Hacker News: nicwilson

New comment by nicwilson in "New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue"

nicwilson — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 03:29:28 +0000

(Having not read the article), most likely because the cancer cells (at least at more advanced stages) are busy trying to replicate as fast as possible, so they take up nutrients at a much faster rate than non-cancerous cells. As to why Iron in particular, it is used as a cofactor for enzyme and if Iron is a limiting factor for replication then supplying it will lead to a burst of growth which then (presumably by applying strong oscillatory magnetic fields) you can target those cells directly to locally boil them.

How do the iron nano materials get there? probably a combination of vasculature and diffusion.

They have done this kind of stuff before with gold nanoparticles, iron is a lot more abundant.

New comment by nicwilson in "D Programming Language"

nicwilson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:19:57 +0000

Sociomantic (bought by Dunhumby, now defunct IIRC) had a realtime advertisement business built in D.

Weka have a realtime distributed filesystem written in D, used for ML/HPC workloads.

New comment by nicwilson in "D Programming Language"

nicwilson — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 10:24:02 +0000

It has an LLVM backend, LDC, that is separate from the LLVM project/Clang.

New comment by nicwilson in "Europe's $24T Breakup with Visa and Mastercard Has Begun"

nicwilson — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 07:41:11 +0000

You might be thinking of Ubiquiti, who were exposed as blind eyeing the sanctions

New comment by nicwilson in "Making the Clang AST Leaner and Faster"

nicwilson — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:25:23 +0000

That is dated Feb 2022. Do you know if anything came of it?

New comment by nicwilson in "In Defense of C++"

nicwilson — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 09:32:42 +0000

It works with arrays (both fixed size, and dynamically sized) and arrays; between arrays and elements; but not between two scalar types that don't overload opBinary!"~", so no it won't work between two `ushorts` to produce a `uint`

New comment by nicwilson in "Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++"

nicwilson — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 01:30:33 +0000

This was essentially how DMD (the reference D compiler) was translated to D. However this was mostly a restricted subset of C++ common to both of them, e.g. no diamond inheritance, no operator overloading whackiness.

New comment by nicwilson in "Features of D That I Love"

nicwilson — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 23:52:14 +0000

`private` is only private to the module, not the struct/class, (In other words, all functions in the same module are all C++ style `friend`s) and so free function in same module work.

New comment by nicwilson in "Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)"

nicwilson — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 11:01:33 +0000

Hmmm, I wonder if you could turn this into a sport and have like one paper per year per group of total BS, and shame on the reviewers/conference/journal if they don't catch it, and kudos to the submitters the more blatant it is.

Come to think of it, is there a "Journal of Academic Fraud"?

New comment by nicwilson in "The number pi has an evil twin"

nicwilson — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 11:51:35 +0000

azimuth is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head

New comment by nicwilson in "Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers"

nicwilson — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 05:16:01 +0000

Double entry accounting is still error prone, but single entry accounting is fraud prone.

New comment by nicwilson in "MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing Elsevier contract"

nicwilson — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 04:38:23 +0000

* Brownian motion. "browning motion" sounds like a euphamism for something else...

New comment by nicwilson in "Everyone is John: A competitive roleplaying game for three or more people (2002)"

nicwilson — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 04:07:30 +0000

54 minutes, but the Yogscast did one a while ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTsW9rWE0o&pp=ygUbeW9nc2Nhc...

New comment by nicwilson in "An interactive guide to the Fourier transform (2012)"

nicwilson — Sat, 16 Dec 2023 01:09:27 +0000

It is, because wavenumber and position are distinct variables and are orthogonal to each other. FT turn position into wavenumber (positional frequency) and wavenumber into negative position:

[ 0 1] [x] [ ω]

[-1 0] [ω] [-x]

the rotation matrix [[ 0 1], [-1 0]] is a 90 degree rotation.

New comment by nicwilson in "An interactive guide to the Fourier transform (2012)"

nicwilson — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 21:59:18 +0000

FT is a 90 degree rotation not a 180, the FT of the FT of a function is the mirror image about the origin, not the function itself.

New comment by nicwilson in "Carcinogens that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them"

nicwilson — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 23:07:09 +0000

Wiki link says that was published in 2010, a lot has happened in the field in 13 years. That predates whole classes of immuno-theraputics like grafting B-Cell (cells that produce antibodies) receptors onto CD8+ T cells (cells that kill infected cells), which I forget the name of.

New comment by nicwilson in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail 48 1/2 year anniversary in theaters December"

nicwilson — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 13:28:12 +0000

not just a drunk, a cheap drunk.

New comment by nicwilson in "Histotripsy – a technique that harnesses soundwaves to attack cancer"

nicwilson — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:14:33 +0000

It won't work for liquid tumours (i.e. blood cancers) since they "metastasise" to the whole vein/artery network.

Cancers in the brain/lungs/bone, unlikely, since the speed of sound is very different between bone/air and flesh. Though I could be wrong.

But for any solid tumour, it should work well.

New comment by nicwilson in "Histotripsy – a technique that harnesses soundwaves to attack cancer"

nicwilson — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:07:18 +0000

> Cons - Sound waves can only penetrate a few centimeters into the body.

For an Air -> flesh medium interface. I'd be very surprised if they didn't couple this to gel to have gel -> flesh interface for what is done with ultrasonography (e.g. imaging for pregnancy) and the article mentions that they do ultrasonography prior to make sure they know where to aim the energy so that would make sense.

New comment by nicwilson in "CatalaLang/catala: Programming language for law specification"

nicwilson — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 23:34:13 +0000

You don't need those voting for the bill to act in good faith if you have as part of the system of passing bills that the opposition gets to write the (adversarial part of the) test suite. Then either that forces any loopholes (or other undesirable effects) to be: updated as explicitly intended (with bad publicity and potential for reversion upon a change of government); or taken into account and the bill updated to reflect that, or left in the test case for case law to cite as intended.

Either way you really want intent to be encoded somehow.