Hacker News: rekenaut

New comment by rekenaut in "Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers"

rekenaut — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 05:42:19 +0000

Especially if with the radiators you can just roll out as rolls of aluminum foil, which is very light and very cheap.

New comment by rekenaut in "Jeff Bezos creates A.I. startup where he will be co-chief executive"

rekenaut — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 06:39:51 +0000

I don’t think this has been true for the vast majority of NASA’s existence. [This 1966 NYT article about Gemini](https://www.nytimes.com/1966/03/20/archives/gemini-8-mishap-...), [this 1986 article about Challenger](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/22/us/nasa-had-solution-to-k...), and [this 2010 article about Constellation](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/science/space/27nasa.html) all omit periods. Even if NYT did stylize it as “N.A.S.A.” in its earliest articles, this would not diverge from common agency practice early on. For instance, in [this official reel about the dedication of Marshall Space Flight Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fasslw4MvE), it is pronounced spelled-out as four letters.

New comment by rekenaut in "Common yeast can survive Martian conditions"

rekenaut — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 03:40:35 +0000

Potentially a much greater filter is going from unicellular to multicellular life, no? If it likely took billions of years to get from unicellular to multicellular life on Earth, and only (hundreds of) millions of years to get to life that can conduct spaceflight, then perhaps microbes wouldn’t be the best way to attack this problem (I’m assuming you’re talking primarily about unicellular microbes, of course).

New comment by rekenaut in "Top Programming Languages 2025"

rekenaut — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 05:55:14 +0000

Dozens of us use Julia. Dozens!!

New comment by rekenaut in "Top Programming Languages 2025"

rekenaut — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 05:52:21 +0000

Where does this idea that a programming language has to be Turing complete come from? As far as I can tell from cursory searches, the most broadly understood understanding of a programming language is a formal language for directing computations on a computer. HTML does this, CSS does this, and SQL does this. Frankly even configuration languages like YAML or the spare INI file do this in the proper context.

Can these languages do everything or even most computations you would be interested in doing in a computer? Of course not. But why should the definition be restricted to languages that can do everything?

New comment by rekenaut in "Man declares country in unclaimed pocket of land between Serbia and Croatia"

rekenaut — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 07:45:12 +0000

If nobody else is claiming the land, you don’t even need one!

New comment by rekenaut in "AI adoption linked to 13% decline in jobs for young U.S. workers: study"

rekenaut — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:07:14 +0000

Traditionally, interns exist as a well-vetted and well-shaped supply of labor (which is very difficult to find through the traditional hiring process). The work they complete is secondary. Are companies going to stop needing good employees? Is nobody going to need to work in 40 years when all the current employees are phased out?

New comment by rekenaut in "Sunny days are warm: why LinkedIn rewards mediocrity"

rekenaut — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 23:26:48 +0000

> Or a quote from Kurt Vonnegut's player piano, "Nobody's so damn well educated that you can't learn ninety per cent of what he knows in six weeks. The other ten per cent is decoration... Almost nobody's competent, Paul. It's enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind."

This advice surprises me. With one foot in the classical music world when I was younger, there are absolutely music skills that take many years if not decades to get to 90% on. And those that have put the work in are absolutely and obviously competent.

Similarly, when I'm working with someone who started off as a machinist, then a designer, then went to school and became an engineer, I find it baffling to think that I can absorb 90% of their knowledge in 6 weeks.

New comment by rekenaut in "How ChatGPT spoiled my semester (2024)"

rekenaut — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:43:04 +0000

The difference is much greater than this. It’s $20/month for a machine that can provide instant answers to any prompt in any topic hundreds of times a month vs $200/assignment that may take days to received and you have to edit yourself if you want a change made.

I think it’s quite clear that most students who are using AI now to generate assignments would not have bought.

New comment by rekenaut in "How ChatGPT spoiled my semester (2024)"

rekenaut — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:36:30 +0000

Is it possible that the methods of cheating in the past were a lot more ineffective, risky, or expensive? If a tool like ChatGPT makes cheating a lot easier and less risky, of course more students will use it.

New comment by rekenaut in "Many countries that said no to ChatControl in 2024 are now undecided"

rekenaut — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 05:47:10 +0000

Because whether the government gets it or this collective organization gets it, you’re still out a $1. Besides, very few people will actually care enough about $1 to partake in literally any amount of effort to regain it.

New comment by rekenaut in "US companies, consumers are paying for tariffs, not foreign firms"

rekenaut — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:03:17 +0000

This isn’t remotely true, the United States is the second largest manufacturing nation by value [1]. And manufacturing is still the dominant industry in many regions of the US. We might not be great at making consumer goods, but consumer goods is only a small subset of all manufacturing.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing

New comment by rekenaut in "macOS Icon History"

rekenaut — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 20:25:17 +0000

Perhaps it’s just nostalgia on my part, but I really don’t understand imposing the constraint of making every Mac app look like the rounded iPhone app buttons. To me, it makes it harder at a glance to distinguish one app from another compared to the older designs.

New comment by rekenaut in "Electronic Arts Leadership Are Out of Their Goddamned Minds"

rekenaut — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 04:20:05 +0000

Is it feasible to get 100 million people to play this game even if it was free? I have to imagine that once you get to $400 million, every additional dollar has effectively no value add. When is it not better to just target a smaller user base and spend way less money? I’m unfamiliar with the ins an outs of this industry, so I am genuinely unsure.

New comment by rekenaut in "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings"

rekenaut — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 04:59:45 +0000

Trust me, the 80% meeting workday became prevalent loooooong before the 2020s.

New comment by rekenaut in "Touching the back wall of the Apple store"

rekenaut — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 03:45:00 +0000

In my pocket, I have a wallet, timer, alarm clock, calculator, telephone, atlas, directory, camera, stock broker, flashlight, tape measure, television, music collection, encyclopedia, transit time table, library, notepad, and translator. How are these utilities an illusion?

New comment by rekenaut in "Touching the back wall of the Apple store"

rekenaut — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 03:40:12 +0000

Outside of urban centers, the only other device that is similarly valuable is a car, but the average American new car purchase costs 65 times the average American new phone purchase. While there is obviously a lot of nuance here, this makes phones feel downright cheap (or conversely, cars downright expensive) compared to imparted value.

New comment by rekenaut in "Learn touch typing – it's worth it"

rekenaut — Sat, 31 May 2025 07:44:55 +0000

They’re not important to (most) young people today for the same reasons health insurance plans aren’t important to young people today: they just haven’t reached the professional world yet. Once they get there, computers suddenly become very important.

Many people who are not tech enthusiasts will be interacting with a computer for at least 40 hours a week or more for nearly half of their lives. If you used any other tool that much, you’d want to get really good at using it. Why shouldn’t the same hold for computers today?

New comment by rekenaut in "The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine"

rekenaut — Fri, 30 May 2025 22:48:09 +0000

I feel that saying "120k is basically minimum wage for major metros" is absurd. As of 2022, there are only three metro areas in the US that have a per capita income greater than $120,000 [1] (Bay Area and Southwest Connecticut). Anywhere else in the US, 120k is doing pretty well for yourself, compared to the rest of the population. The average American working full time earns $60k [2]. I'm sure it's not a comfortable wage in some places, but "basically minimum wage" just seems ignorant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_metropol...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

New comment by rekenaut in "Show HN: Public transportation departure board"

rekenaut — Fri, 30 May 2025 17:51:16 +0000

This is very cool! I love the idea of having a device dedicated to local transit as opposed to having another thing pulling me to my phone. I wish there was something similar for American cities.