Hacker News: fluorinerocket

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Retrofitting JIT Compilers into C Interpreters"

fluorinerocket — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 01:02:13 +0000

There were so many things that NI did that were great. Debugging in LabVIEW was also very easy with probes, conditional breakpoints etc.

It's really too bad that it's more or less dead now

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Peers vote to ban pornography depicting sex acts between stepfamily members"

fluorinerocket — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 17:03:38 +0000

I am sure they each personally researched the topic very thoroughly to come to this conclusion

New comment by fluorinerocket in "CIA used "long-range quantum magnetometry" called "Ghost Murmur" in Iran"

fluorinerocket — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 22:10:56 +0000

What if they have a bunch of prerecorded data for the guys heart, then use a lock in amplifier to see if there is a signal in the noise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Herbie: Automatically improve imprecise floating point formulas"

fluorinerocket — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 18:05:52 +0000

You're right but still, big error. I get its averaging over the range, and the floats are not uniformly distributed.

Maybe the thing to optimize the expression for is the minimize the maximum error, and not the average error. I think that's what I would care about

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Herbie: Automatically improve imprecise floating point formulas"

fluorinerocket — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:36:25 +0000

You're right I misread the graph. That said though I have played around with Herbie before, trying it out on a few of the more gnarly expressions I had in my code (analytical partial derivatives if equations of motion if launch vehicle in rotating spherical frame) and didn't see much appreciable improvement over the expected range of values, but then again I didn't check every single one.

What would be cool is if you could some how have this kind of analysis done automatically for your whole program where it finds the needle in the haystack expression that can be improved, assuming you gave expected ranges for your variables

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Herbie: Automatically improve imprecise floating point formulas"

fluorinerocket — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 02:02:43 +0000

How useful is this when you are using numbers in a reasonable range, like 10^-12 to 10^12? Generally I try to scale my numbers to be in this range, whether by picking the right units or scaling constraints and objectives when doing nonlinear programming/ optimization.

Like looking at this example,

https://herbie.uwplse.org/demo/b070b371a661191752fe37ce0321c...

It is claimed that for the function f(x) =sqrt(x+1) -1

Accuracy is increased by from 8.5% accuracy to 98% for alternative 5 Which has f(x) = 0.5x

Ok so x=99, the right answer is sqrt(100) -1 = 9

But 0.5 * 99 = 49.5 which doesn't seem too accurate to me.

New comment by fluorinerocket in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

fluorinerocket — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:21:32 +0000

The rocket company I worked at designed their orbital rocket in inches and lbm. Engine flow rates in lbm/s, temperatures in deg Rankine, thrust in lbf. Btu/hour/inch^2/degR heat transfer coefficients.

New comment by fluorinerocket in "The Startup Graveyard"

fluorinerocket — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 18:21:24 +0000

I miss fuckedcompany.com

New comment by fluorinerocket in "US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year"

fluorinerocket — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 18:26:43 +0000

How is that working out, genuinely curious

New comment by fluorinerocket in "IPv6 just turned 30 and still hasn't taken over the world"

fluorinerocket — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:08:48 +0000

I don't think they even had a way to do dc-dc voltage step-up and step-down at high power and efficiency, needed semiconductors for that to do high speed switching in buck and boost converters

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Cameras and Lenses (2020)"

fluorinerocket — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 11:01:12 +0000

Awesome, I learned something about optics! I was afraid this was going to be about Haskell

New comment by fluorinerocket in "How uv got so fast"

fluorinerocket — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 15:06:59 +0000

I haven't ever experienced this yet, what packages were involved?

New comment by fluorinerocket in "FPGAs Need a New Future"

fluorinerocket — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 17:50:03 +0000

LabVIEW FPGA was amazing, I did all kinds of things with it on the compactRIO controller FPGA

You can write very neat and tidy code with dataflow diagram languages. I did it professionally for years, and there were many others who did as well.

Same thing as any other language, you have to come up ways to organize the code into functions and classes that make sense. Vomiting everything into the top level diagram is the same as 10000 line of code while(1)

You could always tell the exact level of proficiency someone had with LabVIEW immediately when opening the diagram.

The dataflow model maps very well to FPGAs IMO, it's a shame it never became widespread. There was much potential there

New comment by fluorinerocket in "MIT Missing Semester 2026"

fluorinerocket — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 18:30:46 +0000

They like to say things like that or some version of "we want to teach the concepts, the specific technology changes too fast". Does it? Just seems lazy to me.

New comment by fluorinerocket in "No more O'Reilly subscriptions for me"

fluorinerocket — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 22:30:04 +0000

I on the other hand can't stand PDFs.

They take up valuable screen space, it is annoying to scroll to the sections you need. Yeah yeah some PDFs have the side navigation thing. Most don't

With a book I can put in those little flags to bookmark sections, I can easily riffle the pages and scan for the chapter I need, I can hand write in the margins

I often need 2 or 3 books open to different sections, I like keeping them on my desk so I can glance at them when I need to

I've probably cracked $1000 spent on books this year.

New comment by fluorinerocket in "The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video]"

fluorinerocket — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 22:25:10 +0000

Rockets have flown to orbit on auto coded simulink, seen it myself

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Python is not a great language for data science"

fluorinerocket — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 22:18:23 +0000

Would love to see a language in which hierarchical state machines, math/linear algebra, I/O to sensors and actuators, and time/timing were first class citizens.

Mainly for programming control systems for robotics and aerospace applications

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Implications of AI to schools"

fluorinerocket — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 01:05:15 +0000

When I was a kid in Italy in the late 80s early 90s the elentary school teachers also did "interrogazione" at the blackboard. That is individual kids would go up to the blackboard and get asked questions front of the rest of the class.

Not sure if those two were just old school (they'd occasionally hit us/ pull ears too) but damn was I ahead of all the other kids when I came back to the USA

Also the two teachers had the same class of kids for all of elementary school, teaching 1st through 5th grades sequentially So they got to know the kids quite well

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Norway's lesson for Europe on wealth taxes: let some millionaires go"

fluorinerocket — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:32:38 +0000

So 12% of the population pays it? So more of a tax on the professional, works for a living, upper middle class?

New comment by fluorinerocket in "Loose wire leads to blackout, contact with Francis Scott Key bridge"

fluorinerocket — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 03:50:52 +0000

Clear case on the terminal blocks could be nice, though might still get a bit tough to see when you have multi-level TBs all mounted in strip on DIN rail.

When I used to be involved in control panels I would always yank on all the wires too :-)