Recent submissions

Comment · 1 month ago
That sounds like the breakeven if you're holding wing geometry constant and want to compare cantilever weight cost to bracing drag cost. The real advantage is in allowing for thinner and higher aspect ratio wings like in the Boeing X-66 which was designed to fly considerably faster than 200mph and make fuel savings.

I guess an additional advantage in this design is that the weight of the batteries is in the fuselage rather than the wing, so additional strengthening of some type may be necessary in either scenario.

Comment · 2 months ago
Systems such as this might be useful as an in situ energy source you can couple to quantum gates for gate driving.
Comment · 2 months ago
I'll bite. How does Gitana 18 and the general continued technological progress in the Ultim class fall short? If you had something to contribute, couldn't you just get involved in one of these projects?
Comment · 3 months ago
Ah, another example of multiple equilibria! Investment in intelligence and defence spending can lead to entrenched interests which demand continued spending. The famous military-industrial complex. The coordination needed to break out of this equilibrium can be made much harder by multiple states each needing to meet the defence spending of their peers. It's hard to cross from high defence to low defence spending (consider unilaterally disarming during the cold war. Borderline impossible. You need careful coordination through treaties) and also difficult to go from low defence spending to high absent some obvious threat (you could perhaps model appeasement as an example of this, though I think other factors dominate).

Notably, one of the reasons that the military industrial complex can be hard to unwind is that it works well for capital and workers. Consider all the programs you've heard of which boast about providing jobs in every single state. Whether these different equilibria are better or worse for labour (or fractions of labour giving you your diverging K-shape) is a separate question and potentially changes over time.

One historical event you could model as a change in equilibria was the industrial revolution. Instead of elites consuming economic surpluses, the economy change into a mode where those surpluses could be reinvested in productive capital, new technology, and manufacturing in a self-reinforcing cycle (of course these avenues didn't really exist before). Famously, within this new equilibria, labour did not do well at first; awful conditions in factories with terrible life expectancies. But those workers' grandchildren lived lives of relative prosperity as a result.

All of which is to say, the existence and description of multiple equilibria in economies is a different question from how labour and capital fare in those equilibria.

Comment · 3 months ago
Yeah, that clarifies that you're missing the core idea here. Brett Deveraux is pretty popular here, so maybe you'd like the analogous discussion of high-equilibrium and low-equilibrium ancient economies? https://acoup.blog/2020/08/21/collections-bread-how-did-they...

As much as you may want to move from the low to high equilibrium, it would be pretty hard in an ancient society. In the modern world, with enough exuberance, it seems much easier.

Comment · 3 months ago
The piece is actually quite concise, but you're right in the other respect. You definitely didn't read it. Private equity as an explanation is explicitly rejected.
Comment · 4 months ago
By all means please caveat away! This is HN after all. I was torn between pithyness and qualifying those statements myself. Obviously there's a lot of interesting variation that's not being captured by population means or the limited subgroups we've studied and I'm excited for us to learn more.

In the meantime, I use butter because it's tastier and for me that's worth it. I don't understand why that's not enough for some people.

Comment · 4 months ago
I had to look up the concept of a framing definition so I might have gotten these wrong but I would equivalently state:

1. Modern margarine is healthier than butter.

2. Seed oils are generally healthier than animal fats.

3. PUFAs are healthier than saturated fats.

4. In this case the industrial processed spread is healthier than the more natural less-processed spread.

Comment · 4 months ago
The title is inadvertently correct only because modern margarine is healthier than alternatives such as butter.
Comment · 4 months ago
Bartz v Anthropic is some good authority on fair use (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...). Still, it can't be said to be definitive because the plaintiff's arguments on market harm (with respect to fair use, not piracy) were limited and there were, as far as I can remember, no compelling examples provided of model output reproducing large swathes of training text.
Comment · 5 months ago
I come back to this every so often as well. After so many years of looking at Markov chain outputs that almost looked like they made sense or chatbot systems rewriting your sentence back at you, software which can simply talk is a heady thing.
Comment · 5 months ago
There are birds that go far longer than typical aeroplane flight times without a single flap of their wings either using thermal, ridge, or other sources of lift. Are these flying birds? I've shared thermals with eagles flying the same circles, neither one of us flapping our wings but making minor adjustments for the same goal.

An albatross might be able to go days flying without a single wing flap and no vertical sources of lift by using dynamic soaring in the wind gradient at the surface of the ocean. Perhaps that's something only birds can do. Except the glider pilot Ingo Renner once found an amazing shear layer at 300m altitude and stayed there with dynamic soaring. Remote control gliders use the lee of ridgelines to approach Mach 1 with dynamic soaring.

Perhaps what defines a bird that flies as opposed to a plane is that a bird produces thrust by flapping its wings? Even an Albatross must flap its wings if it has to take-off from water. Maybe we could add that the flapping is driven by animal muscles? But then is the human powered ornithopter Snowbird a bird that flies as opposed to a plane?

Of course this is all ridiculous because everyone knows what you mean when you refer to a bird or plane. We have other ways to definitively identify the difference rather than their mode of flight. It's trickier when I'm asked if an AI is conscious. There is no definitive base-line to fall back on to decide if this is a conscious or conscious-less thinker.

Comment · 5 months ago
Not to mention, when you use a Monte Carlo model, you can easily count the samples which lead to certain outcomes. In their review, they noted that the correlated polling miss in the Midwest was one of the most common scenarios making up that 35% chance of a Trump win.

The idea that Silver somehow 'hit' in 2012 when he correctly predicted all states and 'missed' in 2016 is so juvenile I get second hand embarrassment whenever I see it.

Comment · 6 months ago
None of us are your doctors but Naproxen has well-known gastric issues up to ulcers and stomach bleeding which is why it's advised to be taken with food and why it's also often prescribed with a PPI or H2 Antagonist. Cox-2 selectives such as Celecoxib greatly reduce this risk but seem to be associated with some small cardiovascular risk (admittedly this is a feature of all NSAIDs though less so in Naproxen apparently).
Comment · 6 months ago
The only caveat is that AES is not necessarily a black box. It's possible there may be hidden structure to take advantage of, but if there is there's no reason to suspect it's one that's amenable to a quantum speedup.

As far as the Grover speedup goes, it's already optimal. Requiring O(sqrt(N)) queries is the proven lower bound for unstructured search.

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton