Hacker News: mmusson

New comment by mmusson in "Replace OCR with Vision Language Models"

mmusson — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 21:53:21 +0000

Lol. The resume includes expert in Mia Khalifa easter egg.

New comment by mmusson in ""Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies" – Executive Order"

mmusson — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:10:09 +0000

Power abhors a vacuum.

New comment by mmusson in "Did missing/corrupt dates in COBOL default to 1875-05-20?"

mmusson — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:43:55 +0000

Another thing is that COBOL records commonly have complicated unions (to save space) where a separate code affects how you interpret the fields. You need to understand all the business logic to make sure you are reading the data correctly.

New comment by mmusson in "Homemade polarimetric synthetic aperture radar drone"

mmusson — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 13:02:02 +0000

The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't...

New comment by mmusson in "Anyone can push updates to the doge.gov website"

mmusson — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 21:22:48 +0000

And if it causes near-universal outrage, what then?

New comment by mmusson in "Wide Bandwidth High-Power Triboelectric Energy Harvesting by Scotch Tape"

mmusson — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 03:11:19 +0000

This reminds me of the duct tape X-ray source.

New comment by mmusson in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

mmusson — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 22:56:32 +0000

Or worse, pursuing something already proven not to work.

New comment by mmusson in "Zig; what I think after months of using it"

mmusson — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 12:08:07 +0000

> Huh? How do you think `const char s = "Hello"; const char t = &s[1];` works?

I think you and the parent are using different definitions of granularity. The parent meant that sizeof(t) could be 32 or 64 bits. I think you just meant that the smallest thing the pointer references is the address of a single byte.

Rust already has fat pointers though. A reference to a smaller byte value could be a pointer plus a bit-mask.

New comment by mmusson in "When AI promises speed but delivers debugging hell"

mmusson — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:45:36 +0000

I think there is a skill issue. Just like in any other pursuit, some people are going to be better at using AI productively. It is a tool. You are still responsible for the quality of the resulting code whatever the mix of human and tool generated.

New comment by mmusson in "Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?"

mmusson — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 16:04:27 +0000

The thing I find fascinating is that apparently there is a chunk of behavior that we might define as “intelligent” on some level that seems directly encoded in language itself.

New comment by mmusson in "Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7"

mmusson — Tue, 30 Jan 2024 11:40:24 +0000

The 737 design is like an axe that had its head and handle changed a few times. Is it still the same axe?

New comment by mmusson in "John Carmack and Rich Sutton partner to accelerate development of AGI"

mmusson — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 15:42:11 +0000

From what I have read, John had a genius for what you might call relentless optimization. Even if they just improve the performance or reduce the hardware requirements of executing an already trained LLM that would be a huge win. Current progress in that regard focuses on reducing the fidelity of the LLM to make it easier to execute, which isn’t ideal.

New comment by mmusson in "The Design of the Connection Machine"

mmusson — Fri, 29 Sep 2023 11:57:23 +0000

I was pleased that he called his write up on the industrial design for the computer, a case study.

New comment by mmusson in "Sword swallowing and its side effects (2006) [pdf]"

mmusson — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 15:02:53 +0000

Johnny Fox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Fox_(performer) you are missed.

New comment by mmusson in "Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force (1963)"

mmusson — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 11:24:55 +0000

I remember the doctor explaining that newborns are slippery. All I could imagine was the newborn launching from this contraption with doctor and nurses attempting to catch as the baby slips from person to person while the mother vomits from nausea.

New comment by mmusson in "Observation of zero resistance above 100 K in Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O"

mmusson — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 19:51:59 +0000

I just saw an article that explains the superconducting diode effect https://phys.org/news/2023-08-ubiquitous-superconductive-dio...

So theres the answer.

New comment by mmusson in "Observation of zero resistance above 100 K in Pb₁₀₋ₓCuₓ(PO₄)₆O"

mmusson — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 11:44:39 +0000

How would that work? A diode requires a p-n junction created by doping the substrate. It has low resistance in one direction but ideally infinite resistance in the other direction.

New comment by mmusson in "The Fall of Stack Overflow"

mmusson — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 12:31:17 +0000

The sweet spot for SO for me is workarounds for esoteric problems, not for more common issues because the solutions tend to be out of date (but correct for an older version of the library or whatever).

New comment by mmusson in "The past is not true"

mmusson — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:42:14 +0000

The question is what you really believe to be true. If your car hit me and you truly didn’t remember it that way then you are proving the author’s point.

Maybe you do remember hitting me. There will still be innumerable questions that you couldn’t answer because they were out of your perception in the moment. What if it turns out that in hitting me you stopped me from running over an old lady.

Whether or not you learn of that detail will have a big effect on how you remember the accident.

New comment by mmusson in "The past is not true"

mmusson — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 13:23:43 +0000

I think the point is that interpretation is all we really have. We believe that memories are these absolute things, but rigorous studies show that no human being remembers things perfectly, even when they believe they do.

For many years as a kid, I knew Santa Claus was real because I had seen him come to my house. My faith was unshakable, because I had observed it with my own eyes. Years later, I found out that on Christmas morning. My dad had left the room changed into the Santa outfit, snuck outside and came to the back door to surprise me with my mom. I was too young to realize that my dad had snuck away and wasn’t there at the same time as Santa.

If we could look back in time and see things just as they were I think it would be disconcerting how many little details we remember wrong that our mind fills in, without us realizing it.