Hacker News: robochat

New comment by robochat in "Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran"

robochat — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:03:45 +0000

I never used FORTRAN 77 (which I'm grateful for) but I enjoyed using Fortran 95 a few times in the early 2000s. Apart from the I/O stuff which always felt clunky but I was also very inexperienced in those day (now I would just wrap it in a Python library). I did try to use it a couple of years ago for a personal DSP project but had a problem finding libraries that were up to date/modernised and so I didn't get very far. I know that there's fpm now but it was just before that happened, maybe I'll try again.

New comment by robochat in "Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world"

robochat — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 06:55:01 +0000

The world is made of two types of particle - fermions and bosons. A difference between them is that fermions can not occupy the same quantum state (the Pauli exclusion principle) while bosons can exist as superpositions. Matter is made of electrons, protons and neutrons which are fermions, while the forces are photons, gluons, W , Z and Higgs which are bosons.

In a black hole though … who knows

New comment by robochat in "Learning from context is harder than we thought"

robochat — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 08:16:54 +0000

I think they mean that the model should have sleep period where they update themselves with what they learnt that day.

New comment by robochat in "How I fell in love with Erlang"

robochat — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 21:38:21 +0000

I remember being amazed when I learnt about summing arithmetric series.

New comment by robochat in "Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its tech in mass surveillance of Palestinians"

robochat — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:01:23 +0000

They took a multiplier of 5x (4 indirect deaths for every direct death) and stated that this was conservative given studies of previous conflicts.

New comment by robochat in "I Am An AI Hater"

robochat — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:52:50 +0000

"Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories" by Qntm has some good (harrowing) stories about human uploads too.

New comment by robochat in "Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning"

robochat — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:47:11 +0000

We actually use the twitter detections to launch analyses of the seismic data in order to get confirmed results for events that aren’t reported yet [1] but there are some statistics for the twitter detections in the supplementary material of that article [2]. Basically, in 2016-2017 (wow, so long ago), we detected 893 earthquakes via twitter, with a median delay of 67s and a median separation from the published epicentre of 94km. Note that estimating earthquake epicentres is nontrivial anyway and so, for comparison, 10km accuracy would often be considered ok. So the twitter, I mean X, method isn’t optimal but it gets you down to the right region. Partly it’s because geocoding the tweets is inaccurate and partly it’s because people live clumped together in cities rather than smoothly spread over the surface of the earth.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau9824 [2] https://www.science.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.112...

New comment by robochat in "Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning"

robochat — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:45:56 +0000

There is also the Earthquake Network (EQN) app that works on very similar principals to Google’s system - phones monitor their MEMs accelerometers, when they are left charging with their screen off, and when enough neighbouring phones detect vibrations simultaneously an earthquake is detected and apps nearby are alerted. It’s been running since 2012.

[1] https://sismo.app

New comment by robochat in "Android Earthquake Alerts: A global system for early warning"

robochat — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:37:01 +0000

The USGS created a system to do exactly this about 15 years ago. I’m not sure whether they’re still running it but at the EMSC, we've been running a similar system for many years to highlight earthquakes important to the public and improve our messaging. Twitter doesn’t give access to geotags anymore but we do manage to roughly estimate an earthquake’s location by analysis of the tweets. Estimating magnitude is much more difficult. Naturally there are some false positives but it works well overall.

[1] https://www.usgs.gov/media/audio/shaking-and-tweeting-usgs-t...

New comment by robochat in "Thunderbird 115.4.0"

robochat — Tue, 24 Oct 2023 20:17:14 +0000

I have used Thunderbird for years and my work account has to handle large numbers of emails. In general it is fast for me on both Windows and Linux. I have had some issues over the years but they normally turned out to be due to corrupt mail folders.

New comment by robochat in "Am I the Unethical One?"

robochat — Fri, 26 May 2023 22:00:09 +0000

Can anyone explain the maths that he did because my calculation give different results. Isn't there only a 1 in 2588 chance of a student 'guessing' 19 'answers' out of 45 where there are 5 options for each answer? Whereas the article states that it is 1 in 100 ? (actually he writes 1:100 which is odds, so it is 1 in 101?) Don't we just use the Binomial distribution, so: Prob = 45!/(19!26!) * (1/5)*19 * (1 - 1/5)*26 It's really bugging me that I can't get the maths to work.

New comment by robochat in "Am I the Unethical One?"

robochat — Fri, 26 May 2023 13:22:41 +0000

Actually, I can't seem to get the maths to work. Isn't it just the Binomial distribution? Each question has 5 options so the probability of 'success' is 1/5 and so to get 19 questions 'specifically wrong' out of the 45 planted questions by chance is just (1/5)*19 * (1-1/5)*26 * 45!/(19!26!) = 1 in 2588 but in the article it is 1:100. What am I doing wrong ?

New comment by robochat in "Am I the Unethical One?"

robochat — Fri, 26 May 2023 12:53:37 +0000

This feels harsh because if the tests were similar but with small differences then getting the right wrong answers seems likely to happen anyway. Also, he went the extra step and outright failed the student but I'm not sure why that extra step was justified, surely the cheaters were automatically going to get very poor marks.

New comment by robochat in "Am I the Unethical One?"

robochat — Fri, 26 May 2023 12:46:11 +0000

It was an online course and the exam was online too.

New comment by robochat in "Am I the Unethical One?"

robochat — Fri, 26 May 2023 12:44:38 +0000

For all of my major exams in the UK, we were encouraged to study by practising on old papers and my score would have been abysmal if I hadn't. So not being allowed to look at past exams feels strange to me too.

New comment by robochat in "Extinction of Steam Locomotives Derails Assumptions about Biological Evolution"

robochat — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 19:20:23 +0000

There is a strong connection between the incandescent lightbulbs and the sun because the sun is almost a blackbody emitter too. Studying incandescent lightbulbs allowed researchers to discover the blackbody spectrum and Kirchhoff's law of thermal radiation, which was then applied to the Sun to discover its apparent temperature. The spectral lines in the Sun's spectrum (the frequencies where it deviates from the blackbody spectrum) then allowed researchers to study elements present in the Sun's photosphere.

New comment by robochat in "Something is wrong in the state of QED (2021) [pdf]"

robochat — Sat, 25 Feb 2023 17:21:01 +0000

The paper is written in scathing tones, by page 11 I was laughing at each new report of QED's 'perfect' agreement with whatever was the latest experimental result for the electron's anomalous magnetic moment although as it continued as far as page 14, it became sobering. However, the recent discrepancies are way down in the decimal points of the result now; when these calculations require 1000s of complicated Feynman diagrams and pages and pages of calculation, errors seem inevitable. My hope is that an alternative approach can be found that avoids these complicated calculations and in fact, researchers already seem to be working on this [1].

[1] Nima Arkani-Hamed - The End of Spacetime (Sep 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL77oOnrPzY

New comment by robochat in "One Year into the War in Ukraine"

robochat — Fri, 24 Feb 2023 23:46:30 +0000

I agree with this sentiment but in this particular case, with the personality that Putin projects to the world, it seems like appeasement would just encouragement him to try to take more.

New comment by robochat in "I learned seven programming languages"

robochat — Sun, 12 Feb 2023 14:47:14 +0000

I like nim but I've never really gotten used to the slicing syntax. I guess that I'm just too used to python, plus you have to be a bit careful to leave a whitespace when doing backwards indexing so that the operators work correctly.

So python:

    a = [0,1,2,3,4,5]
    a[0:5] => [0,1,2,3,4] - half closed interval
    a[0:-1] => [0,1,2,3,4] - negative indexing
    a[:5] => [0,1,2,3,4] - skipping start index 
    a[3:] => [3,4,5] - skipping end index

nim:

    var a = [0,1,2,3,4,5]
    a[0..5] = [0,1,2,3,4,5] - closed interval
    a[0..^1] = [0,1,2,3,4,5] - closed interval with negative indexing
    a[..4] = [0,1,2,3,4] - skipping start index
    a[..<5] - Error - doesn't work
    a[3..] - Error - doesn't work
    a[0..<5] = [0,1,2,3,4] - half closed interval
    a[0..< ^1] = [0,1,2,3,4] - half closed interval with negative indexing 
                              (Important - the white space is required, it will crash otherwise!)

I'm sure that there are good reasons for this behaviour and that if you use nim a lot, you just get used to it but I find the python syntax just nicer.

New comment by robochat in "Ask HN: Are alternative (oil, nu, etc.) shells usable as daily drivers?"

robochat — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 12:07:17 +0000

You can easily get bash to do that by adding these lines to your .inputrc file.

  "\e[A": history-search-backward
  "\e[B": history-search-forward
  "\e[C": forward-char
  "\e[D": backward-char