Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | throwup238's commentslogin

> You cannot prove it, but it's a good enough guess.

You can guess that now in the 21st century, but we're talking about illiterate peasants who never traveled past their nearest market center. It's naive to assume we can even possibly empathize with their epistemological outlook.

For example, just look at the medieval sources about barnacle geese from the 13th century (from the educated class):

> Barliates, as Aristotle says, grow from wood, and are birds which the common people call 'barnesques', having a similar nature. [1] (I chose a short quote to make a point but please read the rest of the source, it's hardly an allegorical text)

They didn't have the concept of falsifiability or anything even remotely resembling the scientific process (or critical thinking, for the most part). The literate were obsessed with the classics and just took Aristotles and Ptolemy's word for everything, until Copernicus and Kepler had their way. Anything resembling scientific knowledge filtered down to the peasants or came from old wives tails entirely.

Even now with almost universal literacy we have a significant fraction (if not majority) of the population believing in ridiculously stupid nonsense like astrology. I don't find it hard to believe that people thought that geese's life cycle included barnacles.

[1] https://www.medievalbestiary.bestiary.ca/beasts/beastsource1...


> old wives tails

Please, can I have that for my typo collection?


I only know how it’s used for psoriasis as part of the Goeckerman method [1] but allegedly there’s some general anti-inflammatory effect.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3735239/


It's mildly anti-fungal as well, which makes it effective in dandruff shampoo since a lot of dandruff is caused by fungal overgrowth, aka seborrheic dermatitis.

Another weird/fun one is using bleach as an anti-inflammatory (topical only, of course...), although these days you can find derivative products that offer the same benefits but are much less harsh.


I take a mild bleach bath sometimes and it’s quite invigorating. Seems to kill off a lot of skin surface bacteria which can sometimes be beneficial (there’s good and bad bacteria on your skin).

Not to be done too often but every once in a while I find it helpful. Not all that different from a strongly chlorinated pool.

Another cool one, especially if you don’t have a sauna, is doing a mustard bath. You will sweat like a stuck pig


> ... doing a mustard bath.

So many questions...

American, English, or Dijon?

*Sponsored by Heinz? ;)


piss on your feet (not in the sauna)

Ethernet is already one of the most expensive standards because you need magnetics for isolation. Adding power on top of that is genuinely expensive.

Any chance all of that will be sent to the Internet Archive or Archive Team?

That would crush latency on RAM.

The RAM and CPU would still be on the same card together, and for the typical case of a single GPU it would just be 16x lanes direct from one to the other.

For cases where there are other cards, yes there would more contention, but few expansion cards are able to saturate more than a lane or two. One lane of PCIe Gen5 is a whopping 4 GB/s in each direction, so that theoretically handles a dual 10gige NIC on its own.


What they’re describing is a polymorphic virus. A great analogy for SV startups.

It works great in assembly, not so much for higher level languages.


Is all polymorphic code virii?

Not necessarily, but in practice no one has any use for the technique except to obfuscate viruses, with the exception of academic research.

The nonvirus equivalent is JITs which are present in all major browsers and tons of other runtimes, but they have no use for polymorphism except at a theoretical level (they all use it extensively, but at the type level).


I fought with polymorphic code quite a bit back when I was removing copy protection (many decades ago). There may be other cases where making debugging hard is desirable.

Great point! I forgot about copy protection.

Although in my defense, in my line of work that’s indistinguishable from a rootkit :)


That’s not even the complex part. Most of what you describe is a user interface issue, not a geometric kernel issue.

The hard part of 3 corners fillets is the tolerances. Each of those fillet operations has its own compounding float errors and when they meet, the intersection is so messy that they often do not intersect at all. This breaks almost every downstream algorithm because they depend on point classification to determine whether an arbitrary point is inside the manifold, outside, or sitting on an edge or vertex.

And that description of the problem is just scratching the surface. Three corner filets create a singularity in UV space at the common vertex so even when you find a solution to the tolerance problem you still have to deal with the math breaking down and a combinatorial explosion of special cases, almost each of which has to be experimentally derived.


when i did openscad, i just did a minowski hull with a 4sided bipyramid (aka rotated cube) to get chamfers for my cubes.

bonus: minowski hull with a round pyramid adds chamfers in the vertical and fillets in the horizontal, which is what i want for 3d printing most of the time. additionally it closes small overhangs, and it makes fonts smoother (i.e. fonts don't extrude in a 90degree angle, and get 45degree instead, and print better on vertical faces)

disclaimer: I havent used openscad for about a year and my memory may be fuzzy

edit: i am not saying minowsky hull would directly solve your problem, but maybe the algorithm gives you inspiration to solve your numerical issues


OpenSCAD is mesh based so it's not even in the same universe as a proper brep geometric kernel. Everything is easier when you give up on the math entirely, but that’s not good enough for real world manufacturing and simulation.

All of the major commercial geometric kernels have been working on these problems for thirty years and I’m sorry, but your five minutes experience with a glorified tessellator isn’t going to make progress on long standing computational geometry problems.


  >that’s not good enough for real world manufacturing and simulation
Dumb question: why not?? It's working for that guy and his 3D printer apparently, which is "real world" (though one could certainly argue it's not proper "manufacturing").

In theory pi has infinite places, sure . In real-world practice (vs math-lympics) you never need more than 100 digits, and indeed you rarely ever actually need more than 5.

Why doesn't it work to "just" throw more bit-width and more polygons at it? Who out there actually needs more than that (vs who just thinks they do)?


The answer boils down to “floating point math” and “discontinuities”.

> indeed you rarely ever actually need more than 5.

That’s not how math works. With every operation the precision falls, and with floats the errors accumulate. What was five digits quickly becomes 3 digits and now you’ve got three surfaces that are supposed to, but don’t technically intersect because their compounding errors don’t overlap even though the equations that describe them are analytically exact. Modern geometric kernels have 3 to 7 tolerance expansion steps that basically brute force this issue when push comes to shove.

Once you have these discontinuities, a lot of critical math like finite element modeling completely breaks down. The math fundamentally depends on continuous functions. Like I mentioned above, three corner filets create a singularity in parametric space by default, so even the core algorithms that kernels depend on to evaluate surfaces break on a regular basis on basic every-day operations (like a box with smoothed edges - aka almost every enclosure in existence)

> Who out there actually needs more than that (vs who just thinks they do)?

I can’t stress this enough: almost everyone. CAD isn’t one of those fields where you can half ass it. Even the simplest operations are bound to create pathological and degenerate cases that have to be handled, otherwise you have a pile of useless garbage instead of a 3d model.

Slicers deal with meshes, like video game renderers, not boundary representations like CAD kernels. There is effectively zero overlap. Even just tessellation, the step that converts brep to mesh, is significantly harder than anything 3d printing software has to do.


Join SolveSpace development? ;-)

This is why geometric kernels are the gateway to madness. ;) Thanks for the clarification.

> I known there is research out there (can't dig it up at the moment), but the goal would probably be to generate a robust geometric query for a selected item, so that small changes in the model don't affect which edge gets selected after subsequent operations.

There is quite a bit of research that this is impossible. No matter what algorithm or heuristic you use, the second that symmetry is introduced, the query breaks down. The only way to resolve those issues is to present them to the user as an underspecified constraint, and no geometric kernel is well designed to do that.


What strategy are you using for tolerances, compounding errors, and the nuances of floating point math?

This was already common in tech for Series C+ fifteen years ago when I raised a round. Once you’re talking tens or hundreds of millions, almost everyone wants milestones and tranches instead of giving all the money up front.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: