Hacker News: peter303

New comment by peter303 in "Google I/O"

peter303 — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:16:26 +0000

Relatively few industry keynotes have Nobel Prize Winner presenter. Hassabis was promoting the Gemini Scientists Assistant.

New comment by peter303 in "Google I/O"

peter303 — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:13:55 +0000

Same issue in Firefox.

New comment by peter303 in "A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)"

peter303 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 22:39:13 +0000

The precession circle is 144 arc degrees sin 23.5. In an 80 year lifespan precession would move the rotation pole about .44 arc degrees or the diameter of the full moon. Any long lived astronomical observatory in ancient times would have noticed this.

New comment by peter303 in "Forth: The programming language that writes itself"

peter303 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 10:04:25 +0000

RPN interpreters require very little core memory. So they were popular with computers where core memory was under ten kilobytes.

But its horrible for software engineering with multiple programmers and large codebases. Lacks structures, interfaces, modules, data abstraction that you expect in a modern language. We called it the "Chinese food" of coding- ten minutes later you had nomidea what you just coded.

New comment by peter303 in "Bill Atkinson has died"

peter303 — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 23:10:03 +0000

Frame buffer memory was still incredibly expensive in 1980. Our labs 512 x 512 x 8bit table lookup color buffer cost $30,000 in 1980. Mac's 512 x 384 x 8bit buffer in 1984 had to fit the Macs $2500 price. The Xerox Alto was earlier than these two devices and would have cost even more if it had a full frame buffer.

New comment by peter303 in "AI made these movies sharper – critics say it ruined them"

peter303 — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 22:12:55 +0000

Reminds of "fugi film": the standard development make the colors brighter than reallife. The customers liked that better, even if less accurate.

New comment by peter303 in "Did English ever have a formal version of "you"? (2011)"

peter303 — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 22:12:17 +0000

Of course. You was formal while thou was informal.

New comment by peter303 in "Nvidia announces financial results for second quarter fiscal 2024"

peter303 — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 00:30:37 +0000

The larger language models now employ a trillion parameters. This is faster when memory and computing is tighter, not distributed. Cerebus's million core super-wafer addresses this.

New comment by peter303 in "IRS launches paperless processing initiative"

peter303 — Wed, 02 Aug 2023 22:21:05 +0000

My state has flat tax rate of federal taxable income (after deductions). Most years its free online filing and typing 5 or 6 numbers. Takes five minutes. The tax softwares dont like that because they get half their income from state filings.

I dislike that I dont get the long term capital gains discount like on federal.

New comment by peter303 in "Fossil shows mammal sinking teeth into dinosaur"

peter303 — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 22:44:51 +0000

I eat chicken regularly.

New comment by peter303 in "Time to bring back asylums?"

peter303 — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:46:41 +0000

Congress

New comment by peter303 in "A brief history of computers"

peter303 — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:44:58 +0000

Steam power was more of toy for the Romans. Some made dioramas with statues of the gods moved by steam.

New comment by peter303 in "A brief history of computers"

peter303 — Sat, 22 Jul 2023 23:42:40 +0000

Aristotle described propositional logic.

New comment by peter303 in "AI Is a Lot of Work"

peter303 — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 03:20:27 +0000

I liked the guy using an AI to train another AI. He is just maximizing his income.

New comment by peter303 in "Gravitational-wave detector LIGO is back"

peter303 — Sun, 28 May 2023 00:30:45 +0000

The new run has six candidate GW events the first week. Three are high confidence.

New comment by peter303 in "Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Scalable Model Architecture"

peter303 — Wed, 24 May 2023 17:58:55 +0000

Astrophysicists use a similar algorithm to build giant particle evolution models of galaxies and cosmology. It would be computationally prohibitive to compute the gravitational or electromagnetic force for every combinatorial pair of particles. So the mass/force are averaged in a hierarchical set of subcube centroids.

New comment by peter303 in "The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992)"

peter303 — Fri, 12 May 2023 23:58:38 +0000

More recently it would be self-professed gays. A frat might feel the gay might come on to them, or brand the entire frat as gay. The other similarity is there is at least one predominantly gay frat.

These days there is so much gay publicity, that many young people would no longer think this is an issue, as it no is with Black and Jewish members.

New comment by peter303 in "Gilbert Strang's final lecture at MIT: May 15, 11:00am"

peter303 — Fri, 12 May 2023 23:37:05 +0000

I took a course from him 49 years ago.

New comment by peter303 in "How AI knows things no one told it"

peter303 — Fri, 12 May 2023 23:22:52 +0000

The physical human brain has 86 billion neurons with up to 10,000 connections each. However they are somewhat structured (e.g. the seven layers of the cerebral cortex segregated into vertical silos a few hundred cells wide) reducing the arbitrariness of connections. So say the connectome has 100 trillion parameters.

The brain also has a bunch of other cells that dont appear to encode information. They may supply structural scaffolding and chemicals to mediate neuron function.

New comment by peter303 in "How AI knows things no one told it"

peter303 — Fri, 12 May 2023 23:12:18 +0000

The physical human brain has 86 billion neurons with up to 10,000 connections each. However they are somewhat structured, e.g. the seven layers of the cerebral cortex, reducing the arbitrariness of connections. So say the connectome has 100 trillion parameters.

The bain also has a bunch of other cells that dont appear to encode information. They may supply structural scaffolding and chemicals to mediate neuron function.