Hacker News: inasio

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

New comment by inasio in "Eating stinging nettles"

inasio — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 19:45:41 +0000

I love them in pizza, I don't think we even blanche them, cook them Napolitan-style on a very hot oven quickly. Definitely tasty.

Also works as a pesto ingredient

New comment by inasio in "Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower"

inasio — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 01:32:30 +0000

Basically Amdahl's law [0]. If optimizing for weight, go for the components that make up most of the weight first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

New comment by inasio in "KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web"

inasio — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:29:35 +0000

A few years ago I was evaluating options to move away from a deprecated external latex library my company relied on in Confluence, and tested Notion. I was super impressed at the rendering speed of their latex implementation (KaTex of course). As other have mentioned, not everything is there, but it was sufficiently good for our purposes. The switch was a pain, I hoped that Notion had good tools to move over from Confluence, but we had to do a custom job relying on sketchy undocumented APIs

New comment by inasio in "Benjie's Humanoid Olympic Games"

inasio — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 21:51:12 +0000

There are already robots that do that (autobelayers)...

New comment by inasio in "My game's server is blocked in Spain whenever there's a football match on"

inasio — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 17:42:45 +0000

In days of prison time?

New comment by inasio in "The Beginner's Textbook for Fully Homomorphic Encryption"

inasio — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 21:36:31 +0000

I was surprised that for almost 300 pages there were only 26 references listed in the back. Not the end of the world by any means, clearly a ton of work went into this, but I find it useful to see from references how it overlaps with other subjects I may know more about

New comment by inasio in "David Lynch LA House"

inasio — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:22:11 +0000

It's also (partly) a Frank Lloyd Wright house, that alone would justify a very high price

New comment by inasio in "David Lynch LA House"

inasio — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 05:20:35 +0000

There was an auction of a lot of his memorabilia a few months ago, it included a lot of Festool stuff. He was an avid woodworker (the sale also included furniture he made). I like how the work table where you can see the miter saw is made of the most utilitarian plywood, it feels like he was working until his last days

New comment by inasio in "Implicit ODE solvers are not universally more robust than explicit ODE solvers"

inasio — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 17:47:45 +0000

I was expecting a mention of symplectic ODE solvers, although perhaps that was beyond the scope of the blog post. For Hamiltonian ODEs, you can design methods that explicitly preserve energy, outperforming more generic methods.

New comment by inasio in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

inasio — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:11:21 +0000

The point is that you can go "from more people bad" to "less people good" in just a few jumps, and that is not great.

New comment by inasio in "Why are there so many rationalist cults?"

inasio — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 18:25:46 +0000

Saw once a discussion that people should not have kids as it's by far the highest increase in your carbon footprint in your lifetime (>10x than going vegan, etc) be driven all the way to advocating genocide as a way of carbon footprint minimization