Hacker News: kickopotomus

New comment by kickopotomus in "Explore the Hidden World of Sand"

kickopotomus — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:49:36 +0000

That's a tad pedantic. Everyone takes sand from the beach. That's simply the nature of going to a beach. The spirit of those laws is to prevent people from taking large quantities of sand for some personal or commercial purpose.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Astral to Join OpenAI"

kickopotomus — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:31:39 +0000

Private artifact repositories also help to mitigate supply chain risk since you can host all of your screened packages and don't have to worry about something getting removed from mvn-central, PyPI, NPM, etc.

Plus the obvious need for a place to host proprietary internal libraries.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Like Intel before it, AMD blames motherboard makers for burnt-out CPUs"

kickopotomus — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 23:49:16 +0000

In part, yes, but the whole picture is a bit more complex. Intel and AMD both work with vendors to work out reference designs and power regulator configurations that are compatible with their CPUs. Modern power regulators are relatively complex, especially when you get into the high-end desktop and server space. There are a lot of things that can be done wrong and cause issues, such as voltage or current overshoot when the CPU moves between different power states (e.g. low to high load).

New comment by kickopotomus in "Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, but Trump might offer lifeline"

kickopotomus — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 18:25:34 +0000

You say that as if they only operate in the US. The US represents less than 20% of their user base.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding"

kickopotomus — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 03:37:50 +0000

> 'advisory board member' means that they are a board member in an advisory role, aka a nonexec

No, those are not synonyms. Advisory boards are distinct from the board of directors. Advisory board members have roles similar to what you alluded to in your original comment and do not have fiduciary duties, hence my confusion.

Non-exec board members are not involved with day-to-day business operations but their fiduciary duties are no different than exec members.

Language has meaning. Don't insult others for your own clumsy usage.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding"

kickopotomus — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 03:15:42 +0000

No, I never said that her role is to "cheerlead". Refraining from public disparaging remarks is not a big ask for a board member. Especially if those thoughts were not first brought before the board, which is where such disputes should be resolved.

> Also I never said they had an 'advisory' board

From your comment: "...it's absolutely the role of advisory board members to continue their work".

Not sure how someone is meant to parse that except for you to imply that she was a member of an advisory board.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Before Altman’s ouster, OpenAI’s board was divided and feuding"

kickopotomus — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 02:56:28 +0000

OpenAI does not have an advisory board. She is on the board of directors and has fiduciary responsibilities. It does not matter that the parent organization is a non-profit. The duty remains.

New comment by kickopotomus in "OpenAI staff threaten to quit unless board resigns"

kickopotomus — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 20:02:12 +0000

Ehh I don't think SVB is an apt comparison. When the FDIC takes control of a failing bank, the bank shutters. Only critical staff is kept on board to aid with asset liquidation/transference and repay creditors/depositors. Once that is completed, the bank is dissolved.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Quantum Resistance and the Signal Protocol"

kickopotomus — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 20:58:43 +0000

It seems that your primary concern is that the government (or some bad actor) will be able to install a backdoor into PQC algorithms. Is that right? Why would PQC be more exposed to this type of subversion than existing public-key cryptography?

To your point about PQC being used exclusively, post-quantum encryption methods are designed to be resistant to both quantum and classical attacks. That is one of the key stated goals of the NIST post-quantum cryptography program.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor LK-99 preprint revision 2"

kickopotomus — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 16:28:41 +0000

High-end CPUs are actually not powered directly by DC. Basically all server (and growing portion of consumer) CPUs are powered by multiphase buck regulators[1] which split the power from from the DC PSU rails into a parallel set of modulated buck regulator power stages. The outputs of the parallel regulators are recombined to generate DC (as the combined waveform of the phased AC parts).

The reason for this multiphase design is because it offers better power efficiency and better transient response to the CPU as the CPU moves between it's different power states (high vs low load).

[1]: https://www.ti.com/lit/an/slva882b/slva882b.pdf?ts=169087951...

New comment by kickopotomus in "The fall of Stack Overflow, explained?"

kickopotomus — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 21:18:42 +0000

How would that work? If I just comment on some 8 year old question that the answer does not apply to $LATEST version of $FRAMEWORK, how would anyone with the know-how discover my question?

This truly is a new question because what is really being asked is what was the breaking change that occurred in $FRAMEWORK between the original question was answered and this latest version.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Room temperature, ambient pressure superconductivity – this time for real?"

kickopotomus — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 16:37:12 +0000

We stopped chasing clock speeds because of the physical timing limitations of gate and signal propagation. Not because of heat. Suppose you are using a 5GHz clock. Every cycle is 0.2ns. Light can only travel 6cm in that time. Electricity propagates a little slower through a conductor (and even slower through silicon). So if you are using some insanely fast clock, you are just wasting cycles waiting for signals to move across the chip.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Room temperature, ambient pressure superconductivity – this time for real?"

kickopotomus — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:48:52 +0000

Superconductors may reduce power consumption but they don't do anything to improve transistor density.

New comment by kickopotomus in "In 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of Americans in favor of moon landing"

kickopotomus — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 18:43:45 +0000

I would say NASA is the public facing R&D arm. They also have DARPA as a more secretive R&D arm.

New comment by kickopotomus in "So what was that? Was Starship’s launch a failure or a success?"

kickopotomus — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 17:49:36 +0000

On the contrary, I find it more concerning that people are willing to discount the efforts of hundreds of people to progress human spaceflight just because the CEO is an asshole.

It is interesting that you would immediately default to a cult-of-personality retort when I never mentioned Elon in my original post. SpaceX is not just one man.

New comment by kickopotomus in "So what was that? Was Starship’s launch a failure or a success?"

kickopotomus — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 06:36:15 +0000

I agree with this sentiment. I have also been somewhat unsettled by the detractors here. I am not sure if this is purely an American sentiment, but it seems like more of the general population has started to view advancement in binary terms. In both science and public policy, it seems that an increasing proportion of the population view anything less than 100% success/improvement as an abject failure.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work"

kickopotomus — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:49:14 +0000

How is it any more dangerous than existing cloud storage use?

New comment by kickopotomus in "Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work"

kickopotomus — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 23:59:20 +0000

It seems like everyone is just focusing on auto-generated/summarized emails which is rather myopic. The real value add here is the ability to make all of an organization's data more easily discoverable and searchable.

New comment by kickopotomus in "Legal use of hallucinogenic mushrooms begins in Oregon"

kickopotomus — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 18:06:10 +0000

> You have a substance that you know, for a fact, a certain proportion of the population will abuse, to the detriment of both themselves and society at large.

I can understand why someone may take this stance, but I think this argument is something of a hasty generalization when it comes to drug policy. For starters, the policy alone (prohibited vs decriminalized vs legalized) does not appear to be the determining factor in the "certain proportion" of the population that use drugs problematically or otherwise. The US consistently has some of the highest drug usage and abuse rates compared to our western counterparts in Europe. I don't know of the exact reason for this. Could be other cultural differences between the US and Europe. Could be the fact that most European countries approach drug abuse as a public health issue opposed to a criminal one, and focus on harm reduction and rehabilitation instead of jail time.

New comment by kickopotomus in "FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to be released on $250M bail"

kickopotomus — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 22:18:47 +0000

I doubt they used a bondsman. $25 million is a pretty steep fee. They likely paid the entire bail amount and will get that money back once SBF shows up to court.