Hacker News: wombatpm

New comment by wombatpm in "Secondhand book sales are booming. Is it because of AI?"

wombatpm — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 15:30:24 +0000

Which is completely bonkers, because they are going to go on and make copies of their scanned copies- for backup purposes.

It would have made more sense for them to be required to store, maintain, and never sell the original.

What if taking the first picture of the Mona Lisa required it to be destroyed?

New comment by wombatpm in "Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking"

wombatpm — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:26:49 +0000

Night flying, mountain terrain, little moonlight. Pilots focused on distant landing point and hit intervening ground on descent.

A crash is usually the end result of several previous bad decisions.

New comment by wombatpm in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

wombatpm — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:40:54 +0000

Biology would greatly benefit. We barely understand transcription and protein structure. And the straightforward systems that we know like insulin have complex post translational modifications. So while we have a map of the partial proteonome, we have barely scratched the surface on networks regulation and interactions.

New comment by wombatpm in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

wombatpm — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 01:29:44 +0000

I stopped after Malloreon more because my interests changed. Finding out their history hasn’t changed anything for me. But Marion Zimmerman Bradley for some reason has and I have no desire to read any of her books ever again.

New comment by wombatpm in "I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals"

wombatpm — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:18:55 +0000

It’s going to go back to the old boys club where personal connections between research groups and institutions will matter more.

New comment by wombatpm in "Did They Ghost You?"

wombatpm — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:37:42 +0000

Public data that can’t be adjusted like Glassdoor reviews?

A way to keep recruiters honest? Is this for job xyz that has been reported filled as of Friday?

I’d certainly use it in interviews. Job x appears to posted every 10 weeks and reported a filled by internal hires. What is the problem with this job?

New comment by wombatpm in "Did they ghost you?"

wombatpm — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:21:44 +0000

Then should be a paper trail of the position, and a final decision by a person to not fill the position.

I feel that as part of unemployment insurance all job postings should tie back to a canonical job position registered with the state with mandatory reporting of applications received,number of interviews conducted,date hired or date position withdrawn, and final dispensation: external hire, internal hire, contract hire, or position withdrawn.

If HR isn’t bullshitting everyone, they should have that data. State agencies and nonprofits already tract the information.

New comment by wombatpm in "Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data"

wombatpm — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 03:06:40 +0000

Converting from sour to sweet is easier than sweet to sour. Because the sulfur in sour is the catalyst killer. You may have issues in the early processing steps because of lower viscosity, but you can do blending if necessary.

New comment by wombatpm in "The startup's Postgres survival guide"

wombatpm — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 19:55:30 +0000

Can’t say enough good things about Database Design for Mere Mortals. I keep a physical copy on my desk to give to other developers to read.

New comment by wombatpm in "Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)"

wombatpm — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 18:29:34 +0000

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.

So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.

I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.

New comment by wombatpm in "Differentiable Fortran with LFortran and Enzyme"

wombatpm — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 14:30:13 +0000

Lots of scientific code in Fortran has sparse arrays, so a NxN array that only has values on 5 diagonals will store that as 5xN array to save memory allowing you to run a larger problem.

New comment by wombatpm in "Japan develops a method to recover up to 90% of lithium from used EV batteries"

wombatpm — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 09:19:22 +0000

Sulfur is produced when the H2S is removed from petroleum and natural gas. Elemental sulfur is burned to produce Sulfuric acid using the Contact Process.

New comment by wombatpm in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

wombatpm — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 05:47:32 +0000

Physical Chemistry (I think it was Chem 361 at UofI) took most of the semester to get to the point where we could derive the shape of the hydrogen orbitals. Probably the best lecture of that class.

New comment by wombatpm in "Do you hate XML? (2010)"

wombatpm — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 19:55:26 +0000

XML is like violence. If it’s not solving your problem, you need to use more.

New comment by wombatpm in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

wombatpm — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:03:37 +0000

Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.

New comment by wombatpm in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

wombatpm — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:30:41 +0000

Same problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has been broken, the cancer cells are prone for more mutations.

Chemo, radiation, and CRISPR will kill everything it can reach that is susceptible. That leaves everything that was unreachable or resistant behind to start growing again.

Kill cancer cells is easy. Killing ONLY cancer cells is very hard.

New comment by wombatpm in "Shall we play a game? My AI nuclear simulation"

wombatpm — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:35:02 +0000

You just need to get a breeding pair and you can raise as many as you need.

New comment by wombatpm in "German ruling declares Google liable for false answers in AI Overviews"

wombatpm — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 03:49:26 +0000

Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?

New comment by wombatpm in "Where is the AI jobs crisis?"

wombatpm — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:57:30 +0000

Old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average everyone there is a millionaire

New comment by wombatpm in "Flock license plate reader wrongly linked a San Diego man to a violent crime"

wombatpm — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:51:13 +0000

Police would just argue that the second datapoint was wrong.