Hacker News: nn3

New comment by nn3 in "Sizing chaos"

nn3 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:39:26 +0000

What's also annoying is that sizes of the same clothes change. I have a pair of jeans that I ordered on Amazon in 2020. It happens to fit me great. So recently I decided to order two more of the same. I got exactly the same model with the same size on Amazon, just with different colors. But neither fit very well, they were far wider. The first one had such a horrible fit that I immediately sent it back. The other I can wear, but it's quite different from the other perfectly fitting one. Why are they doing that? It's insane.

New comment by nn3 in "We May Never Know If AI Is Conscious, Says Cambridge Philosopher"

nn3 — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 18:29:00 +0000

How do we know the Cambridge Philosopher is conscious?

New comment by nn3 in "Compiler Engineering in Practice"

nn3 — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:55:23 +0000

I don't feel his overflow miscompilation example is a good one. A 64bit multiplication converted back to 32bit has the same overflow behavior as if the computation was in 32bit (assuming nobody depends on the overflow indication, which is rare). And in high level programming languages you typically can't tell the difference.

New comment by nn3 in "Iran's president calls for new capital to replace Tehran"

nn3 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 18:25:56 +0000

St. Petersburg (at least for some time)

New comment by nn3 in "Jacqueline – A minimal i386 kernel written in Pascal (2019)"

nn3 — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 19:09:03 +0000

Thats the pascal kernel in all its glory. Its just a bare metal hello world

KernelMain(); [public name 'kernelMain']; begin consoleClearDisplay(); consoleSetAttributes(White, Black); consolePutString('Hello world'); end;

New comment by nn3 in "Study of 1M-year-old skull points to earlier origins of modern humans"

nn3 — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 02:15:11 +0000

chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans evolved intelligence too. They are smarter than most other critters in the jungle. Just all not as much as the lineage that leads to humans.

It's actually quite difficult to define human intelligence. Every time we think we find something unique by humans eventually some animal turns up that can do it too. It may be all just a question of degree and how it's used.

New comment by nn3 in "Nearly 1 in 3 Starlink satellites detected within the SKA-Low frequency band"

nn3 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:06:14 +0000

This is actually not correct for Starlink. They did a lot of work to lower their albedo based on astronomer complaints, even though there wasn't any government regulation in this area.

It might apply to some of the emerging Starlink competitors however, especially the Chinese ones and AST.

New comment by nn3 in "Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition"

nn3 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 01:09:35 +0000

If you would spin the whole structure you couldn't have multiple shells all with 1G on their surface. The required spin speed for 1G depends on the diameter. But their whole concept is built around multiple shells, which is clear from the name.

Regarding the GDP needed once you have a working "mine from the moon and send to orbit" economy it doesn't seem to be too bad. The assumption would be that a lot of technology is already developed for other projects. Launching it all from earth obviously wouldn't be possible even with vastly cheaper launch. That's why they put the build into the moon-earth L1 lagrange point to be easily reachable from the moon.

For propulsion and reactors, but there are multiple projects today working on all of this. Building a life support system for 400 years is still an unsolved problem however.

New comment by nn3 in "A recent study suggests that insects branched out from crustaceans"

nn3 — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:55:57 +0000

There are also lots of extinct examples like Ichthyosaurs, Mosasaurs, Plesiosaurs

Modern examples are saltwater crocodiles, sea turtles or sea snakes

New comment by nn3 in "Data centers contain 90% crap data"

nn3 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:40:47 +0000

I suspect for most cloud providers you deleting data is cheaper because the data is not charged by the byte. But then they like having data, maybe just to train their AI models or for bragging rights to their investors.

For the expiration dates most modern file systems have the concept of arbitrary extended attributes per file. It's quite easy to add meta data like this yourself.

New comment by nn3 in "Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Smoothing"

nn3 — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 23:51:41 +0000

Does the really need reinforcement learning? It seems like something that classical controller should be able to do.

New comment by nn3 in "Why Quantum Cryptanalysis is Bollocks [pdf]"

nn3 — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 03:16:19 +0000

Wish openssh would take that presentation to heart instead of constantly breaking everyones setups with new keys.

New comment by nn3 in "How Medical Research Cuts Would Hit Colleges and Hospitals in Every State"

nn3 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:00:01 +0000

It is hard to say what the effect will be:

If it's true that these indirect costs only contain expenses closely related to the actual research then they can just move to the actual grant with somewhat more accounting overhead. I suspect the universities are doing that accounting already for their internal purposes so it won't be that big a change.

But if it's true that a significant part of them are not related there would need to be significant changes in budgets, and whoever benefits will have a problem.

I suspect the truth is somewhere inbetween. In any case it's a good opportunity for these organizations to figure out how to become more cost effective.

New comment by nn3 in "Wild – A fast linker for Linux"

nn3 — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:12:45 +0000

>Secondly, if you think any compiler is meaningfully doing anything optimal >>("whole program analysis") on a TU scale greater than say ~50kloc (ie ~10 files) >relative to compiling individually you're dreaming.

That's wrong. gcc generates summaries of function properties and propagate those up and down the call tree, which for LTO is then build in a distributed way. It does much more than mere inlining, but even advanced analysis like points to analysis.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/IPA.html https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/IPA-passes.html

It scales to millions of lines of code because it's partioned.

New comment by nn3 in "Starlink is now cheaper than leading internet provider in some African countries"

nn3 — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:39:40 +0000

Lagos can't use starlink very much because starlink has limited capacity in any given area. The future sats might improve that a bit with more sats and more capacity per sat, and also there will be more non starlink constellations, but it's an inherent problem. If they targeted any densely populated area they would vastly over-provision the rest of the more sparsely populated world.

So in general it's good news for the rural population (if they can afford it), but it doesn't really help too much for the cities.

New comment by nn3 in "ASML dethrones Applied Materials, becomes largest fab tool maker"

nn3 — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 19:19:23 +0000

Relevant HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181

Apparently their software development processes are terrible.

New comment by nn3 in "Ghidra 11.0 Released"

nn3 — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 07:03:16 +0000

Pointer to that index? Quick google couldn't find it

New comment by nn3 in "As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit the workforce"

nn3 — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 03:39:31 +0000

If its one adult per 10 kids and they each pay 700 the child care is making 840k per kindergarden teacher. Assuming the adult makes 60k a year thats 780k of overhead. Where is it all going?

New comment by nn3 in "Rare 2,100-year-old gold coin bears name of obscure ruler from pre-Roman Britain"

nn3 — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 16:50:06 +0000

They didn't necessarily need gold. For example in bronze/iron age trading it was common to use relatively standardized small bars of other metals for payment. These were not coins, but approximately had the same function.

New comment by nn3 in "A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it"

nn3 — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 13:59:04 +0000

"And people with severe mental health or substance use issues were screened out of the initiative"

Just to keep in mind. I assume that's only some (small?) fraction of the homeless.