Hacker News: nritchie

New comment by nritchie in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

nritchie — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:14:00 +0000

I have no idea what you are babbling about. Sure, the evolution of the climate is recorded in the geological record. Climate scientists largely understand why these geological timescale events happened. What we are now undergoing is orders-of-magnitude faster than any geologically recorded event. Except for catastrophic events like meteorite impacts and mega-vulcanism there has never been such a rapid change. And climate scientists understand why. Look in the mirror. It is us.

New comment by nritchie in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

nritchie — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:06:02 +0000

Right, science, while not perfect (being a human endeavor), is our best mechanism for getting closer to the truth. Sure, fraud happens (occasionally). Not all "results" are a step forward. But the system is inherently self correcting. The problem is the politicization of science funding when scientific results don't fit into a dogma driven view of the world.

New comment by nritchie in "Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints"

nritchie — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 10:43:50 +0000

Science funding in the US is in crisis. We need to stand with those bold enough to point out that the emperor has no clothing.

New comment by nritchie in "The desperation of NYTimes"

nritchie — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:35:31 +0000

The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?

New comment by nritchie in "Nobody cracks open a programming book anymore"

nritchie — Tue, 26 May 2026 00:05:37 +0000

Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points. I could have developed a half-baked notion of how the borrow-checker worked by fooling around and reading blurbs on Stack Exchange. But Rust for Rustaceans made clear the more subtle points that might have taken years of tinkering to understand. Thank goodness people still write excellent books on computer programming.

New comment by nritchie in "We've made the world too complicated"

nritchie — Sat, 16 May 2026 22:47:22 +0000

There is necessary complexity and un-necessary complexity. Often the modern world seems to be layering on un-necessary complexity and frequently this is not to the individual's benefit. Consider for one, picking health insurance. It should be easy to line up 5 or 6 plans, compare them on coverage and price. However, it is against the insurance companies interest to compete directly. Much better to make it so complex that the average consumer can't compare realistically products. (Doubly so since we don't know what is covered until the doctor asks.) The government could make it easier on consumers by clearly defining coverage levels and allowing companies to compete on price.

New comment by nritchie in "Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data"

nritchie — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:43:44 +0000

This is why it is good lab procedure to always "run a blank." A blank is simply a sample that is constructed exactly like a real sample but without the thing you are studying. This way you quickly learn about contamination from tools/gloves/environment etc.

New comment by nritchie in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

nritchie — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:48:34 +0000

Both things can be true. A better O-ring with the same joint might have prevented the disaster. A better designed joint with the same O-ring might also. Feynman knew that a little theater would go a long way. The O-ring explanation, albeit a partial explanation, made for good theater.

New comment by nritchie in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

nritchie — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:44:37 +0000

Maybe not so much "oblivious to safety" as "oblivious to probable risk." We worry to much about low risk events (like airline flights) and don't worry enough about higher risk events (like trips-and-falls, driving a car, poor diet...)

New comment by nritchie in "Image manipulation with convolution using Julia"

nritchie — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:19:34 +0000

I really enjoy how Julia handles images. The abstractions really streamline developing image processing algorithm that are independent of pixel representation. Like so much of Julia, the first time I saw it, my mind was warped. Julia is worth learning if just for all the clever design choices.

New comment by nritchie in "Data has weight but only on SSDs"

nritchie — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:48:17 +0000

An encrypyted drive is likely to have (close to) equal numbers of 0's and 1's full or empty so any of these arguments are moot.

New comment by nritchie in "LFortran compiles fpm"

nritchie — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:11:11 +0000

A fast-to-compile but slow-to-run LLVM alternative would make Julia much more useable day-to-day too.

New comment by nritchie in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

nritchie — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:37:20 +0000

And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.

New comment by nritchie in "IRS lost 40% of IT staff, 80% of tech leaders in 'efficiency' shakeup"

nritchie — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:29:54 +0000

This is just the lazy comment of someone who believes all the right-wing propaganda about government. In my experience, government employees take pride in doing a job worth doing and doing it well.

New comment by nritchie in "The New Collabora Office for Desktop"

nritchie — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 15:53:45 +0000

I don't care about dated looks. I do find MS Office's pressure to use OneDrive frustrating and annoying. Honestly, older UIs for office suite products just feel more direct and responsive than the clever ribbon bars. Excel used to be svelte (25 years ago or more...) Now it feels bloated and clumsy. LibreOffice Calc (same parentage as Collabora Office) feels more like Excel used to feel. Similar complaints about Word.

New comment by nritchie in "The guide to real-world EV battery health"

nritchie — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 14:12:36 +0000

Hopefully, in coming years, we will see more practically designed EVs that are more affordable. A practical car doesn't need neck-snapping acceleration, every bell-and-whistle and room for a family of six with a dog. I'd like to believe that as batteries cost drop, the incentive to justify the extra cost will drop. Then we can get back to "just basic transportation" rather than a luxury product for the rich. While $31k isn't exactly cheap, the base new Leaf is heading the right direction.

New comment by nritchie in "My first paper: A practical implementation of Rubiks cube based passkeys"

nritchie — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 01:25:15 +0000

This is a great example of the "I wonder if I could"-kind of research. It doesn't have to be practical. I doubt the authors intend it as a viable security product. It is the kind of "just playing around" thinking that can sometimes lead to brilliant insights. Keep up the good work.

New comment by nritchie in "Weighting an average to minimize variance"

nritchie — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 20:19:31 +0000

A handful of the comments are skeptical of the utility of this method. I can tell you as a physical scientist, it is common to make the same measurement with a number of measuring devices of differing precision. (e.g. developing a consensus standard using a round-robin.) The technique Cook suggests can be a reasonable way to combine the results to produce the optimal measured value.

New comment by nritchie in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2025"

nritchie — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:27:15 +0000

It is worth noting that the research that Martinis is being awarded the Nobel prize was largely performed while at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), part of the Dept of Commerce.

New comment by nritchie in "Asked to do something illegal at work? Here's what these software engineers did"

nritchie — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 11:57:15 +0000

I was just double billed by the third-party that Enterprise Rentals uses to handle tolls. Fraud? Incompetence? Is there a difference?