Hacker News Reader

anon_123g987on Mercedes and Ferrari’s edge in the electric car age: high-end axial motors

In 2021, worldwide, Tesla had 21% of the purely electric market and 14% of the plug-in market, down from the previous year's 23% and 16%, respectively.

Source: https://insideevs.com/news/564800/world-top-oem-sales-2021/

anon_123g987on A dad took photos of his toddler for a doctor – Google flagged him as a criminal

Why would you assume a crime by default? The presumption of innocence is only a slogan in the US, just like the above mentioned secularity. Look what happened with the guy in this post. You can't even take a photo of your own kid.

anon_123g987on Exponential Smoothing: faster and more accurate than NeuralProphet

In theory, his version is right. In practice, yours.

anon_123g987on Why Nagasaki? (2013)

Racist take: if one Japanese bayonets a child, we should nuke them all.

anon_123g987on Why Nagasaki? (2013)

"Jap" is not simply short for "Japanese", but a racial slur. Edit your comment while you can. (Or maybe remove it entirely.)

anon_123g987on How fast is 12th Gen Intel Core?

This is from an AnandTech interview with Jim Keller: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16762/an-anandtech-interview-...

anon_123g987on Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

That's my point. Without additional context, humans would make the same mistakes. Having all information that humans have, this AI could perform at human level.

One of the hardest aspects of software development is communicating with the customer, for humans and AI alike. But a translation from layman English to machine code has to happen, at some point.

anon_123g987on Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

That's a good one.

BTW, it's case sensitive:

"on independence day": “At 12:00 AM, only on Thursday, only in July” (0 0 * 7 4)

"On Independence Day": “At 12:00 AM, on day 4 of the month, only in July” (0 0 4 7 *)

anon_123g987on Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

But isn't translating from English (or some other natural language) is what a programmer does when constructing a regular expression or a cron job? So it is possible, although humans make mistakes, too. Maybe fewer, or different mistakes than "AI", but still, fundamentally it's the same.

Maybe an alternative to natural language processing could be pattern recognition from a number of user supplied examples, and its expression in an unambiguous domain language. That's also what programmers do.

anon_123g987on Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

Always: “Every minute”

Sometimes: “Every hour”

Once in a blue moon: “At 12:00 AM, on day 18 of the month, only in February”

On my birthday: “At 12:00 AM”

On Christ's birthday: “At 12:00 AM, on day 25 of the month, only in December”

anon_123g987on HypeScript: Simplified TypeScript type system in TypeScript's own type system

I like the idea, but I'd recommend the name "ToffeeScript".

anon_123g987on Bluetooth remains an 'unusually painful' technology after two decades

We just learned that any Bluetooth device can detect it easily.

anon_123g987on Volkswagen enters battery business with $20B investment

"20 MPG is about 0.1 square millimeters," according to https://what-if.xkcd.com/11/. "If you took all the gas you burned on a trip and stretched it out into a thin tube along your route, 0.1 square millimeters would be the cross-sectional area of that tube."

It's simple dimensional analysis (https://xkcd.com/687/).

anon_123g987on James Webb Space Telescope White House Briefing

Angular Diameter Turnaround: https://xkcd.com/2622/.

anon_123g987on Virgil: A fast and lightweight programming language that compiles to WASM

Harmonizing Classes, Functions, Tuples and Type Parameters in Virgil III.: https://research.google/pubs/pub41446.pdf

From OO to FPGA: Fitting round objects into square hardware?: https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/paper/oopsla10.pdf

Vertical Object Layout and Compression for Fixed Heaps: https://web.cs.ucla.edu/~palsberg/paper/cases07.pdf

Virgil: Objects on the Head of a Pin: https://escholarship.org/content/qt13r0q4fc/qt13r0q4fc.pdf

I found these with https://scholar.google.com/.

anon_123g987on 7-zip 22.00 – APFS, Posix TAR, high precision timestamps

For me, finding the exact licence (LGPLv2) on the SourceForge page was literally one click away: under the first tab labelled "Summary". Not too bad.

anon_123g987on A lightning bolt would be worth only about a nickel (2015)

While it's true that the power of a human is not much (certainly not enough to power a house), but we have a lot of energy. Most of us carries at least 1 kg (~2 lbs) fat, which contains ~37 MJ of energy. For comparison, a stick of dynamite has ~1 MJ of energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat#Biological_importance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite#Form

anon_123g987on Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice?

According to my dictionary, the pronunciation of "libretto" (an imported, but already established English word) in IPA is [lɪbr'etoʊ]. We can extrapolate from this.

anon_123g987on Why is Apache clinging to OpenOffice?

> in most people's vocabulary

In (monolingual) English speakers vocabulary.

anon_123g987on AI Wrote and Performed a Jerry Seinfeld Routine [video]

It doesn't have a laugh track to prompt you. Here is [Seinfeld / Laugh Track Removed: Soup Nazi](https://yewtu.be/watch?v=23M3eKn1FN0).

anon_123g987on How Good Is DALL-E Mini at Origami?

Don't overestimate humans. Most people (adults, not toddlers) can't even draw a bicycle, even if they used one for most of their lives, so presumably they have a conceptual understanding of how it looks and works.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3059089/it-turns-out-its-almost-...

anon_123g987on What Happened to RSS?

Thanks! I just found this: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. Perfectly hidden on the site itself. That's what happened to RSS.

anon_123g987on Last public payphone removed from Manhattan streets

From an interview with the directors:

Sinclair: Why were they only able to jack in through hard-lines, but still able to communicate over cell?

WachowskiBros: Sinclair, good question! Mostly we felt that the amount of information that was being sent into the Matrix required a significant portal. Those portals, we felt, were better described with the hard lines rather than cell lines. We also felt that the rebels tried to be invisible when they hacked that’s why all the entrances and exits were sort of through decrepit and low traffic areas of the Matrix.

The full interview: https://www.matrixfans.net/movies/the-matrix/wachowski-broth...

More speculation by a fan about this: https://screenrant.com/matrix-phone-hard-line-enter-exit-exp...

anon_123g987on Reward Is Enough (2021)

The claim here is even stronger, and somewhat different: that suffering and reward are fundamentally different kind of things, and cannot simply undo each other, not at any exchange rate. The difference is qualitative, not quantitative. For example, if you lose your eyesight, it's such a big loss, that most likely nothing can balance it out ever. It has no "five times as good" equivalent.

anon_123g987on Reward Is Enough (2021)

In the simpler case you are optimizing on a single scale between maximum suffering and maximum happiness.

In the proposed, more complex case you have two independent scales, the suffering scale (on which you want to primarily minimize), and the happiness scale (on which you want to secondarily maximize).

anon_123g987on Reward Is Enough (2021)

"Negative utilitarianism is a form of negative consequentialism that can be described as the view that people should minimize the total amount of aggregate suffering, or that they should minimize suffering and then, secondarily, maximize the total amount of happiness. It can be considered as a version of utilitarianism that gives greater priority to reducing suffering (negative utility or 'disutility') than to increasing pleasure (positive utility). This differs from classical utilitarianism, which does not claim that reducing suffering is intrinsically more important than increasing happiness."

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

anon_123g987on Removing blur from images – deconvolution and using simple image filters

There's no simple and easy way as far as I know, but there are many approaches both for blur detection and automatic correction (kernel estimation). It's called blind deconvolution.

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

anon_123g987on Removing blur from images – deconvolution and using simple image filters

I think the most famous example of using this technique, that's maybe easier to remember and refer later, is the correction of the flawed mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope.

https://www.nasa.gov/content/hubbles-mirror-flaw

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_...

anon_123g987on Removing blur from images – deconvolution and using simple image filters

The paper:

O. Keleş, E. Anarım: Adjustment of Digital Screens to Compensate the Eye Refractive Errors via Deconvolution.

Link to PDF:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emin-Anarim/publication...

anon_123g987on Bolt announces layoffs

From user throwaabolt's profile page:

"troll account. didn't actually get laid off from bold. curious to see how long it takes HN to realize this."