Hacker News: kevlened

New comment by kevlened in "The Millennium Problems for Biology"

kevlened — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:42:03 +0000

Agreed. Morphogenesis is more general. Limb regeneration is how morphogenesis is represented in this problem set.

New comment by kevlened in "The Millennium Problems for Biology"

kevlened — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:37:17 +0000

That’s number 6: limb regeneration.

New comment by kevlened in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"

kevlened — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:28:53 +0000

Without humans, you could rediscover any benefit the "human search method" confers with enough compute and time, but we're limited by both.

New comment by kevlened in "John C. Lilly on solid state intelligence and the elimination of man (1978)"

kevlened — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:08:43 +0000

When a search space has irreducible complexity, ensemble search methods can improve performance. It's possible culture, emotions, religion, etc are part of an ensemble.

Simulating the "human search method" in silico doesn't need to include specific personalities, but they do provide a bootstrap, just as we've bootstrapped current AI with human language.

For symbiosis, there may be an advantage to the physical adaptability of biology.

In general, it's currently unclear if biology is emulating what we're creating in computers, if computers are emulating what we achieve biologically, or if both approaches are imperfect emulations of a different ideal search method.

New comment by kevlened in "Half-Baked Product"

kevlened — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 16:05:08 +0000

That's quite a complement to AI

New comment by kevlened in "A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading"

kevlened — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:31:57 +0000

We have already seen selection pressure results in Candida auris

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.01397-19 (2019)

https://radiolab.org/podcast/fungus-amungus (2020)

New comment by kevlened in "A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading"

kevlened — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:33:37 +0000

It can be airborne, lives on sanitized surfaces for up to 10 weeks, and may take 3 years for symptoms to appear.

Still, it is more concerning for cats than humans.

New comment by kevlened in "Office-open-xml-viewer: Office XML document viewer that renders to HTML Canvas"

kevlened — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:48:12 +0000

From my experience, the team that's the closest to open-source pixel-perfect Word support is https://github.com/superdoc-dev/superdoc (unaffiliated)

New comment by kevlened in "The dead economy theory"

kevlened — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:14:41 +0000

One argument may be that ownership is the last role for a human in a business. The firm exists to show ownership of an AI and provides a mechanism for managing its proceeds.

New comment by kevlened in "Sal Khan's AI revolution hasn't happened yet"

kevlened — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 07:17:46 +0000

Derek Muller of Veritasium has a presentation on why the promises of a revolution in education are never fulfilled. [0]

His hottest take is we're already close to the optimal process for learning, so technology isn't going to improve it. Learning takes work, and no technology can do the work for you.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70

New comment by kevlened in "Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw"

kevlened — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 23:48:49 +0000

Nanoclaw uses the official claude agent sdk, so it should be unaffected.

New comment by kevlened in "Show HN: BreezePDF – Free, in-browser PDF editor"

kevlened — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:57:18 +0000

For those looking for an MIT alternative, there's an embeddable solution which uses PDFium (Apache) compiled to wasm instead of MuPDF (AGPL): https://www.embedpdf.com/

There's a hosted version for quick edits: https://app.embedpdf.com/

Discussion from several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44901683

Neither fully handles XFA, but that's a perennial struggle.

New comment by kevlened in "[dead]"

kevlened — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:09:00 +0000

> A recent study from Stanford

Source?

New comment by kevlened in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

kevlened — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 15:11:23 +0000

Even without prior knowledge, seeing others safely navigate the same section will lower your estimated risk.

New comment by kevlened in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

kevlened — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:52:40 +0000

> Musk miscalculated on 1) cost reduction in LIDAR

Given that Musk has a history of driving lower costs, it's unlikely he overestimated the long-term cost floor. He just thought we were close to self-driving in 2014.

Another factor is Andrej Karpathy, who was the primary architect for the vision-only approach. Musk wanted fewer parts, and Karpathy believed he could deliver that. Karpathy is still an advocate of vision-only.

New comment by kevlened in "VTT Test Donut Lab Battery Reaches 80% Charge in Under 10 Minutes [pdf]"

kevlened — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 13:27:58 +0000

> They also published the report here: https://pub-fee113bb711e441db5c353d2d31abbb3.r2.dev/VTT_CR_0...

That's the same link. Is there a way to attest that this is an official VTT report?

New comment by kevlened in "Fastest Front End Tooling for Humans and AI"

kevlened — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:50:11 +0000

> Oxfmt got it, and then won.

This doesn't align with the data.

  - 650k npm downloads for oxfmt this week [0]
  - 4.3m npm downloads for biome this week [1]

  - 19.1k gh stars for oxfmt [2]
  - 23.7k gh stars for biome [3]
  - gap widening in favor of biome [4]

  [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/oxfmt
  [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@biomejs/biome
  [2] https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc
  [3] https://github.com/biomejs/biome
  [4] https://www.star-history.com/#oxc-project/oxc&biomejs/biome&type=date&legend=top-left

New comment by kevlened in "Modern CSS Code Snippets: Stop writing CSS like it's 2015"

kevlened — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:51:45 +0000

There's an active proposal for rendering html in canvas to control styling. Text rendering and accessibility are main focuses for the proposal.

https://github.com/WICG/html-in-canvas

New comment by kevlened in "Cells use 'bioelectricity' to coordinate and make group decisions"

kevlened — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 17:32:51 +0000

He's changed wild-type planarians to grow the heads of other species. It reverts after a few weeks, because the system has error-correcting mechanisms, but the DNA of these worms is unchanged.

He once compared tinkering with DNA as pulling out a soldering iron to fix a software bug.

In the case of morphology, DNA may not be the best level of abstraction. It's certainly possible, just as one can use chemistry for social problems, but for some problems, affecting cell-to-cell communication may be a more direct path.

New comment by kevlened in "Creators of Tailwind laid off 75% of their engineering team"

kevlened — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 16:02:19 +0000

More details:

https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/1467...

https://x.com/adamwathan/status/2008909129591443925

https://adams-morning-walk.transistor.fm/episodes/we-had-six...