Recent submissions

Comment · 11 months ago
Largely but not entirely a data problem; specifically poor captioning. High quality captioning makes such a big difference.
Comment · 11 months ago
The buffer pool and CoW are honestly really nice patterns for this type of canvas heavy setup with React where it's not a good fit for a custom reconciler.
Comment · 1 year ago
For hydrocarbon synthesis, hydrogen production from electrolysis dominates the energy usage, along with driving the Sabatier process. DAC might be like 5-10%.

Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.

Comment · 1 year ago
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.

Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.

Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.

And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.

Comment · 1 year ago
My wife has been working on a pixel accurate recreation of MacPaint on the web, and one of the things that I've learned from on-and-off helping with it was just how much of the magic in it is actually just handled by QuickDraw.

Also, the text styling has a lot more complexity than you would expect.

Comment · 2 years ago
The energy densities are generally at least an order of magnitude lower and the cost is at least an order of magnitude higher. They serve different purposes.
Comment · 2 years ago
My understanding is that fluoridation of municipal water supplies serves a different purpose than fluoride in toothpaste. The fluoride in the water supply is low concentration and is intended to cause teeth to develop with stronger cavity resistance, toothpaste is a much more superficial and immediate measure.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
I remember looking into a similar problem and learned that on desktop it was just an encrypted SQLite DB. It was readable with the standard SQLite library.

Not sure of the situation for the mobile backups though!

Comment · 3 years ago
They really aren't the same.

Crypto didn't and still doesn't have the same immediate utility. The value proposition just wasn't there to justify the money and attention it was getting. Bitcoin in particular was a prototype that got mythologized into being "digital gold" despite it's many, many technical limitations.

Diffusion models and LLMs work today and make possible things that were science fiction five years ago, and have shown tremendous and exciting progress in the past 18 months.

Comment · 3 years ago
Haskell is purely functional, but if you make ample use of do-notation it's very easy to write in a familiar imperative(ish) style for day-to-day tasks. Most learning materials won't emphasize this but large production Haskell codebases that do a lot of IO usually end up looking a lot more familiar than you might expect.

If you have interest in both OCaml and Haskell, you might also consider just learning Rust which borrows aspects from both of them. Rust traits aren't quite as powerful as Haskell typeclasses and its module system is definitely more limited than OCaml's, but if you write it in a more functional style you'll get exposed to a lot of similar patterns.

A lot of things in Haskell never really clicked for me until I spent some time getting comfortable with Rust.

Comment · 3 years ago
It depends on what you eat. A person eating a lot of tomatoes, legumes, potatoes, and squash would hit it pretty easily, which is common for a lot of traditional diets (south asia, some parts of latin america, etc).
Comment · 3 years ago
> For instance, using the features of the language to describe a nested structure of components, each of which has different dependencies that are a subset of its parents dependencies

I may be misunderstanding you, but this seems tractable with React.memo. Merely encode the dependency or lack thereof in the propsAreEqual predicate.

Comment · 3 years ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton