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Many of the advances in biology in the middle of the 20th century were also helped along by physicists who switched to biology, often inspired by Schrodinger's What is Life? (1946). The list includes Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and (coming from physical chemistry) Rosalind Franklin.

> AI might give them good reasons for pros and cons.

This is what lawyers do, in their briefs and oral arguments before the court.


True. But if I was a judge I might want to consult AI to get a "neutral" opinion.


AI "neutrality" is a mirage. Hopefully the Supreme Court justices are smart enough to know that.


Hopefully. If they are smart they know that everybody can be wrong, therefore it is good to hear differing opinions and argumentation from multiple sources, in important matters.


Yes, that’s why they have lawyers submit briefs and make oral arguments.

I was very pleasantly surprised when they sent me free replacement hardware to reassemble an old ikea twin bed model that had been discontinued a number of years ago. I assume they use the same hardware in other models they still sell.


It's not cheap, though. Two weeks ago I bought a computer with a similar form factor (GMKtec G10). Worse CPU and GPU but same 16GB memory and a larger SSD for 40% the price of a base mac mini ($239 vs $599). It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to install linux. Even a used (M-series) mac mini is substantially more expensive. It will cost me about an extra penny per day in electricity costs over a mac mini, but I won't be alive long enough for the mac mini to catch up on that metric.

I considered the mac mini at the time, but the mac mini only makes sense if you need the local processing power or the apple ecosystem integration. It's certainly not cheaper if you just need a small box to make API calls and do minimal local processing.


It's cheap for what you get.

If you just need "a small box to make API calls and do minimal local processing" you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.

All 3 serve a different purpose; just because you can buy a slower machine for less doesn't mean the price:performance of the M1 Mac Mini changes.


> you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price of the GMKtec G10.

Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.

A 16gb pi5 kit, to match just the RAM capacity to say nothing of the difference in storage {size, speed, quality} and networking, is then also an eye watering $300


>Sadly not really. The Pi 5 8gb canakit starter set, which feels like a more true price since it's including power supply, MicroSD card, and case, is now $210. The pi5 8gb by itself is $135.

At that point buy a used macbook air m1.


>you an also just buy a RPI for a fraction of the price

lol. you need to look at rpi 5 prices again. they are insane.


If you need the CPU power in the Mac Mini then it is a pretty good price-to-performance ratio.


> It came with Windows preinstalled, but I immediately wiped that to install linux.

Do you really need Openclaw now? And not claude code + zapier or Claude code + cron?

That's the point. If you have worse CPU and GPU Windows will be sluggish (it's bloated).


That’s a big “if” at the end. You can always make a computer cheaper “if” you strip down what you need to do with it.

The Mac mini strangely is and has been a very good deal for years now.


This site is extremely uncomfortable to read on mobile (iOS).


The "hide distracting items" option is the best thing Apple has done lately. Unfortunately there's not anything worth your time once you get that nav out of the way.


it also contains no "manifesto" ...

-tracker, -alert or -status would be more proper titles.


+2 android


At least nobody can accuse them of not dogfooding enough.


A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).


I heard circles are also related to pi but have not had the time to confirm yet.


Pies are more of a Tau day thing https://www.tauday.com


Sure would be a lot easier if we could just have “4 right angles”-day


That's a pi-ty


> A friend of mine tries to bake a spherical pie for pi day (March 14) each year, with varying approaches (and levels of success).

Could also do it on pi approximation day (July 22), then one doesn't have to be so exact about it.


Now I'm considering making a Matt Parker pie: a spherical pie made from a normal pie + calling it close enough in 2 out of 3 dimensions.


So a "Parker square" of pies then?


I didn't get it, so I looked it up.

22/7 ~= 3.14


355 / 113

( = 3.1415929204 )

is one approximation I have read about, attributed by some, to ancient or medieval Indian or Chinese mathematicians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approximations_of_pi


Actually closer to π and matches the more sensible date format.

(Yes this is worth fighting over!)


while true that month being 1st making little sense, the good format usually features leading zeros, so '22/07'


There are some old 18th century pies they cooked in boiling water inside a bag which could be quite spherical. Townsends on youtube has some videos on it.


Isn’t that essentially a stuffed pudding? Or do some use pie dough


From what I understand many of the pie doughs of the period were the same thing as pudding dough, everyone had a pot to boil stuff in and it was just extra if you had an oven and pie pans, sometimes with noted cooking times for a pan at the end. The that era of American cooking kind of blends puddings and pies so that they mean basically the same thing. Similar someone making a pan fried rice recipe today and just adding on the end of the recipe if you are fancy and own an actual wok you can adjust cooking times for that.


The first two things that spring to mind are pasties from the UK (which are not usually spherical but can get quite hemispherical), and the "UFO-Döner" from Germany (which are more oblate spheroids). Maybe by combining these ideas, your friend can get closer to their dream?


Beef Wellington could be spherical if you so chose.

I suspect that deep-fried-battered haggis might exist which could be very spherical.


British steak and kidney pudding (a steamed pie of suet pastry) is a truncated cone shape, could go spherical with the right pastry case.


A truncated cone is called a "frustrum" which always seemed fitting to me.


I wonder if they could look to dim sum for inspiration? A apple dumbling is basically just a round apple pie right?


Heating the middle has to be a pain. And cutting it…


I’m pretty sure that the state of the art right now is firing the pastries on a ballistic arc in hard vacuum and hitting them mid-trajectory with a laser pulse to cook them through.


Well if you insert metal rods through it you can help with the heat transfer, then you can lattice over the holes. If you pumpkin pie it, you might even be able to have it hold up under its own weight. Plus a bit of stiff whipped cream in the holes would help.


I would make them fairly small (personal pie-sized) and use a filling that doesn't need to be cooked in the oven to set. The main limiting factors, I think, would be structural integrity and heating the filling to the center. You could set it on a ring (like the rim of a spring-form pan) to support it better during cooking. Now, a four dimensional hyper pie, on the other hand...


If you’re not cooking the filling, then do a teflon ballon that you put the crust on. Cook. Remove balloon. Then pipe in ready to ready to set chocolate cream.


One of those spherical ice cube makers but made of cast iron, a little like those little waffle makers.


I don’t think those will work, you want the outer surface to be crispy. The dough’s gotta go on the outside of the sphere.


I would bake it on a pizza stone to ensure an even bake.

Has nobody here ever done this? It comes out perfectly cooked.


You cook a spherical pie on a pizza stone? Do tell.


I cook a circular pie on a pizza stone.


If we don't care what the filling is you could just use sticky rice.


A pie like this, to the face of a problematic politician, would add drama and help resurrect the profile of pies as activists!


One could always precook the filling.


Is there? I followed the link[1] to the original author of the desktop software this web app is derived from, and he says:

> To make a long story short, by the third generation of ReferenceFinder (written in 2003), I had incorporated all 7 of the Huzita-Justin Axioms of folding into the program, allowing it to potentially explore all possible folding sequences consisting of sequential alignments that each form a single crease in a square of paper. Of course, the family tree of such sequences grows explosively (or to be precise, exponentially); but the concomitant growth in the availability of computing horsepower has made it possible to explore a reasonable subset of that exponential family tree, and in effect, by pure brute force, find a close approximation to any arbitrary point or line within a unit square using a very small number of folds.

(emphasis added)

[1] https://langorigami.com/article/referencefinder/


There's brute force involved, but it's not brute force by itself. It's like a chess engine, which yes, it checks thousands of positions, but only after filtering out hundreds of thousands of positions.


Are you involved in writing or maintaining this software? If so can you provide some more details on this “filtering”? Because I skimmed the source code [1] and it looks to me like it’s pure brute force building a database of lines and points up to a certain rank (number of operations required to create that line/point) and then searching through it.

[1] https://github.com/MuTsunTsai/reference-finder-cpp/blob/main...


No, you are right. The author even uses the expression "by pure brute force". I just supposed it would given that virrually every number a user would input is constructible with foldings.


The CBO estimates [1] that foreign exporters bear 5% of the burden of the tariffs, with American consumers bearing the remaining 95%:

> [T]he net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)

This is a serious document written by a bunch of serious economists. You can find a list of them at the bottom of the page. That you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false" should give you pause.

[1] https://www.cbo.gov/publication/62105#_idTextAnchor050


> you have written their conclusion off as "transparently false"

I didn't say that. I said that the common argument that tax/tariff increases are always passed along 100% to consumers is transparently false. And contrary to your criticism, the cited paper agrees with my claim (in this case, while my claim is general):

"In CBO’s assessment, foreign exporters will absorb 5 percent of the cost of the tariffs, slightly offsetting the import price increases faced by U.S. importers. In the near term, CBO anticipates, U.S. businesses will absorb 30 percent of the import price increases by reducing their profit margins; the remaining 70 percent will be passed through to consumers by raising prices."

It goes on to say that other businesses, whose costs haven't increased, will raise prices - which is not at all 'passing along costs to consumers' but a different dynamic - and that the combined two dynamics yield the overall consumer impact equal to 95% of tariff costs:

"In addition, U.S. businesses that produce goods that compete with foreign imports will, in CBO’s assessment, increase their prices because of the decline in competition from abroad and the increased demand for tariff-free domestic goods. Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."

I think the tariffs are a big mistake but the argument I was addressing - if you tax businesses then consumers effectively pay the tax - is widespread disinformation.


The final quoted portion doesn't seem to agree with your final statement though?

> Those price increases are estimated to fully offset the 30 percent of price increases absorbed by U.S. businesses that import goods, so the net effect of tariffs is to raise U.S. consumer prices by the full portion of the cost of the tariffs borne domestically (95 percent)."

The idea expressed previously in your excerpts is that domestically-produced US goods do increase their revenues by the amount that their produced-abroad competitors. So things are okay from that perspective.

But what that final quotation says is that those increased revenues are 95% paid for by US consumers. In other words, they "effectively pay the tax."


Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.

[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...


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