<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: westurner</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=westurner</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:20:19 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=westurner" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Is Liquid Metal Killing Our PCs? Scientific Analysis and a 2-Year Test [video]"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>TechIngredients studied this and found that Silicone oil and Graphene makes the best thermal paste for cooling chips;<p>"DID WE JUST MAKE THE WORLD'S BEST THERMAL PASTE!?" <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=Glfak2B9J5U" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=Glfak2B9J5U</a><p>"Make Our Best Thermal Paste... YOURSELF!" <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=8RJ-vLLwDPU" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=8RJ-vLLwDPU</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:42:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50126279</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50126279</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50126279</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Using AI to reverse engineer hardware"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From
"Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg" <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062870">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062870</a> :<p>> <i>Neural Amp Modeler</i> (is open source)<p>> JUCE on embedded, Rust DSP<p>> <i>A board of guitar pedals with IDK one USB-A and a USB-C adapter with OSC and MIDI support; USB MIDI trololo pedals</i><p>There are multiple products like this on Amazon+Shopify w/ linked inventory now</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:45:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105358</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105358</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105358</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Ask HN: CAD for wood working with LLM support?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191589">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36191589</a> :<p>> tsugite<p>> compas_wood / wood_nano<p>clementzheng/joinery: <i>Parametric joint generation toolkit for laser cutting</i>: <a href="https://github.com/clementzheng/joinery" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/clementzheng/joinery</a><p>GitHub topics: joinery, woodworking, CNC<p>Though, there is 3d printing of wood now.<p>And here's a wonder material: Lignin-Vitrimer with Lignin-Derived Carbon Fiber, and Cellulose</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:33:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105183</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105183</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50105183</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Tiny E-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS of Game Boy Fun"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>kuslota/InkBoy: <a href="https://github.com/kuslota/InkBoy" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kuslota/InkBoy</a><p>So it's a dithering SPI display driver?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 14 Oct 2026 20:08:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094320</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094320</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094320</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sort of like if you're sawing boards with a handsaw, and then they give you an electric saw but that fails coincidentally, and you don't expend effort because why not wait for the electric saw to be fixed?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:10:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078819</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078819</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078819</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It may be. Indeed how do helicopters even fly.<p>But the point is that Lean formalisation is a new bar for engineering and for physics and abstract math.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:31:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50035145</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50035145</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50035145</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: reliability & AI"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Noting that planes fly but there is yet no Lean proof of Bernoulli's principle in Mathlib or Physlib.<p>> <i>the trustworthiness of math itself</i><p>Is abstract math rigorously proven?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:36:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034544</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034544</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50034544</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[15-Minute Lesson Plan: A.I.-Assisted Mathematics]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/learning/15-minute-lesson-plan-ai-assisted-mathematics.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/learning/15-minute-lesson-plan-ai-assisted-mathematics.html</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024243">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024243</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 1</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:52:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/07/learning/15-minute-lesson-plan-ai-assisted-mathematics.html</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024243</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024243</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Show HN: Turning on-chain wallet activity into trading signals"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Compare that investment strategy to value investing or buying and holding an index ETF. 
Do you think that using on-chain wallet activity as trading signals is good way to trade? On those signals?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:29:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020263</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020263</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020263</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Data Centers Reduced Electricity Prices. Can That Continue?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"Data Centers: Location Choice and Grid Externalities" (2026)  
<a href="https://celhai.github.io/pdfs/Elhai_Zhou_data_centers.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://celhai.github.io/pdfs/Elhai_Zhou_data_centers.pdf</a> .. gscholar: <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=Data+Centers%3A+Location+Choice+and+Grid+Externalities&btnG=" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=Dat...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 13:23:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020191</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020191</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50020191</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Margaret Hamilton has died"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11</a> :<p>> <i>Original Apollo 11 guidance computer (AGC) source code for Command Module (Comanche055) and Lunar Module (Luminary099). Digitized by the folks at Virtual AGC and MIT Museum.</i><p>Other Moon things of note:<p>- There are various open RL approaches for lunar-lander the computer game. GitHub topic   
lunar-lander:  <a href="https://github.com/topics/lunar-lander?o=desc&s=stars" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/topics/lunar-lander?o=desc&s=stars</a><p>- They probably should have landed that payload gently on the moon in order to not collapse any existing cave systems in order to develop competency to land the ISS on the moon.<p>- There is a new orbital deceleration and landing approach for the moon;<p>- "A rough guide for going back to the Moon" (2026) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755912">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755912</a> :<p>> <i>"Earth–Moon transfer via the L1 Lagrangian point using the theory of functional connections" (2026) <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42064-025-0297-x" rel="nofollow">https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s42064-025-0297-x</a> </i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:49:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007319</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007319</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007319</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Float and integer arithmetic follow two different paradigms"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>fenv: 
<a href="https://manpages.debian.org/testing/manpages-dev/fenv.3.en.html" rel="nofollow">https://manpages.debian.org/testing/manpages-dev/fenv.3.en.h...</a> :<p>> <i>These eleven functions were defined in</i> C99, <i>and describe the handling of floating-point rounding and exceptions (overflow, zero-divide, etc.).</i></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:37:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007134</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007134</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007134</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Beauty in DVD Menus"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We watched and all wrote about <i>Momento</i> in our language arts program in high school.<p>The character Fuchs in <i>Barry</i> reminds of Sammy Jankiss.<p>I don't think anyone in our class had found that feature of the Memento DVD menu?<p>Bank then before YouTube, there were properly-tracked copies of Pink Floyd and The Wizard of Oz on the internet.<p>Another weird thing about Memento,<p>If you train a neural network on videos of fluids in reverse, can it recover or reconstruct the parameters of the fluid?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:35:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007106</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007106</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50007106</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Beauty in DVD Menus"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Tangentially, Is it possible to lase circuits with a LightScribe DVD burner?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 08 Oct 2026 15:27:02 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006988</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006988</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50006988</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "When random is not actually random enough"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Randomness test > Specific tests for randomness:  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_test" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomness_test</a><p>Which NIST SP-800-22 implementation instead of the now-archived paranoid_crypto randomness tests?<p>paranoid_crypto/docs/randomness_tests.md :  <a href="https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto/blob/main/docs/randomness_tests.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/paranoid_crypto/blob/main/docs/ran...</a><p>/? NIST SP-800-22 Rust:  <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=NIST+SP-800-22+rust&oq=NIST+SP-800-22+rust" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=NIST+SP-800-22+rust&oq=NIST+...</a><p>Sometimes it's possible to whiten random to make it uniform random or normal random;<p>Whitening transformation:  <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitening_transformation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitening_transformation</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 07 Oct 2026 01:42:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986896</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986896</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49986896</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "'No more Viktor Orbán': EU plans 15-year probation period for new member states"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>But does this apply to new associate member states?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:17:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983475</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983475</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983475</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can PQ certs and MTC solve for CA compromise as is described? Is this the cost of PKI instead of key exchange?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 20:11:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983399</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983399</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49983399</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Perhaps this was downvoted in ignorance?<p>This question could have avoided the offense:<p>What is the relation between Cherenkov relation and effective mass in longitudinal plasma waves?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 19:35:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982971</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982971</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982971</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> <i>which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)</i><p>I have been researching applications of FTL as well;<p>Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there <i>are</i> Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?<p>So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?<p>A Twistor model can model such;</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:01:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980453</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980453</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by westurner in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From the article:<p>> <i>Candidate 1: Designed a Luttinger Compensated Magnet, YBaMnFeO₅</i><p>> <i>Candidate 2: Identified a Luttinger Compensated Magnet in KV[Cr(CN)₆] from 1999</i><p>> <i>KV[Cr(CN)₆] belongs to the same family as Prussian blue, the 300-year-old pigment.</i><p>An actual validation would be complex; so let's try and see what parts of this argument are grounded and feasible?<p>/? Prussian blue antiferromagnetic:  <a href="https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Prussian+blue+antiferromagnetic&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart" rel="nofollow">https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Prussian+blue+antiferro...</a> :<p>- a number of articles confirming antiferromagnetic effects<p>/? Luttinger-compensated Prussian blue:<p>- "Luttinger-compensated bipolarized magnetic semiconductor" (2025)  <a href="https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/9syc-71w8" rel="nofollow">https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/9syc-71w8</a> .. "[2502.18136] Luttinger compensated bipolarized magnetic semiconductor"  <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18136" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.18136</a> :<p>> <i>The Luttinger compensated magnetism not only has the zero total magnetic moment as the antiferromagnetism, but also has the -wave spin splitting as the ferromagnetism, thus our work not only provides theoretical guidance for searching Luttinger compensated magnetic materials with distinctive properties, but also provides a material basis for the application in spintronic devices.</i><p>/? 
Luttinger-compensated  : <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Luttinger-compensated" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=Luttinger-compensated</a><p>We could model this as a logical proof  that's checkable also in lieu of doing actual work to confirm or reject the (AI) hypothesis, but first let's reason about the feasibility:<p>Are the described effects real?<p>Are there reported, reputable similar findings in similar materials?<p>So, at least the blue one could really work. Like it's 1999.<p>---<p>Without even validating the argument, what else do we think we know about this problem?<p>Did the authors know that there is a laser way to laser program the normally random domains of a magnet or antiferromagnet?<p>But is this going to be lower-cost and more sustainable than carbon-based room-temperature semiconductor computing, and does anyone know whether that will work yet (with ABC stacking in trilayer and pentalayer rhombohedral graphene) either?<p>I guess we can follow up later by searching for citations that reference this article that does not have DOI (which are free from Zenodo and FigShare).<p>Have we sufficiently reasoned or inferred whether the study is repeatable and reproducible?<p>At least we didn't inappropriately reject the hypothesis without experimentation or evidence</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:36:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980092</link><dc:creator>westurner</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980092</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980092</guid></item></channel></rss>