Hacker News: empiricus

New comment by empiricus in "Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants"

empiricus — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:10:15 +0000

to my knowledge, the cost of uranium is almost negligible compared to the capital cost of building the plant. so as long as a market exists, you can choose whatever strategy: buy a big buffer, or just don't care if price oscillates x times.

New comment by empiricus in "Creatine raise brain energy levels and slow Alzheimer's cognitive decline by 30%"

empiricus — Sun, 31 May 2026 17:31:19 +0000

search the micronised version, it is so fine it looks like it disolves completely.

New comment by empiricus in "Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)"

empiricus — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:35:02 +0000

ty, will look at deskflow

New comment by empiricus in "Two computers, one monitor, zero fiddling (2025)"

empiricus — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:40:44 +0000

does synergy works better now? 3 years ago, every week I would get into a situations where one machine was not connecting to the other, and I had to randomly restart synergy so maybe it connects. fun to do that 5 min before the meetings.

New comment by empiricus in "Math Jokes in Alice in Wonderland"

empiricus — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:50:50 +0000

This is strange to me, with quartenions you model rotations in 3d space, not 4 dim rotations.

New comment by empiricus in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

empiricus — Mon, 18 May 2026 15:02:31 +0000

I suspect that you can modulate nuclear power too, but why do it? after you started the reactor it runs practically for free? (the fuel cost is so small; or it costs the same to run full power of half power). disclaimer: I did not read actual details about nuclear power plants designs in the past 20 years, so i'm vibing from first principles and bad memory

New comment by empiricus in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

empiricus — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:59:41 +0000

Europe was spending 200 billions / year on gas from russia. I imagine they could try to build 100 reactors for that price, but it would take a couple of years I imagine...

New comment by empiricus in "Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets"

empiricus — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:53:01 +0000

So sad we could not apply economy of scale for nuclear... The main reason solar and batteries are so cheap is economy of scale.

New comment by empiricus in "An AI agent deleted our production database. The agent's confession is below"

empiricus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 21:24:21 +0000

From the category of "never run complex dd while drinking beer"

New comment by empiricus in "Statecharts: hierarchical state machines"

empiricus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:36:23 +0000

I agree, we try to think in terms in state machine. Just complaining that somehow this is not good enough, in practice we need to add random flags, and it is not clear how to separate the multitude of separate state machines all active at the same time.

New comment by empiricus in "Statecharts: hierarchical state machines"

empiricus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 11:53:38 +0000

"No statechart will survive contact with real world applications". I mean, when you have external dependencies, multilayer protocols, multithreading, perf requirements, the state will becomes an ugly mess. One can only dream of a clean statechart.

New comment by empiricus in "A Powerful New 'QR Code' Untangles Math's Knottiest Knots"

empiricus — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 12:47:32 +0000

But I see all the "QR codes" have a hexagonal symmetry? So basically you can use only one corner (1/6) to represent a node? Why do they keep the entire hexagon?

New comment by empiricus in "How does GPS work?"

empiricus — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:58:44 +0000

(also you receive the signal from all satellites at the same time, on the same freq, and some random reflections. and then you need to extract independent streams of bits for each satellite, each with its own nanosecond timestamp for receive time)

New comment by empiricus in "How does GPS work?"

empiricus — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:50:26 +0000

And then you try to actually build a GPS network, and ask yourself: what kind of antennas should we use? what should be the freq? how much power? how will the receiver detect the precise nanosecond when it receives an incredible weak signal? (in current GPS the signal is bellow thermal noise)

New comment by empiricus in "XOR'ing a register with itself is the idiom for zeroing it out. Why not sub?"

empiricus — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 08:01:07 +0000

The hw implementation of xor is simpler than sub, so it should consume slightly less energy. Wondering how much energy was saved in the whole world by using xor instead of sub.

New comment by empiricus in "Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)"

empiricus — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:24:32 +0000

You could use colors in the step-by-step simulation to show dependencies. Also show some tooltips/comments when things happen (that you described above). Ideally one should press next next next in the simulation, and understand what happens better than the paragraph description above.

New comment by empiricus in "Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)"

empiricus — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:36:41 +0000

Maybe it's just me, but the visualizations do not help me at all.

New comment by empiricus in "The Rational Conclusion of Doomerism Is Violence"

empiricus — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:29:03 +0000

well, rhetorical trick or not, it is worth thinking about the fact that the dynamics of the thing are already outside anyone's control. I mean, everyone is racing and you cannot stop.

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.