btrettel

9 ms·

61.
by btrettel 9mo ago
Hmm... okay, I'll try some more local cycling groups as there are a lot of them. Maybe one lesson to take from all the comments I'm reading here is that there's a lot of variation between groups. I'm thinking road cyclin
62.
by btrettel 9mo ago
I think the problem comes when certain topical groups interpret their mission narrowly. Based on your other nearby comment, you mention your experience with a rock climbing group that doesn't so narrowly focus on rock climbing. I think
63.
by btrettel 9mo ago
I'll try starting a more niche group just to see what happens. Maybe I'm wrong and I'll find a handful of interesting people. Still, there's a nagging feeling in the back of my mind. If the number of people interested in
64.
by btrettel 9mo ago
Interesting. I was a decent runner in high school, way back. I'm a cyclist now, but I found that cycling groups tend to either be focused on athletic performance or activism and I don't particularly care for either at this point.
65.
by btrettel 9mo ago
I've thought about starting my own community group, but I am pretty skeptical that I could find many folks interested in what I'm interested in. I think this is a real barrier to many. Any advice? To elaborate, in the US, existing
66.
by btrettel 10mo ago
Here's my experience with (attempted) theft on a train: I once was on a MARC train at DC Union Station. Some train cars have electrical sockets, so I plugged in a bike light I had since I'd be taking a bike for the last part of th
67.
by btrettel 10mo ago
Is the annotated bibliography actually annotated ? I'm wondering if I'm using this website wrong.
68.
by btrettel 10mo ago
This reminded me of some earlier discussion on Hacker News about using LLMs trained on old texts to determine novelty and obviousness of a patent application: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440273
69.
by btrettel 10mo ago
Open source Nerf blaster simulator, for both spring and pneumatic blasters. https://github.com/btrettel/blastersim The core simulator part works, but I don't yet have a user interface or documentation. Probably ju
70.
by btrettel 11mo ago
Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. Check the agreements you signed with your current employer. You might be surprised.
71.
by btrettel 11mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Assume good faith.
72.
by btrettel 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
73.
by btrettel 1y ago
This guy? https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-solarpowered-plastic-to-f... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Brown_(influencer) He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty
74.
by btrettel 1y ago
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff
75.
by btrettel 1y ago
Unfortunately, Fortran's implementation of this has some inconsistencies. Doing certain operations will convert from the custom indexing back to 1-based indexing. https://github.com/sourceryinstitute/fidbits/b
76.
by btrettel 1y ago
In practice, unit checking is almost never done on actual code, though it should be done. From what I recall, some Fortran folks have been trying to get unit checking into the Fortran standard itself since the 1970s without success. I was a
77.
by btrettel 1y ago
Here's an example of research that I found to be hard to do in academia with details about why: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154799 Note that I don't think VCs or DAOs would care about this research eith
78.
by btrettel 1y ago
I don't agree. I think most people would think that "patents" implies that a patent office has granted a patent. For what it's worth, confusing patents and patent applications is a pet peeve of mine as a former patent ex
79.
by btrettel 1y ago
The headline is inaccurate. As far as I can tell, no patents have been granted yet. Intel filed patent applications . Failure to distinguish between applications and granted patents is far too common. https://patents.google.com&
80.
by btrettel 1y ago
I fully support looking at older publications. There are a ton of great older ideas which were unjustly ignored. Or maybe they were rightly ignored at the time, but the situation has changed and now those ideas are relevant now. As an examp
81.
by btrettel 1y ago
I'm not them, but I've had good success with ~20 year old CD-Rs using GNU ddrescue. https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ Not everything was recoverable, but the vast vast majority was.
82.
by btrettel 1y ago
I've used various commercial databases over the years. Some popular commercial databases relevant to HN readers include Web of Science, Scopus, and Engineering Village. When I worked at the USPTO, I used the less popular database Dialo
83.
by btrettel 1y ago
I took an IP law class in grad school. I asked the professor a question about making a more clear rule about how much is use of a copyrighted work is fair use or something along those lines. (I think I had some vague idea about using inform
84.
by btrettel 1y ago
On point 2, the study being apparently impossible to conduct as described was also a problem for Michael LaCour. Seems like an underappreciated fraud-detection heuristic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Contact_Chang
85.
by btrettel 1y ago
> is LaTeX also falling out of use for technical papers? In mechanical and aerospace engineering broadly, I see less use of LaTeX over time. It's hard to estimate precisely which percent of the market is LaTeX vs. Word vs. something
86.
by btrettel 2y ago
Again, I think it comes down to what the "population" (reference class) is. Implicit in what I quoted was the population being companies. I personally would criticize it on that point, not that they are making the base rate fallac
87.
by btrettel 2y ago
It does address the base rate, though not in a fully satisfactory way. You're correct to point out the number of Teslas on the road vs. other vehicles, as is this person who mentions driving hours: https://news.ycombinator.c
88.
by btrettel 2y ago
The base rate was discussed early in the article, but not by that name: > It’s not just that self-driving cars in general are dangerous for motorcycles, either: this problem is unique to Tesla. Not a single other automobile manufacturer
89.
by btrettel 2y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce... for an explanation of r > g.
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by btrettel 2y ago
I had similar thoughts before. It's worth thinking about what attorneys will do in response to rejections based on LLMs reproducing ideas. I'm a former patent examiner, and attorneys frequently argue that the examiners showed &quo

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