nritchie

7 ms·

31.
by nritchie 1y ago
I wonder the complete opposite. On Hacker News, people are excited about AI. Outside this bubble, in the real world, less so.
32.
by nritchie 1y ago
Here ( https://uncertainty.nist.gov/ ) is another similar Monte Carlo-style calculator designed by the statisticians at NIST. It is intended for propagating uncertainties in measurements and can handle various different assu
33.
by nritchie 2y ago
As a scientist, I like to believe that my greatest contribution is my fresh ideas. Maybe AI will be able to do this better than I can. If so, I'm not sure that I really want to be a scientist anymore. TBH, I'm in science because
34.
by nritchie 2y ago
"taxpayers believe" is very different from "there actually is".
35.
by nritchie 2y ago
It's been noted that LLM's output quality decays as they ingest more LLM generated content in their training. Will the same happen for LLM generated code as more and more of the code on Github is generated by LLMs? What then?
36.
by nritchie 2y ago
You see this time and time again. A scientist/mathematician/technological leader who thinks because they are the "cat's pajamas" in one field that they are equipped to chime in on another. One example is John Clau
37.
by nritchie 2y ago
Isn't the larger point of this article that errors like this can sneak in and remain dormant for years? Even if this example is old, isn't this lesson still relevant? Expecting that we are now immune from this class of errors be
38.
by nritchie 2y ago
Another way to say this: Eat foods with low glycemic index. Avoid foods that spike blood-sugar levels.
39.
by nritchie 2y ago
No need to get worked up. You can get a RealID compliant driver's license (plastic credit card sized item) or state ID (ditto) You don't need a smart phone.
40.
by nritchie 2y ago
As a bicyclist, I'm constantly told how dangerous bicycles are. Usually, I get a blank look when I explain, bicycles are very safe, it is the cars that are the dangerous part of the equation. Now I'll have to add fast billing am
41.
by nritchie 2y ago
I was waiting for this one. Julia's multiple dispatch and the amazing composability was eye opening. The first time you see exchanging a Measurement for a simple number and returning a computation with uncertainties. Or a Unitful fo
42.
by nritchie 2y ago
Nice idea. It would be great to plan a week's menu using something like this. Currently, we alternate weeks and it ends up being one week of the same 6 recipes and one week with slightly more variety. Then there is the kids who won&#
43.
by nritchie 2y ago
We know that vaccines saved hundreds-of-thousands of lives. It is also possible that they caused a small number of adverse effects (although the signal for this is so deep in the noise to be effectively uninterpretable.) Focusing on the p
44.
by nritchie 2y ago
I'm a physicist whose written substantial projects in both Julia and Rust (and C/C++/Object Pascal/Java/Python/...). I'm also a person who refactors frequently. While my mind was initially blown away by a
45.
by nritchie 2y ago
When I was a freshman (or so) in high-school, our computer lab had just graduated from a time-share terminal to the next-door university to the Apple II. A kid (Ray Tobey) in the next grade up started to code a project to submit to a Byte
46.
by nritchie 2y ago
As a reformed bee-keeper, I've come to understand that it is the native pollinators that really matter. Monarchs and other native pollinators do most of the work. Except in exceptional (and artificial) situations (like almonds in Ca)
47.
by nritchie 2y ago
I understand well where this woman is coming from. Most people who succeed in school succeed because they can memorize. This means most of you on this comment board likely are in the roles you are because you can memorize. Success in sch
48.
by nritchie 2y ago
How about "Pending" and "Complete" for 0% and 100%?
49.
by nritchie 2y ago
I wonder what this would do to the prices of phones? In particular, I wonder if iPhones would be as popular (or as expensive) if people paid the full price up front? I suspect if people paid up front for phones, people wouldn't gravi
50.
by nritchie 2y ago
But if you don't have very many dollars in your pocket, you don't have very much say.
51.
by nritchie 2y ago
One more "doable" for Scott - Campaign finance reform. It doesn't matter who you vote for if when they get to congress, they represent their donors rather than the voters. We could call our current system "free speech&
52.
by nritchie 3y ago
YouTube, like the entire Internet, is such a mixed bag. There is some really first rate content but most of it is total junk. Like Little Richard says "It ain't what you do, it's the way how you do it."
53.
by nritchie 3y ago
1. Zoning laws limit supply 2. Trickle down economics doesn't
54.
by nritchie 3y ago
Of all the beverages to drink, black tea is one of the most benign (usually.) Low calories and moderate amounts of caffeine (compared to coffee or many sodas). For me, tea makes water palatable - black tea with a little milk, no sugar. Fo
55.
by nritchie 3y ago
But they aren't as profitable as a gas guzzling SUV.
56.
by nritchie 3y ago
I do understand why EVs can wear tires faster than gas cars. Because of the low end torque, it is easy (even in the Nissan Leaf I drive) to chirp the tires at the light. However, if you drive moderately (and it is a choice), there is no r
57.
by nritchie 3y ago
Its a different experience in the UK where trespass laws are so different. Here in the land of the free, where we value property rights over freedom of motion, we are restricted to explore only a fraction of the land around us. One man&#x
58.
by nritchie 3y ago
At the end of the day, the number of optimizations that even a JIT can do on Python is limited because all variables are boxed (each time the variable is accessed the type of the variable needs to be checked because it could change) and the
59.
by nritchie 3y ago
Makes you wonder if there was malice involved?
60.
by nritchie 3y ago
How does Project Loom in JDK 21 change this? It seems that Java has expended a lot of effort in implementing low cost virtual threads including all the effort needed to make async truly async throughout the Java runtime library.

More ›