Hacker News: inasio

New comment by inasio in "The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf]"

inasio — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:17:47 +0000

The end of life section is a bit whitewashed. Freeman Dyson had an article (struggling to find it) about how von Neumann was invited to give a Hilbert-style lecture on the 10 problems for the new computing age. All the big names at the time were there, but von Neumann was in such poor shape (dementia I assume), that it was decided to pretend it had never happened.

edit: article is called Birds and Frogs, by Freeman Dyson https://wucj.lab.westlake.edu.cn/Others/Dyson_Birds_and_Frog...

New comment by inasio in "Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022"

inasio — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 23:08:01 +0000

Reminded me of the Huascaran avalanche (1970, killed approx 30K people) [0]. I'm surprised this is not also in the thousands of casualties (perhaps it'll get there) [0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970_Huascar%C3%A1n_debris_ava...

New comment by inasio in "An Engineer's Old Cooking Trick Is Going Viral, Divides the Internet"

inasio — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:28:32 +0000

For another super condensed shorthand system for recipes, see Thermomix cookbooks (requires a Thermomix though)

New comment by inasio in "BMW Spider-Man in-car advertising"

inasio — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:02:44 +0000

The main story in the wiki page comes from the Autopian [0], specifically from Jason Torchinsky, ex Jalopnik. It's an awesome publication, check them out, and Jason is an incredible writer (Onion alumni)

[0] https://www.theautopian.com/bmw-is-showing-commercials-on-th...

New comment by inasio in "LearnVector – Andrew Ng's AI company building one‑to‑one learning experiences"

inasio — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 03:30:24 +0000

See The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

New comment by inasio in "Midjourney Medical"

inasio — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 05:37:22 +0000

I've worked optimizing MRIs trying to make them faster and more accurate, they're amazing machines (distinguish white matter from grey matter in the brain is very non trivial), but super complicated and expensive. To me, the paradigm change that could come from greater accessibility and throughput to analyze all that data would be having longitudinal baselines (scans every x months), which right now only very few people can access, and for the same reason there's not a lot of data to build accurate models.

New comment by inasio in "Pirates, a naval warfare game inspired by Sid Meier's Pirates"

inasio — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:01:24 +0000

Nice job! Sid Meier's Pirates is one of my favorite games, wish they brought it back (I still play it occasionally, can't believe it never got a remake)

New comment by inasio in "New stainless steel can survive conditions for hydrogen production in seawater"

inasio — Wed, 13 May 2026 17:47:20 +0000

Stayed a few times in a place exposed to constant breeze from a tropical Pacific coast beach, and learned that stainless steel doesn't really last very long there. Everything stainless steel-based (fixtures, fridges, handles) rusts in a few years. I'd bet there's a market for upscale alloys

New comment by inasio in "A programmable watch you can actually wear"

inasio — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:59:03 +0000

Does anyone know if this has an accelerometer? I recently got a nice sports-oriented smartwatch (non-Garmin), to use it mostly for rowing, but it doesn't track the rowing-rate. It should be pretty easy to program one if the watch has accelerometers, but couldn't tell from the spec sheet (maybe that means no?)

New comment by inasio in "The Ferrari of Espresso Machines Is Fueling a Hot Resale Market"

inasio — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:56:05 +0000

Vancouver also has a pretty nice La Marzocco showroom, the occasionally organize events, and can always go by to view the very nice machines and if you ask politely you'll get an amazing espresso

New comment by inasio in "Do you even need a database?"

inasio — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 04:11:10 +0000

There's a whole thing this days about building solvers (e.g. SAT or Ising) out of exotic hardware that does compute in memory. A while back I wondered if one could leverage distributed DB logic to build solvers for massive problems, something like compute in DB.

New comment by inasio in "An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published"

inasio — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 01:39:02 +0000

I have a nice copy, at least as of a few years ago you can get them for relatively cheap. I've been meaning to put scans of the text into OpenCV and play a bit to see if there's an underlying code. The number system in the page numbers has been cracked as far as I know.

New comment by inasio in "Ode to the AA Battery"

inasio — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:09:19 +0000

I found a Minidisc player that had been in storage for over 10 years, probably closer to 15. Runs off a single AA battery; I'd left it with a Duracell and it was still running.

New comment by inasio in "Immanuel 'the Königsberg clock' Kant (2015)"

inasio — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 19:43:49 +0000

Reminds me of Emilio Salgari (late 19th century, Italy's Jules Verne), one of my favorite authors growing up. He has many books on Malaysian pirates, Wild west cowboys (he's apparently considered the grandfather of the spaghetti western), adventures in India, etc. Always thought he must have been an adventurer, or at least a sailor. He never left Verona.

New comment by inasio in "Ford kills the All-Electric F-150"

inasio — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 02:46:00 +0000

My electrician drives an electric F-150, it's impressive how useful it is for him. The frunk carries a big box of tools, there's tons of outlets to charge his power tool batteries, he can even run a small welder

New comment by inasio in "OpenAI sued for allegedly enabling murder-suicide"

inasio — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 21:33:00 +0000

I read the Ars Technica version [0], completely insane read if true (LLM allegedly painted target on mom, convinced him he was the matrix's Neo, but kung-fu was already pre-uploaded, etc...)

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/12/openai-refuses-t...

New comment by inasio in "P-computers can solve spin-glass problems faster than quantum systems"

inasio — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:15:13 +0000

The paper compares p-computers with D-Wave's quantum annealing machine, which is limited to only solving certain problems (as opposed to universal QC such as Google or IonQ's, that could in theory implement Shor's)

New comment by inasio in "What will enter the public domain in 2026?"

inasio — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 06:53:58 +0000

A lot of WW2 heavyhitters from all sides:

Hitler, Mussolini, Patton, Churchill, Goebels. Even Anne Frank and Einstein.

New comment by inasio in "Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication"

inasio — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 19:15:08 +0000

Skunks apparently make great pets (but need to have their stink glands surgically extracted), the pitch is smart like a cat but faithful like dogs

New comment by inasio in "Project Euler"

inasio — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 21:59:52 +0000

A few years back (10 maybe?) they had a disk crash, and there was a notice that for people with 100 or more problems solved they'd do an extra effort to recover their solutions and add you back, not sure if it was only posted on the main website. I was lucky to get my account back at the time