Hacker News: rcthompson

New comment by rcthompson in "Are hard drives getting better?"

rcthompson — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 16:09:13 +0000

Hmm, I hadn't considered that doubling the drive size doubles the resilver time and therefore doubles the exposure time for risk of array loss. I guess the math gets complicated depending on RAID topology.

New comment by rcthompson in "Are hard drives getting better?"

rcthompson — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:16:14 +0000

Of note, assuming that decommissioning of drives is driven primarily by e.g. space concerns rather than signs of impending individual drive failures (which seems to be the case based on the linked article about storage scaling), you could conduct a survival analysis in which decommissioned drives are treated as right-censored to get a better measure of the failure rate over time as well as how that failure rate depends on various factors. Note that the most common choice of a proportional hazards model may not be appropriate here, and an accelerated failure time model may be more appropriate, although I couldn't say for sure without actually working with the data.

New comment by rcthompson in "Are hard drives getting better?"

rcthompson — Thu, 16 Oct 2025 14:06:41 +0000

If hard drives increase in capacity while maintaining the same MTBF, does this count as an improvement? If you previously stored your data on 10 drives and now you can store the same data on 5 drives, that reduces the probability of failure of the system as a whole, right? Is there some kind of "failure rate per byte" measure that normalizes for this?

New comment by rcthompson in "M8.7 earthquake in Western Pacific, tsunami warning issued"

rcthompson — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 03:23:55 +0000

I thought that it was a log10 scale, so each increment of 1 on the scale is a 10-fold power increase, not a 10^1.5-fold.

New comment by rcthompson in "Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists"

rcthompson — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 04:09:55 +0000

In a similar vein, some of my colleagues have been feeding their scientific paper methods sections to LLMs and asking them to implement the method in code, using the LLM's degree of success/failure as a vague indicator of the clarity of the method description.

New comment by rcthompson in "The unreasonable effectiveness of fuzzing for porting programs"

rcthompson — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 19:00:32 +0000

The author notes that the resulting Rust port is not very "rusty", but I wonder if this could also be solved through further application of the same principle. Something like telling the AI to minimize the use of unsafe etc., while enforcing that the result should compile and produce identical outputs to the original.

New comment by rcthompson in "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"

rcthompson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 19:25:30 +0000

DNA methylation means adding one or more methyl groups to the DNA, so technically it is an alteration. But most people would assume that altering a gene specifically means changing the "letters" of the gene sequence that encode the protein, and that's not what DNA methylation does.

New comment by rcthompson in "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"

rcthompson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:07:44 +0000

I can't speak for every institution, but our PR department does as many back and forth passes as it takes for the scientists who did the work to sign off that any edits made still preserve scientific accuracy.

New comment by rcthompson in "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"

rcthompson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:05:29 +0000

Describing a change to DNA methylation "alters" a gene is technically correct in the sense that it is an change to the molecular structure of the DNA that makes up the gene, but is indeed misleading, because without further clarification a majority of people would assume it refers to a change in the gene sequence.

New comment by rcthompson in "Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover"

rcthompson — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:02:03 +0000

Imagine you have the text of a book in a word processor. You can change the text by typing new words or deleting ones that are there. You can also change the font, size, alignment, etc. The latter category of changes does not alter the words in the text, but it can affect how that text is interpreted, which parts of the text a reader focuses on, etc. The difference between a genetic alteration and an epigenetic alteration is conceptually similar. Genetics is changing the "text" of the genome while epigenetics is changing aspects of the genome that affect how that "text" is interpreted and used.

New comment by rcthompson in "Can I ethically use LLMs?"

rcthompson — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 20:22:13 +0000

I think they're also confusing power and energy, or at least not clearly distinguishing between them, with phrases like "enough to power X houses".

New comment by rcthompson in "Hard disk fraud: long runtimes on new Seagate hard disks"

rcthompson — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:26:22 +0000

Are they breaking the law? I don't love that they're requiring either payment or allowing cookies, but at least they're fully disclosing that and giving you the choice. I'm pretty sure that's what the GDPR requires.

New comment by rcthompson in "AMD: Microcode Signature Verification Vulnerability"

rcthompson — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 20:42:57 +0000

Did you roll your own die or just trust that Randall's original die roll was sufficiently random?

New comment by rcthompson in "The legacy of lies in Alzheimer's science"

rcthompson — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 11:38:53 +0000

There actually are checklists you have to fill out when publishing a paper. You have to certify that you provided all relevant statistics, have not doctored any of your images, have provided all relevant code and data presented in the paper, etc. For every paper I have ever published, every last item on these checklists was enforced rigorously by the journal. Despite this, I routinely see papers from "high-profile" researchers that obviously violate these checklists (e.g.: no data released, a not even a statement explaining why data was withheld), so it seems that they are not universally enforced. (And this includes papers published in the same journals around the same time, so they definitely had to fill out the same checklist as I did.)

New comment by rcthompson in "Tcl's bet on screens that look like paper"

rcthompson — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:05:53 +0000

Does anyone know where I can see one of these screens in person? I'm interested in potentially owning one for reading comics, graphic novels, etc., but I'd really like to see what it looks like in person before spending money on one.

New comment by rcthompson in "TCL's bet on screens that look like paper"

rcthompson — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 15:03:47 +0000

It has an alternate low-power mode that only provides a few basic functions (presumably phone, text, maybe a basic web browser?). When running in "regular" Android mode it won't reach those numbers (although I believe it still claims to do better than most phones in that mode).

New comment by rcthompson in "Brood War Korean Translations"

rcthompson — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 20:57:51 +0000

I believe the equivalent term used in English (exhibited in the new translation) is "natural", short for "natural expansion", which refers to the obvious location where the player should build their first expansion. It sounds like the term used in Korean for this concept literally means "front yard" rather than matching the English term.

Our first new Framework Laptop 16 Expansion Bay module

rcthompson — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 11:44:23 +0000

Article URL: https://frame.work/blog/our-first-new-framework-laptop-16-expansion-bay-module

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42460536

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by rcthompson in "Microsoft is first to get HBM-juiced AMD CPUs"

rcthompson — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 20:11:48 +0000

Presumably it's directed at anyone writing an article for public consumption.

New comment by rcthompson in "Hacking Kia: Remotely controlling cars with just a license plate"

rcthompson — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 04:04:04 +0000

> car thefts

To be specific, I don't think the cities are suing over the car thefts. If I understand correctly, they're suing because the availability of easily hacked Kia cars enabled a wave of other crimes, because the criminals knew they had easy access to a getaway vehicle that couldn't be traced back to them.