Hacker News: salynchnew

New comment by salynchnew in "Newly discovered spider builds spring loaded snare to catch ants"

salynchnew — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:43:04 +0000

There are probably some other interesting adaptations involved, like the fact that the surface of a mantis shrimp's (shell? carapace?) selectively filters out sound waves (and thus, shockwaves caused by its own "punch").

New comment by salynchnew in "TerraPower in deal with Meta for eight Natrium 345 MW nuclear plants"

salynchnew — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:11:35 +0000

People on HN really love small-scale fission nuclear when the sun is (gestures) right there.

New comment by salynchnew in "The death of the brick and mortar toy store"

salynchnew — Fri, 22 May 2026 07:41:39 +0000

That seems like a rather inefficient use of resources. How long will a fund typically keep that on the books before they have to offload the asset or declare bankruptcy? At a certain point, that smells like a scam with a real estate business attached to it.

New comment by salynchnew in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

salynchnew — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:25:06 +0000

The Failure to Launch episode about Qian, the Cultural Revolution, and the brief inter-departmental war and attempted "coup" at the defense research institute where he worked... was quite something.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rocket-scientist-g...

New comment by salynchnew in "Talking to strangers at the gym"

salynchnew — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:21:13 +0000

If Books Could Kill (which is notoriously against self-help books) did an episode on Dale Carnegie.

Even they said that he seemed to be a pretty alright guy who was genuinely nice to people in his personal life, not just in his public persona.

New comment by salynchnew in "Group averages obscure how an individual's brain controls behavior: study"

salynchnew — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:57:04 +0000

Often reminded of this passage from Hitchhiker's:

The Maximegalon Institute of Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious (MISPWOSO) is a fictional research institution from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

New comment by salynchnew in "Butterflies are in decline across North America, a look at the Western Monarch"

salynchnew — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:51:48 +0000

You can get alternative bulk mowable native lawn substitute seeds from the Thomas Payne Foundation.

New comment by salynchnew in "Hypura – A storage-tier-aware LLM inference scheduler for Apple Silicon"

salynchnew — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 17:09:41 +0000

It was written by an LLM, so... yeah.

New comment by salynchnew in "Kagi Small Web"

salynchnew — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 23:22:46 +0000

As the author is dead, I'm sure the money goes towards site hosting fees.

New comment by salynchnew in "The Accidental Room (2018)"

salynchnew — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:38:34 +0000

When I learned that this person was one of the RISD art students who started Fort Thunder, it all made a lot of sense to me. That was by all accounts a very strange and unique intentional space for people who didn't want to live in a conventional manner.

Here's an archive of the old Fort Thunder website:

https://web.archive.org/web/20091025093813/http://fortthunde...

New comment by salynchnew in "A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs"

salynchnew — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:46:11 +0000

If it's already scanned, then you don't have to leave your desk.

New comment by salynchnew in "Yes, It's Fascism"

salynchnew — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 07:02:20 +0000

It's amazing that so many "leaders" (esp. in tech) seemed to not worry about or even tacitly/openly supported the Trump admin, when so many other folks could clearly see the disaster looming on the horizon.

New comment by salynchnew in "In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels"

salynchnew — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:16:30 +0000

It's a great idea, but I feel like that way ends up with the nightmare scenario of each of us managing an AWS-style admin console for washing the dishes, etc.

That way lies madness, although I suppose there might be one or two family members I would want to lock out of the dishwasher.

New comment by salynchnew in "Keeping 20k GPUs healthy"

salynchnew — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:12:19 +0000

> operating too close to the operational limit, tipping over it, and then requiring a power cycle.

GPUs--they're just like us!

New comment by salynchnew in "Keeping 20k GPUs healthy"

salynchnew — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:10:24 +0000

It's wild that these are the failure rates for datacenter-grade products. If you were pushing consumer GPU servers all-out, I would expect this kind of variation.

I expect it's not just a problem with Nvidia, though.

New comment by salynchnew in "Anthropic Economic Index report: economic primitives"

salynchnew — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:06:41 +0000

So.... motivated reasoning makes the world go 'round?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning

New comment by salynchnew in "US blocks all offshore wind construction, says reason is classified"

salynchnew — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:18:55 +0000

> Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.

People still insist that ecofascists(?) or NIMBYism is what killed nuclear, when the reality is that it was the coal industry.

New comment by salynchnew in "40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"

salynchnew — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 19:41:34 +0000

Why are you calling Bennett et al "the Stanford... study" ? Not one person on that team went to Stanford.

Direct link to the poster presentation: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf

New comment by salynchnew in "The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership"

salynchnew — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:40:36 +0000

You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.

New comment by salynchnew in "Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use"

salynchnew — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:47:48 +0000

Could also be an article placed by a competitor + a squeaky wheel.