Hacker News: flopsamjetsam

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Google shuts down Nobel Prize winning AlphaFold"

flopsamjetsam — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 20:56:54 +0000

> I'm guessing Google can't make money on them.

The weights are free for non-commercial use. And Isomorphic are their commercial arm, and they partner with the big drug companies.

Edit: after reading the article, I realise it's about the disbanding of the team, so probably your original comment is correct.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld"

flopsamjetsam — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 05:56:52 +0000

Yes, it reminds me a lot of the ports between 8-bit computers in the 80s, and also console ports pre-Playstation.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Should you use AI for a task? Here's a simple way to decide"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:47:02 +0000

An article by Bruce Schneier, on how he frames the question when evaluating his students.

Should you use AI for a task? Here's a simple way to decide

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 23:47:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/24/should-you-use-ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053023

Points: 4

# Comments: 3

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Count Binface"

flopsamjetsam — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 07:24:10 +0000

That is excellent, and explains much!

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:15:06 +0000

> CLIC was awful (thankfully it has been abandoned)

Could you expand a little on what made it a bad design? I'm not much up on RISC-V.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Book: RISC-V System-on-Chip Design"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:12:52 +0000

I re-took Computer Architecture recently, and we used their earlier book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture: ARM edition", and it was also excellent.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "RISCBoy is an open-source portable games console, designed from scratch"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 23:06:38 +0000

From the GitHub page:

> It is a Gameboy Advance from a parallel universe where RISC-V existed in 2001. A love letter to the handheld consoles from my childhood, and a 3AM drunk text to the technology that powered them.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1 Supercomputer"

flopsamjetsam — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 21:08:01 +0000

> We think it is highly likely that these LX2 chiplets are etched using SMIC 7 nanometer processes at the N+3 refinement, and we base that on the fact that the chip only runs at 1.55 GHz. That is nowhere near the 3 GHz that SMIC can push with that process, but it is probably lower to get the memory and core speeds more balanced. [1]

Based on the ARMv9.2.

[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/hpc/2026/06/25/a-deep-dive-on-c...

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions"

flopsamjetsam — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:35:26 +0000

I was a programmer, and moved over to biology recently. I was very "wtf is R" when I started, but slowly its strengths are coming through. I found the combination of the REPL plus the IDE, and the language syntax, somehow give me the ability to play around a lot more than I expected. Unlike others, I find tidyverse (especially ggplot2 and dplyr, which reminds me a lot of pandas) to be quite intuitive.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Dirty Little Zine – a tool for making an 8 page printable Zine"

flopsamjetsam — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 06:49:07 +0000

I love this, it's like a grown-up PrintShop.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Spanish traders set the standard for GnuCash database design"

flopsamjetsam — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:37:41 +0000

That's fascinating, I remember my Dad telling me you would pay for something in guineas as a sort of tip, but I never knew it was for horses (this is in Australia).

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "I’m writing again"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:35:50 +0000

I loved Swaine's Flames from DDJ. Shame I missed his revival.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Map of Metal"

flopsamjetsam — Thu, 21 May 2026 05:28:55 +0000

Great map!

No Opeth?

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Goodbye Visa and Mastercard: 130M Europeans switching to sovereign payment"

flopsamjetsam — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:53:04 +0000

For those wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_Supplementary_Ser...

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Hindenburg’s Smoking Room"

flopsamjetsam — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:56:45 +0000

You'd think they'd just ban repeat offenders.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Scientists “bottle the sun” with a liquid battery that stores solar energy"

flopsamjetsam — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:39:17 +0000

Yeah, you'd think they'd include that.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec6413

"Upon treatment with acid, that bond breaks to release more than a megajoule per kilogram of the compound, enough to rapidly boil water from a solution."

That's from the editor's summary (I haven't had time to read the paper).

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Additive Blending on the Nintendo 64"

flopsamjetsam — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:34:04 +0000

From the Wikipedia article:

> However, it is possible to implement saturating addition and subtraction in software without branches, using only modular arithmetic and bitwise logical operations that are available on all modern CPUs and their predecessors, including all x86 CPUs (back to the original Intel 8086) and some popular 8-bit CPUs (some of which implement the Z80 instruction set) are still in production.

Does anyone know what the implementation of this is, without conditional moves?

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Do teachers need advanced degrees?"

flopsamjetsam — Fri, 15 May 2026 01:50:39 +0000

Do you mean for a teaching job, or just any job? Certainly in fields like biology, you can only be taken seriously by others in the field by having an advanced degree (which is really only the beginning).

In computing, in the commercial field, you can of course get by with no degree.

New comment by flopsamjetsam in "Bankruptcies increase 11.9 percent"

flopsamjetsam — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:25:19 +0000

> And for sports, the level at which you have to be competitive is getting younger and younger. So much more sports science/nutrition going in at the middle school/high school level.

For endurance-based sports, online coaching has really accelerated this as well.

For skills, you still really need in-person coaching.