comment by empiricus in "The Q, K, V Matrices"

empiricus — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 09:39:29 +0000

Not sure how helpful it is, but: Words or concepts are represented as high-dim vectors. At high level, we could say each dimension is another concept like "dog"-ness or "complexity" or "color"-ness. The "a word looks up to how relevant it is to another word" is basically just relevance=distance=vector dot product. and the dot product can be distorted="some directions are more important" for one purpose or another(q/k/v matrixes distort the dot product). softmax is just a form of normalization (all sums to 1 = proper probability). The whole shebang works only because all pieces can be learned by gradient descent, otherwise it would be impossible to implement.