News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

uolmir

Re:Patrick Stewart has died on Thursday October 29, 2026 @04:25PM (#50295359)
I was scanning the comments for someone to mention this. I, Claudius is a great show and for the many people who mainly know Stewart from Star Trek, his character is a very fun contrast from Picard.
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Thursday October 15, 2026 @10:36AM (#50104306)
This is very funny. But I think it would make me feel like I was working inside of Papers Please or some similar game.
Re:Demystifying Tufte's data-ink ratio – Tufte's Razor on Monday October 05, 2026 @01:27AM (#49961009)
I agree. I think Tufte has good aesthetic judgement and is often right in his criticism of why certain examples of visual data presentation are flawed. But a researcher on this subject he is not.

To your question, I recommend this recent review as one good example: https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956

Re:Remove and Disable Apple Macos27 AI Models Tool on Sunday October 04, 2026 @10:05PM (#49959923)
Aerospace is very good. I'm not some tiling pro but it's been working perfectly for me for a year or so. Such an improvement over just using spaces on macos.
Re:“I just chose words carefully” on Sunday August 30, 2026 @07:35PM (#49503903)
He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.
Re:'We mould trees to grow into the shape of chairs' on Monday May 18, 2026 @09:44AM (#48179836)
So elves in dwarf fortress.
Re:All Look Same? on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @10:26PM (#47069528)
Seriously. I remember distinctly playing with this in 2004-5.
Re:What an unprocessed photo looks like on Sunday December 28, 2025 @06:44PM (#46415677)
This is a great write up. It's also weirdly similar to a video I happened upon yesterday playing around with raw Hubble imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gBXSQCWdSI

He take a few minutes to get to the punch line. Feel free to skip ahead to around 5:30.

Re:Ask HN: What did you read in 2025? on Friday December 26, 2025 @10:50PM (#46398937)
I know what you mean by your comment, but you might want to give catch 22 another try sometime. I'd say that the start with the Texan is far from the best the book gets. Reading it, I think you'll find Yossarian more and more understandable and the situations more and more bleakly comic as you go.

Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.

Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.
Everywhere? This is a crazy thing to claim. I was also recently in Japan and I never took a car anywhere. I'm sure there are particular routes that are badly served but come on.
> In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants.

We're better than this here. Don't spread misinformation. First of all overhead is listed as a percentage, such as 55% or 60% or whatever but the university doesn't get that fraction of the total grant. You work up the so called direct costs, ie the line item salaries of the researchers, the reagents, etc. and then the overhead is 60% of that figure. So it would work out to be 38% of the total dollars granted.

It's also not a trick. It's a negotiated amount that is supposed to avoid each grant requesting some amortized fraction of the cost of office space and other necessary but shared expenses.

I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.

Although that land would have already been under water.
Re:The last step in a long process on "arsenic life" on Thursday July 24, 2025 @03:48PM (#44675197)
Important context to be found in the reporting on this saga, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/science/arseniclife-retra....

In short, the authors and NASA strongly disagree with the decision to retract and argue that this is clearly outside of the typical norms for what retraction is supposed to represent. A paper being wrong isn't and shouldn't be the standard for retraction, particularly in this case when the original paper was published with multiple technical responses and rejoinders.

Re:What's Happening to Reading? on Wednesday July 16, 2025 @05:54PM (#44587216)
One of the best! If memory serves there was a This American Life segment excerpted from it too (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).
From the article this seems much less bad than the headline might imply. This idea predates trump and it does not eliminate scientific review of proposals. That said, whether the cost savings itself is worth what might be a diminishment in review quality is hard to say. I can only comment from the NSF side of things to say that peer review of proposals is a mixed bag and will unavoidably run into human error and individual predispositions regarding scientific importance so maybe this isn't a bad approach to try.
Re:Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal on Saturday February 15, 2025 @10:12AM (#43059043)
There have been several of these deep dives into manipulated speed runs and they seldom disappoint. Since we are on HN, I'll mention another mathy one that was summarized by Matt Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU
Reflections on science in the internet age and a debate on the meaning and appropriate use of retraction.
That's good advice in that context and speaks to the difference in standards of evidence between normal expository or persuasive writing in school and scientific writing. In a scientific paper if you assert something it's important to flag to the reader what kind of claim this is, eg something demonstrated by other research, something that directly follows from your evidence, or something that could possibly be true given prior knowledge and your evidence.
Re:Studying Stones Can Rock Your World on Sunday September 01, 2024 @06:24PM (#41420928)
Very true (I imagine) and similar to the popularity of "roadside geology" books.
Re:Increasing Retention Without Increasing Study Time [pdf] on Saturday August 17, 2024 @12:54PM (#41275869)
This is good stuff but I'll say that it isn't as comprehensive as all that. These studies and findings are almost entirely focused on simple recall knowledge (isolated facts, vocabulary). That's an important part of learning certainly and it informs research on learning higher order concepts but it's not the full story.

Just to name one example, folks might look into research on conceptual change theory (eg Chi or Posner). This theory helps explain why a concept like electricity is so challenging to learn. The reason, in brief, being that naive conceptions make a category error and think of electricity as a thing rather than a process. And this theory then informs instructional practice. Specifically, teachers should be aware of difficult concepts and should design activities that force students to confront the contradictions between their naive models and more accurate/complete ones.

Mickie Chi also has fascinations research on active learning (ICAP) and related work on the effectiveness of peer learning.

Re:We’re ending production of Chromecast on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @11:01AM (#41171522)
This is gonna be me if or when my quite functional dumb LG from 2012 ever gives up the ghost. I just don't see the appeal of smart TVs when that functionality can be outsourced to a cheaper modular device.
Re:Your Driving App Is Leading You Astray on Wednesday July 10, 2024 @10:37AM (#40927388)
I think the author probably exaggerates her point a bit (fair enough; she's an opinion writer), but I do find it appealing to imagine that OpenStreetMap would have broad buy-in and would lead to more innovation and diversity in the digital maps marketplace.
Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @09:47PM (#40871690)
Yeah. I think if I read Dream Machine first I would have enjoyed Wizards less. But some of the history was new to me which meant that I enjoyed Wizards for those aspects and then Dream Machine for the detailed look into why it happened.
Re:Man-Computer Symbiosis by J. C. R. Licklider (1960) on Wednesday July 03, 2024 @12:30PM (#40867550)
It is one of my favorites. I actually came to it via "where wizards stay up late", which I would also recommend although it doesn't have the depth and insight of dream machine.
Re:My finetuned models beat OpenAI's GPT-4 on Monday July 01, 2024 @12:28PM (#40847378)
I don't know your circumstances but often you retain the right to distribute a "post print", ie the final text as published but absent journal formatting. A dissertation should fit that definition.

Older »