Hacker News: retzkek

New comment by retzkek in "ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation"

retzkek — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 14:59:23 +0000

And then, what? Are citizens beating down the doors to do these jobs but getting out-competed by migrants? Are these the same citizens who are lining up to do sweatshop labor when manufacturing “returns” to the US?

If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.

Ask HN: What new tools are there for facilitating virtual conferences?

retzkek — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 18:02:55 +0000

Five years ago we were all forced to take in-person events online, where technology was not quite up to the task. We are facing another situation now where international travel is not safe for many people.

What new tools are there for facilitating virtual-only conferences and meetings? Has anyone solved/made progress on the "hallway conversation" problem? Any exciting startups in this space?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43426694

Points: 9

# Comments: 1

New comment by retzkek in "GSA Eliminates 18F"

retzkek — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 19:38:02 +0000

Update: the former 18F folks have stood up a new site: https://18f.org/guides/

New comment by retzkek in "GSA Eliminates 18F"

retzkek — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 06:09:04 +0000

Their web dev guides - especially for a11y - are high quality, and were taken offline this morning. I stood up a copy (slightly modified) at https://guides.18f.kmr.me/

Hopefully the GitHub repos stick around; I forked and cloned a few and suggest folks browse through them and grab anything that looks interesting in case they disappear.

New comment by retzkek in "GSA Eliminates 18F"

retzkek — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 20:54:33 +0000

There are many conspiracy theories related to his trip to Moscow in 1987, which I don’t ascribe much to, but the connections are there, if only for some “assistance” to be rendered quid pro quo.

I’m a firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor, and like you ascribe most of his and his followers’ actions to stupidity, but there’s clearly also some maliciousness.

New comment by retzkek in "GSA Eliminates 18F"

retzkek — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 20:27:39 +0000

There’s at least one, although as a governor he may not count.

> From the Department of Education, Medicaid, the CDC, and more - Trump and Elon Musk are gutting the agencies and programs that protect Americans every single day.

https://bsky.app/profile/jbpritzker.bsky.social/post/3lisgh4...

President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology

retzkek — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 02:37:44 +0000

Article URL: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/presidents-council-of-advisors-on-science-and-technology/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810026

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by retzkek in "Fidget"

retzkek — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 17:52:39 +0000

Years ago in college I did a bit of work on a nuclear physics simulator (think: reactor modeling) that based its geometrical model on implicit surfaces, specifically R-functions (of which min(x,y) is an example), which have some neat properties such as being differentiable everywhere. This is a good introduction (and probably the only one in English): https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/35ae0f68-1af5-4f28-8b8b-7...

I've been away from the nuclear field for a while, but I imagine it's still using a lot of legacy Fortran codes to do modeling. Fidget has some interesting possibilities as a kernel for a new simulation package.

New comment by retzkek in "Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS"

retzkek — Tue, 17 Dec 2024 03:55:04 +0000

I struggled with APL last year. This year I’ve been enjoying trying to solve the problems in uiua (“wee-wha”). It’s a symbol-based array language like APL, with a wonderful online editor and code formatter (also command line), that formats on each run, and lets you type in English keywords that it converts into symbols, so you don’t have to hunt and peck through the virtual keyboard or remember a bunch of arbitrary chords.

There’s a decent VSCode plugin but I mostly use the online pad because it’s such a rich environment. Very active Discord, with an AoC channel for help and sharing solutions - the maintainer actively iterates on the language to help them solve AoC problems.

https://www.uiua.org/

(I also fall back to Clojure when I’m struggling to come up with a uiua solution or banging my head against the stack, I kinda wish I had uiua-in-Clojure like how April is APL-in-CL)

New comment by retzkek in "OpenAI o1 system card"

retzkek — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 21:49:47 +0000

> Not on topic, but from the other side of the Atlantic, how on earth did the US go from "her emails/lock her up" being a rallying cry to electing the guy who stacked piles of classified documents in his bathroom?

The same way football (any kind) fans boo every call against their team and cheer every call that goes in their teams' favor. American politics has been almost completely turned into a sport.

New comment by retzkek in "Chinese pebble-bed nuclear reactor passes "meltdown" test"

retzkek — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 02:29:25 +0000

There is a similar unit used for tracking nuclear fuel “burnup,” which is how much energy it produced: GWd/t (or GWd/MTU).

New comment by retzkek in "Thinking about recipe formats more than anyone should"

retzkek — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 19:12:34 +0000

mise in place is the art of reducing all that other stuff to as close as zero time as possible during the cooking, and many recipes expect the cook to read through first and identify what can be prepared/placed in advance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_place

New comment by retzkek in "Math and puzzle fans find magic in Martin Gardner's legacy"

retzkek — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 01:57:15 +0000

Toothpaste tube! https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c5/El...

New comment by retzkek in "Where the Digital Sidewalk Ends"

retzkek — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 20:05:53 +0000

I refer to Strava and RideWithGPS heatmaps whenever planning a new cycling or running route, and they are very useful, but they still need vetting (satellite and street view mostly) since 1) people have different tolerances for safe/comfortable interactions with traffic, and 2) road race data is often mixed in (despite users being able to tag races), which frequently are on (closed) roads you wouldn’t want to be on otherwise.

New comment by retzkek in "NBC News Lite Version"

retzkek — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 21:22:13 +0000

This is a nice trend, here's a couple other text-only mainstream news sites:

https://lite.cnn.com/

https://text.npr.org/

New comment by retzkek in "The Architecture of London Pubs (1966)"

retzkek — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 03:36:18 +0000

A random blog I found through Kagi Small Web is one man's journey to visit all the pubs in the Good Beer Guide: https://simeyeveritt.wixsite.com/brapa

It's such an interesting look into these slices of life, both current and former, that are so unlike my own experiences.

New comment by retzkek in "Sndkit – a toolkit for computer music composition"

retzkek — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 22:18:22 +0000

> Brackets and s-expressions can be fun, but they can get very unwieldy very quickly in LIL, especially since backslashes are required to break up commands across different lines.

> The previous vibrato example

    sine [add [param 440] [sine 6 50]] 0.5

> can be rewritten without brackets using a special function called 'zz':

    sine 6 50
    add zz 440
    sine zz 0.5

> zz itself doesn't do anything. It is a placeholder that tells the function to use the argument that has been implicitely generated.

This is an interesting approach to making stacked operations more readable, similar to the "thread-as" macro in Clojure [1], which would make the example look like:

    (as-> (sine 6 50) zz
          (add zz 440)
          (sine zz 0.5))

Of course, with this example in Clojure one could use "thread-first":

    (-> (sine 6 50)
        (add 440)
        (sine 0.5))

[1]: https://clojure.org/guides/threading_macros

Incidentally, for making music with Clojure there's Overtone: https://github.com/overtone/overtone

New comment by retzkek in "Boeing workers vote to strike"

retzkek — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:48:53 +0000

I didn't sense any judgement there, just a statement of fact. Learning a new language as an adult is doable, but not trivial, so it's certainly a factor in making a decision to relocate to another country for a job.

New comment by retzkek in "The Minneapolis Street Grid: Explained"

retzkek — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:59:44 +0000

> Not sure about west. :)

Unincorporated addresses in Kane and DuPage Counties do use a reference system based off State & Madison as baseline (although it's been codified based off county and township lines). Eg. 40W100 Keslinger Rd is a bit over 40 miles west of State St.

New comment by retzkek in "Oracle will use three nuclear reactors to power 1-gigawatt AI data center"

retzkek — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 03:23:55 +0000

Amusingly that’s not a nuclear plant pictured; looks like coal. I don’t think we’re going to see a general nuclear renaissance in the US, but it has its part to play. Co-locating with a massive data center can make a lot of sense.