Hacker News: snitty

New comment by snitty in "Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs"

snitty — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:42:57 +0000

Apple also has an entire international retail arm.

New comment by snitty in "Michael Rabin has died"

snitty — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:45:12 +0000

May his memory be a blessing.

New comment by snitty in "Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon"

snitty — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 11:07:44 +0000

Rad Hardened parts are "Commercial off the Shelf" parts. VORAGO, TI, and others provide rad hardened parts via vendors like Mouser and Digikey. They're just much more expensive.

New comment by snitty in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

snitty — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 18:31:26 +0000

A "runway incursion" is a very broad term that includes everything from this accident to a single engine Cessna moving past the hold short line prematurely at a quiet airport.

FAA defines it as "Any occurrence at an aerodrome involving the incorrect presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the protected area of a surface designated for the landing and take off of aircraft." [0]

Many runway incursions run no risk of any accident, but are still flagged as issues, investigated, and punished if appropriate.

[0] https://www.faa.gov/airports/runway_safety/resources/runway_...

New comment by snitty in "$96 3D-printed rocket that recalculates its mid-air trajectory using a $5 sensor"

snitty — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:57:48 +0000

This is shockingly similar to microbial motility mechanisms. Like random walk plus chemotaxis.

New comment by snitty in "Aromatic 5-silicon rings synthesized at last"

snitty — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 20:55:55 +0000

https://xkcd.com/1053/

New comment by snitty in "Aromatic 5-silicon rings synthesized at last"

snitty — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:44:17 +0000

In this case aromatic means a ring of atoms where there is electron sharing among all the members of the ring.

They're called aromatic rings because before they understood the structure, they grouped them by their behavior, and the aromatics contain a lot of volatile organics like benzene, toluene, phenol, which have strong odors.

New comment by snitty in "Aromatic 5-silicon rings synthesized at last"

snitty — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 15:25:23 +0000

>Move over cyclopentadiene anion—there’s a new five-membered aromatic ring in town, and this one is made of silicon.

CHEM-Es are build a little different from the rest of us.

New comment by snitty in "GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment"

snitty — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:57:54 +0000

So here the test was effectively given a set of relevant facts, can we influence the way a judge (or LLM) rules based on superfluous facts. The judges were either confused or swayed by the superfluous facts. The LLM was not. The matter was one where the outcome should have been determinative, not judgment-based, under US law.

New comment by snitty in "GPT-5 outperforms federal judges in legal reasoning experiment"

snitty — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 01:48:10 +0000

Arguing that this is a Common Law matter in this scenario is funny in a wonky lawyerly kind of way.

The legal issue they were testing in this experiment is choice of law and procedure question, which is governed by a line of cases starting with Erie Railroad in which Justice Brandies famously said, "There is no federal common law."

OpenAI and Ginkgo Bioworks (YC S14) used GPT5 to lower protein production costs

snitty — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 22:20:21 +0000

Article URL: https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-lowers-protein-synthesis-cost/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906212

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by snitty in "Show HN: Shelvy Books"

snitty — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 03:06:21 +0000

I miss Delicious Monster's Library app

New comment by snitty in "Cadova: Swift DSL for parametric 3D modeling"

snitty — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 19:05:20 +0000

I find this much more readable than KCL[0], but I also understand the ultimate goals of the two are probably a bit different.

[0]: https://zoo.dev/docs/kcl-samples/pillow-block-bearing

New comment by snitty in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

snitty — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:10:57 +0000

That's why I run my server on 7100 chips made for me by Sam Zeloof in his garage on a software stack hand coded by me, on copper I ran personally to everyone's house.

New comment by snitty in "A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]"

snitty — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:45:56 +0000

But that bears no relation to what happened in the video.

New comment by snitty in "A laser pointer at 2B FPS [video]"

snitty — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 22:43:59 +0000

>As I understand it, this is sort of simulating what it would be like to capture this, by recreating the laser pulse and capturing different phases of it each time, then assembling them; so what is represented in the final composite is not a single pulse of the laser beam.

It is not different phases, but it is a composite! On his second channel he describes the process[0]. Basically, it's a photomultiplier tube (PMT) attached to a precise motion control rig and a 2B sample/second oscilloscope. So he ends up capturing the actual signal from the PMT over that timespan at a resolution of 2B samples/s, and then repeating the experiment for the next pixel over. Then after some DSP and mosaicing, you get the video.

>It seems like if you could measure the pulse's propagation in one direction, and the other (as measured by when it scatters of the smoke at various positions in both directions), this seems like it would get around it?

The point here isn't to measure the speed of light, and my general response when someone asks "can I get around physics with this trick" by answer is no. But I'd be lying if I said I totally understood your question.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KOFbvW2A-o

New comment by snitty in "Forth: The programming language that writes itself"

snitty — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 14:00:25 +0000

I remember programming in Forth on my Palm Pilot, as there was a Forth interpreter for it.

New comment by snitty in "Nobel Peace Prize 2025: María Corina Machado"

snitty — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 10:23:40 +0000

Is the US going to invade Oslo in retribution?

New comment by snitty in "Gifted children are special needs children"

snitty — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 15:07:18 +0000

How many years were you in kindergarten?

New comment by snitty in "Qualcomm to acquire Arduino"

snitty — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 14:58:50 +0000

And yet there is clearly a market for easy-to-program MCUs for hobby and educational purposes.