Hacker News: hasmanean

New comment by hasmanean in "Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men"

hasmanean — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:11:59 +0000

Plumbers are paid well because of the way they organized.

-They restricted the number of apprentices. That limited the number of people in the field similar to medical school.

-They could bar substandard workers from practising in the city of London.

-They kept their craft knowledge in house and it was never written down. Apprentices swore oaths never to reveal the “secret of the mystery.”

If you look at programming we do everything the opposite. It’s no wonder salaries will collapse. In fact the only question is why didn’t they collapse sooner.

New comment by hasmanean in "ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC"

hasmanean — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:01:30 +0000

It was declared untrue in 1818 by Johnson’s dictionary.

But that’s just 1 vote. ;)

New comment by hasmanean in "ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC"

hasmanean — Fri, 09 May 2025 16:07:25 +0000

Because alchemists were afraid of people stealing their recipes. Jabir bin Hayyan (aka Geber) the father of chemistry wrote in his own shorthand which is named after him—-gibberish or jibberish.

So Lead, gold, and quicksilver were not the substances their names suggest. They were codenames. The real processes have never been revealed.

New comment by hasmanean in "Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī's Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)"

hasmanean — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:26:21 +0000

I think there was a bbc documentary where they showed a manuscript of Newton or Kepler with a geometric proof and compared it to one by Al Jazari. They were identical.

In fact even the vertices were labelled the same, and followed the order of Arabic letters.

Shoulders of giants indeed. Shoulders of jazari.

New comment by hasmanean in "Most AI value will come from broad automation, not from R & D"

hasmanean — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 22:12:38 +0000

We have YouTube plumbers. Has destroyed the industry? No. But it’s made plumbing accessible to a whole range of DIYers.

Maybe AI will be just as productive.

Seriously YouTube has been amazing for the world of self learning. AI could learn a lot from it.

New comment by hasmanean in "Ask HN: What is the best software to visualize a graph with a billion nodes?"

hasmanean — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 13:24:18 +0000

Expensive quixotic adventure.

Perhaps that is the experience he was after for his billion node graph.

New comment by hasmanean in "Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]"

hasmanean — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:09:03 +0000

The length of common LLM responses is perfectly able to fit on a sheet of paper.

New comment by hasmanean in "Call the compiler, fax it your code [video]"

hasmanean — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 00:07:47 +0000

If you had a ham radio connection and wanted to broadcast emergency bulletins to people, radio fax would be quite useful.

It’s push rather than pull like the web. Email works too, but fax has more utility in an emergency situation. Beats having to download adobe acrobat on every computer….

New comment by hasmanean in "Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?"

hasmanean — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:31:32 +0000

They talk about so little because that’s what the fcc rules limit them to. Can’t blame people for behaving like Elmer the safety elephant all the time.

What can you do with a license? Jam live music with other people over the air, in full duplex mode. Thats something only analog radio can do—because the latency is so low.

New comment by hasmanean in "Back to the future: Are hackers the future of amateur radio?"

hasmanean — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 11:25:44 +0000

Yes, discussing politics or broadcasting music is not allowed over ham radio. Basically all we can do is exchange call signs, locations and details about our signals and stations.

I have wondered if you could use the fact that analog radio over short distances has latencies measured in the microseconds, so you could have a jazz band with players scattered over an entire city, but they can play like they are in the same room. Internet comms have too much latency (measured in the milliseconds).

New comment by hasmanean in "The return of pneumatic tubes"

hasmanean — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 01:38:18 +0000

Does it have to be pneumatic? Electric propulsion would be simpler and not need a tight fit in the tube.

New comment by hasmanean in "Tiny beauty: how I make scientific art from behind the microscope"

hasmanean — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 02:47:32 +0000

Maybe we need scientific sculptors. 3D printing and cnc machines will allow some interesting 3d forms to be generated.

New comment by hasmanean in "Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]"

hasmanean — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:59:41 +0000

I spent my life looking for such an elegant tome. If I had discovered it when I was 15 maybe my life would have been happier.

Utilitarian programming is like utilitarian food. Programming should be seen as an act of worship to the god of simplicity. If the artificial world intrudes and makes the program complicated, this is what leads to suffering. Ultimately it is the world which should be changed.

New comment by hasmanean in "Lufthansa brings the inflight experience to life with mixed reality"

hasmanean — Mon, 27 May 2024 13:43:50 +0000

If I could look down mid-flight and see what was happening below…ancient battles, modern news events…that would be a truly educational inflight experience.

New comment by hasmanean in "Vision Transformers Need Registers"

hasmanean — Sun, 12 May 2024 00:06:52 +0000

So is that what all the visual cues are in real life, things like fashion accessories, uniforms etc.?

New comment by hasmanean in "X.org on NetBSD – The State of Things"

hasmanean — Mon, 06 May 2024 09:18:25 +0000

Not everybody understands English 100%.

The guy in the old west who drew his gun and said “them’s fightin’ words?” He probably didn’t enough English to understand the whole sentence but picked out a few words which meant to him “fight.”

New comment by hasmanean in "Digitized Continuous Magnetic Recordings for the 1859 Carrington Event"

hasmanean — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 23:58:36 +0000

If they had used polygonal mirrors instead of flat ones they would not have lost any data.

New comment by hasmanean in "Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America"

hasmanean — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:21:28 +0000

And how does a stampeding herd coordinate to move around a fence?

Buffalo will run off a cliff in the hundreds because those in the back can’t see what’s in the front.

New comment by hasmanean in "Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America"

hasmanean — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 01:38:56 +0000

How to you make a fenced off ranch when 30 million buffalo decide to stampede through?

New comment by hasmanean in "Haunting photos of the bison extermination in 19th century America"

hasmanean — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 18:43:37 +0000

Actually the grasslands of the Great Plains had immense amounts of carbon sequestered in their roots which extended several feet down.

Buffalo, by grazing and fertilizing, helped the grass.