Hacker News: yccs27

New comment by yccs27 in "[dead]"

yccs27 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:43:30 +0000

Does "Pharma" actually dose medication based on the Eyring equation? I'm not convinced we actually know the value of ΔG. AFAIK, the optimal biological dose is determined via dose-ranging studies during Phase I/II of clinical trials. And drug metabolism rate is measured, not derived from theoretical models.

New comment by yccs27 in "Waymo Safety Impact"

yccs27 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 07:20:50 +0000

Road capacity does not increase with speed above 50 km/h on urban roads or 70 km/h on highways. Following distance scales with speed, so more speed can actually mean fewer cars per unit of time.

In theory, braking distance scales quadratically with speed. In practice, people leave less room on highways, because they rely on others driving predictably, but spacing still increases faster than linear.

New comment by yccs27 in "Hisense TVs add unskippable startup ads before live TV"

yccs27 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:19:23 +0000

I'm not so sure this is really a free market equilibrium. There are two effects which explain the prevalence of ads even if consumers are willing to pay more for ad-free products:

- Imperfect information, aka Market for Lemons: It can be hard to find out how prevalent ads will be when buying a product. Consumers often make a purchasing decision without knowledge about ads.

- Changing terms after lock-in, aka Enshittification: Manufacturers (like Hisense here) can add advertising to products after consumers have already bought them. Initially, consumers have negotiation power since they can freely choose a product, but later they are locked in and cannot easily react to the manufacturer changing the product to their detriment.

New comment by yccs27 in "The “JVG algorithm” only wins on tiny numbers"

yccs27 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 10:25:57 +0000

The last line of the introduction

> By doing so, we aim to provide a novel paradigm [...]

also made me think of item 19 on your list:

> 10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting edge of a "paradigm shift".

I'm sad though that you didn't call it the "Baez crackpot index"...

New comment by yccs27 in "Voith Schneider Propeller"

yccs27 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:42:39 +0000

This reads a lot like an advertisement. The linked page [[Cyclorotor]] is more neutral and has more information on the design and applications outside of marine vessels:

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

New comment by yccs27 in "Wisconsin communities signed secrecy deals for billion-dollar data centers"

yccs27 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 19:31:49 +0000

It‘s preying on the city‘s desperation to get a cash payout, to get space and utilities worth much more. Facebook abuses its market power to pit city governments against each other, while the cities don‘t have many alternatives.

New comment by yccs27 in "Are two heads better than one?"

yccs27 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:11:18 +0000

The saying probably assumes that each chronometer has a certain small probability of malfunctioning, resulting in a significant error (basically a fat-tailed error distribution). With three chronometers, you can use a robust estimator of the true value (consensus value or median). With two, there's no robust estimator and if you use the mean, you have twice the probability of being significantly wrong (though only by half as much).

New comment by yccs27 in "Show HN: Cachekit – High performance caching policies library in Rust"

yccs27 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:50:02 +0000

Thanks for the link, nice to see the informal conventions spelled out like this!

New comment by yccs27 in "The chess bot on Delta Air Lines will destroy you (2024) [video]"

yccs27 — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 11:06:37 +0000

True, although better pruning can massively lower the effective branching ratio compared to pure alpha-beta, making the algorithm benefit more from longer search time again (which is why pruning is so important).

New comment by yccs27 in "Looking for flagged discussions on HN? See what's active"

yccs27 — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:03:49 +0000

Users with enough karma can "flag" posts and comments, which a) calls for moderator attention and b) decreases ranking. It's meant for off-topic/inflammatory/low-quality submissions.

New comment by yccs27 in "Some Junk Theorems in Lean"

yccs27 — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 15:31:20 +0000

It is enforced automatically for most purposes: If you're writing a proof involving e.g. the sqrt function, you want to use theorems about it, e.g. that (sqrt(x))^2 = x. Almost all of those theorems have x>=0 as a precondition, so you do need to prove it when it matters.

New comment by yccs27 in "Inverse Parentheses"

yccs27 — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:49:26 +0000

Thanks, writing it as 1+2(*)3 made it click for me.

Reminds me of the '$' operator in Haskell - it lowers the precedence of function application, basically being an opening parenthesis that's implicitly closed at the end of the line.

New comment by yccs27 in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

yccs27 — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 12:10:06 +0000

No. There is a global allocator which is used by default, but all the stdlib functions that allocate memory have a version which allows you to pass in a custom allocator. These functions are still "unstable" though, so they can currently only be used with development builds of the compiler.

New comment by yccs27 in "Ruby Symbols"

yccs27 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:55:06 +0000

The article is a bit confusing, but I like the concept behind symbols: Basically a way to distinguish identifier names (chosen by the programmer) from user-facing strings.

The distinction between is one I've mentally adopted in other languages like Python as well. For personal projects I like to use single quotes for 'symbols' and double quotes for "strings", e.g.:

    add_label(text="Hello World!", align='center')

Does anyone else do something similar?

New comment by yccs27 in "/dev/null is an ACID compliant database"

yccs27 — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 08:23:33 +0000

> 85,66% guaranteed uptime (we need some sleep, too)

New comment by yccs27 in "Knocker, a knock based access control system for your homelab"

yccs27 — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 13:20:11 +0000

Unfortunately there's an increasing number of home internet connections behind CGNat, as IPv4 adresses run out (and IPv6 doesn't gain momentum, heaven knows why)

New comment by yccs27 in "Most expensive laptops"

yccs27 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:55:47 +0000

#9 on the list is a Macbook Pro.

New comment by yccs27 in "Most expensive laptops"

yccs27 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 07:53:21 +0000

Are there any laptops that actually have a desktop GPU built in?

New comment by yccs27 in "The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming"

yccs27 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:08:17 +0000

The most general approach is to calculate all the different cases, and then do a branchless selection:

    var4 = (var1==1)*(var2+var3) | (var1==2)*(var2-var3) | ...

Of course this is basically the slowest possible option, but it might work as a starting point for a general-purpose optimizer to find a faster solution. If it doesn't, this will likely compile to conditional move instructions.

It might help if you replace the comparison and multiplication with an equivalent expression made from bitwise operations, but I believe most compilers already know how to do this transformation.

New comment by yccs27 in "Effect Systems vs. Print Debugging: A Pragmatic Solution"

yccs27 — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:37:05 +0000

I was referring to the specific Debug effect described in the post, which only works in debugging builds. This means that the production build cannot have unexpected output from a function with no declared effect.