Hacker News: whoisburbansky

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle"

whoisburbansky — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:36:17 +0000

The only (tiny) issue I've had with Tailscale on Kobo has been that the tailscale daemon prevents me from using the Kobo in Mass Storage Mode while it's active, so I have to disable/quit KOReader to be able to plug it in again, which is admittedly not frequently warranted anyways.

Errors in Palladium's "How GDP Hides Industrial Decline

whoisburbansky — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 04:18:41 +0000

Article URL: https://totalhealthoptimization.com/2025/10/05/errors-in-palladiums-how-gdp-hides-industrial-decline/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487604

Points: 8

# Comments: 3

New comment by whoisburbansky in "ReMarkable Paper Pro Move"

whoisburbansky — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:11:38 +0000

OTOH, koreader on the Scribe post jailbreak is easily the best large format PDF reading experience I've ever had.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel"

whoisburbansky — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:11:59 +0000

Profits from the stake lower taxes that would otherwise be levied on you? Of course that’s moot if the deficit isn’t something being taken seriously.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "2025 Hiring Pause"

whoisburbansky — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 01:35:35 +0000

No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "2025 Hiring Pause"

whoisburbansky — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 22:20:02 +0000

I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1"

whoisburbansky — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 05:02:49 +0000

https://planetbanatt.net/articles/mla.html this is a great overview of how MLA works.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1"

whoisburbansky — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 05:01:29 +0000

The key idea of Latent MHA is that "regular" multi-headed attention needs you to keep a bunch of giant key-value (KV) matrices around in memory to do inference. The "Latent" part just means that DeepSeek takes the `n` KV matrices in a given n-headed attention block and replaces them with a lower-rank approximation (think of this as compressing the matrices), so that they take up less VRAM in a GPU at the cost of a little extra compute and a little lost accuracy. So not caching, strictly speaking, but weight compression to trade compute off for better memory usage, which is good because the KV matrices are one of the more expensive part of this transformer architecture. MoE addresses the other expensive part (the fully-connected layers) by making it so only a subset of the fully-connected layers are active at any given forward pass.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1"

whoisburbansky — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 04:57:54 +0000

Foundations don't change much with "the speed of development"

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Firebase bill is usually $50, but I was surprised to see a $70k bill in one day"

whoisburbansky — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 01:07:57 +0000

Somebody else pointed out that it's likely just an alert, not a hard limit, which checks out given Firebase documentation (https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/billing/avoid-surp...), which has no mention of hard limits and explicitly warns you that an alert won't stop anything.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Character amnesia in China"

whoisburbansky — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 22:32:14 +0000

If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they comprehensible to their intended recipients?

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Anatomy of a credit card rewards program"

whoisburbansky — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:01:20 +0000

It plays out this way because anything anyone buys with a credit card, reward card or not, ends up costing 2-3% more than it would otherwise have, because of interchange fees. If you have a rewards card, the CC issuer turns around and gives you, say, half of that back (1% cashback on everything) and keeps the rest. It's kind of like a tax break that you only qualify for if your credit score is above a certain threshold, but you have to pay into regardless of income/credit score.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "44% of All Single-Family Home Purchases Were by Private Equity Firms in 2023"

whoisburbansky — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 21:26:03 +0000

The linked to Atlantic article literally makes the opposite point; the subtitle there is "Blaming the housing crisis on hedge funds and private equity may be easy, but it’s dead wrong."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-cr...

New comment by whoisburbansky in "The Seamless Communication models"

whoisburbansky — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 16:42:50 +0000

It depends on what your goal is; for some tasks it's possible that getting the AI to do it is best, but, e.g. the existence of auto-pilot doesn't mean that hobbyist pilots wouldn't benefit from/enjoy exercising the same skills manually.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope"

whoisburbansky — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 23:12:17 +0000

Wait are y'all the folks who moved together cross-country so you could be neighbors with your siblings?

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Room temperature, ambient pressure superconductivity – this time for real?"

whoisburbansky — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 17:21:22 +0000

With the regular magnets, you'd have to hold them in places, since otherwise they'd rotate in place and fall back down, attracted to each other.

Book Review: The Domestic Revolution, by Ruth Goodman

whoisburbansky — Tue, 23 May 2023 15:43:58 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-domestic-revolution-by

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36045982

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Everyone Was Wrong About Reverse Osmosis–Until Now"

whoisburbansky — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:51:02 +0000

Wait, where do the other two units of water go?

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Prince Rupert's Drop vs Molten Glass [video]"

whoisburbansky — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 03:52:52 +0000

Cool call-out there, I hadn't realized praseodymium and neodymium are actually short for praseodidyium and neodidymium ("green" and "new" didymium, respectively). Having all three of those words multiple times writing out this comment, I totally understand why the extra "id" was eventually dropped for the elements' formal names.

New comment by whoisburbansky in "Flipper Zero banned by Amazon for being a ‘card skimming device’"

whoisburbansky — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 15:19:58 +0000

This post kind of worked out great for me, since they've been out of stock on their main website every time I've tried to get one, but it looks like they're back now and I was able to make an order. Wouldn't have realized without this post reminding me to go check, so talk about silver linings, haha!