Hacker News: power

New comment by power in "The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A"

power — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:51:37 +0000

Wrote my first programs for this too, at 7. Copied from the manual with no understanding but eventually writing my own. The only coder in the house! Didn't write anything decent until the C64 when I made a few small games.

Great memories of Parsec too.

New comment by power in "Long Fatigue: The exhaustion that lingers after an infection"

power — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 10:05:16 +0000

Sadly I'm in the same boat, for years now. Fatigue is such an inadequate term. Can't even sit up for long without getting exhausted. Still trying treatments but to no avail so far. The impact of Long Covid seems to be drawing a lot of eyeballs to this though so I'm hopeful something will be found.

It's taught me patience and empathy. I used to teach others how to program and when people couldn't get something I presumed they weren't trying hard enough. I get it now. Now I read the requirements or exercise or puzzle or whatever and there's just nothing where once there was a bubbling and filtering of ideas or whatever we call thinking.

There was a recent survey paper in Nature covering this syndrome that can triggered by various infections https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01810-6

Be well, and get your own Illness Benefit Insurance policy

New comment by power in "You have a right to know why a health insurer denied your claim"

power — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 19:09:14 +0000

A lesson learned from hard experience and unfortunately too late: get your own illness benefit insurance. If you have it through your employer you can't sue the insurance company since you're not a party to the contract. They don't even need to talk to you, only your employer.

New comment by power in "CEOs’ pay climbed before layoffs at tech giants like Alphabet and Microsoft"

power — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 23:03:50 +0000

I love that song and found out recently it was actually written by Peter Hames.

New comment by power in "Mathematics in Movies"

power — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 10:09:03 +0000

You may enjoy https://behind-the-screens.tv/

New comment by power in "US has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been located"

power — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 18:35:12 +0000

You're right. Tom Clancy used it in The Sum of All Fears

New comment by power in "Adventures of a Mathematician brings an unsung scientist back into the light"

power — Wed, 13 Oct 2021 11:16:40 +0000

The book is well worth a read too. There are some great bits with John Von Neumann.

On a similar note, Adventures of a Physicist by Luis Alvarez is also a great read. Among many other things, he and his son proposed the theory that the dinosaurs' extinction was caused by a meteor.

A visual introduction to Gaussian Belief Propagation

power — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 12:34:54 +0000

Article URL: https://gaussianbp.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28367177

Points: 186

# Comments: 13

The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

power — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 11:46:55 +0000

Article URL: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-idea-that-a-scientific-theory-can-be-falsified-is-a-myth/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24491661

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by power in "The Kush civilization flourished in Sudan nearly 5K years ago"

power — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 16:48:06 +0000

There's a nice webcomic called Drawing History that gives a gentle overview of many ancient civilisations, including the Kush https://m.tapas.io/series/Drawing-History/info

New comment by power in "Zoom corrects usage numbers: says it has 300M daily meeting participants"

power — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:07:37 +0000

Zoom traffic is encrypted, just not end-to-end. So your ISP and flatmates can't sniff it but people with access to Zoom servers could

New comment by power in "Lyme disease bacteria eradicated by new drug in early tests"

power — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 12:39:34 +0000

I'm interested in your opinion of the citations too. They purport to show persistence beyond standard treatment in mice, dogs, macaques and humans, the latter via xenodiagnosis and PCR. PCR is pretty direct.

New comment by power in "Cliff Stoll, the mad scientist who invented the art of hunting hackers"

power — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 12:24:31 +0000

I got one shipped to Ireland and it arrived in one beautiful piece. Cliff also sent on a email documenting the process and I replied with an unboxing photo. It was worth ordering just for the lovely interaction.

New comment by power in "Maybe It’s Lyme"

power — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 10:08:01 +0000

30000 Lyme cases a year are reported by health services to the CDC so eventually some celebs are going to catch it, and since they make good news you'll hear about it. On "chronic Lyme", it's been rebranded as post treatment Lyme disorder (PTLDS), it's acknowledged by the CDC [0] and they also acknowledge that some experts hypothesize it may be the result of persistent infection, others an autoimmune disorder. One John Hopkins study [1] found the typical symptoms of PTLDS do persist for some after treatment for Lyme and another[2] found a set of symptoms allowing them to reliabily identify PTLDS. Any disease that lasts a long time and doesn't have a set treatment is going to attract quackery and plenty people will fall for it, but that doesn't mean there's no disorder there. The fact the symptoms can come and go makes it that much easier to associate their most recent treatment with a cure. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/postlds/index.html [1] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/... [2] Mentioned here https://www.hopkinslyme.org/lyme-disease/treatment-and-progn...

New comment by power in "Fighting persistent Lyme disease symptoms"

power — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 07:18:18 +0000

> But the concept of a "chronic" bacterial lyme infection has little to no medical bearing.

From your first link: "In 2017, scientists at the Tulane National Primate Research Centers, funded in part by an NIH research resources grant, reported evidence of persistent and metabolically active B. burgdorferi after antibiotic treatment in rhesus macaques"

From your second link, to the CDC: "Other experts hypothesize that PTLDS results from a persistent but difficult to detect infection".

New comment by power in "Ask HN: Recommendations of good cybercrime novels?"

power — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 13:51:02 +0000

The last being one of the founders of ycombinator

New comment by power in "William James and the philosophy of pragmatism"

power — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 11:56:27 +0000

I found it well worth reading, and found his writing about thinking to be so clear that I felt like I could almost understood thought, for a while. You might like the abridged version, "Psychology: The Briefer Course" [1] to get a taste. This shorter is referred to as 'Jimmy' where the full version is 'James'!

[1] https://archive.org/details/psychologybriefe00willuoft

New comment by power in "The Case for Learned Index Structures"

power — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 11:05:57 +0000

Normal DB indexes are designed to be general-purpose so that they give predictable performance no matter the data you insert. The paper basically describes a more efficient way to look up data by using an index that's tailored to the specific dataset it's built over. It's expected that you'd be able to get a performance increase by doing this. In more detail, they use neural nets to learn an approximation of the distribution of the data and use that to look up the rough position of each key faster than usual. They still use traditional structures for the "last-mile" which is not so easily learned. You could accomplish the same thing without NNs by using anything that can approximate the distribution of the data. E.g. a histogram would work for some cases, and you could do some PCA and normalization first to deal with more cases. NNs have the advantage that they can learn more complex distributions.

New comment by power in "How a single PostgreSQL config change improved slow query performance by 50x"

power — Thu, 23 Nov 2017 12:15:32 +0000

Postgres has a query optimizer that uses Genetic Algorithms: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/geqo.html

Clarification: this is for planning how to execute a query, not for tuning the db settings

New comment by power in "Like modern democracies, ancient Greek democracy had an anger problem"

power — Sun, 24 Sep 2017 12:28:40 +0000

It's worthwhile to remember that Athenian democracy was direct and not representative like nowadays. Individuals voted on bills rather than electing officials to vote in their place. Plato claimed this form of government led to bills passed by popularity contest and tyranny of the majority which sounds pretty modern to me.

Still, I'd prefer democracy with all its problems to the Republic he proposed.