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583 karma · joined January 13, 2011

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condiment··on Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s
This belief is completely incorrect. Helmets increase survivability and decrease the degree of injuries in every respect. This is a very well-studied phenomenon with many public and peer reviewed sources. [1]

To respond to the 'nuance' of your remark, that helmets change rider behavior for the worse, resulting in higher aggregate injuries - that is also incorrect. The passage of helmet laws results in significant reductions (20-50%) in head injuries and deaths. These are reductions among the same population, in the same geography, in a short timeframe. It is indisputable.

If the total number of recorded injuries is going up, it's because ridership has increased. Ridership is up for lots of reasons, population growth and health benefits being two of them. Cycling is a terrific way to improve your overall health, even when the risk of injury or death due to cycling is taken into consideration. [2]

And if manufacturers profit from improving the health and safety of a population? Good.

[1] https://newrossgreenway.org/bicycle-helmet-vs-no-helmet-stat... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10546027/

condiment··on "McKinsey in a Box": The End of Strategic Consulting?
What a hot take! If you're in an organization where leadership 'points the finger' at McKinsey to cast blame for an unpopular decision, imagine what sorts of decisions they would have made without the consultants!

Consultants are hired to improve decision quality. They do that through a combination of analysis, experience, and industry connections. The work product is rarely 'powerpoints'. The work product is the actual work, which entails people doing research, making decisions, executing on them, and measuring results.

At any rate, I don't disagree with you that consultants aren't going anywhere. This post is an ad for an immature AI service that makes a bunch of claims about how they've solved for hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs in order to take down McKinsey. If they had solves for those problems, they'd be wasting their effort building a replacement for consulting firms.

condiment··on What's going on with gene therapies?
You're conflating gene therapies vs. the human genome with gene therapies vs. viral genomes. In some cases, the illnesses are genetic, but this article is specifically about how gene therapy companies keep going out of business trying to cure rare genetic illnesses! Even if the technology is the same, the uses are very different and regulatory approval is still required for the application of the technology.

That's not to say there aren't additional ethical challenges that would arise if gene therapies were cheap, but the ethics concerns you're raising seem like future concerns, relevant to a world that does not yet exist.

condiment··on What's going on with gene therapies?
To summarize, the problem with gene therapy is simply that it's extremely expensive and the list of qualified clients is extremely small. That's because these therapies have been necessarily targeted towards ultra-rare and assuredly fatal diseases.

That approach developed the technologies, but what if a mass market approach is what is required to create the economies of scale we need to actually benefit from this science long-term? Consider a cure for the common cold. All of the technology exists. We can take a tissue or fluid sample and extract viral genomes, comparing against a database of over 100k viruses. We can develop MRNA vaccines that target specific viral proteins. We can do both of these things using current technology in a timeframe of less than a day.

To me this is the next great leap. Gene therapy is less a technology problem than it is an infrastructure problem, and rare diseases cannot support the infrastructure. But there are plenty of wealthy people who would pay $10k, maybe even $50k, out of pocket to cancel a cold. Rare diseases bootstrapped the tech, common diseases can scale it, and once scaled, everyone benefits.

condiment··on Plastic bag bans and fees reduce harmful bag litter on shorelines
I think the parent is pointing out that empirically, increases in plastic waste are observed in places where plastic bags are banned.

You are correct there’s no problem with them if they’re used enough, but evidence suggests they do not receive that usage.

condiment··on New Study: Waymo is reducing serious crashes and making streets safer
So, what’s it gonna take for Waymo to start selling retrofit kits for existing cars?

If a $10,000 investment reduces the chances of a serious accident by 90%, the corresponding reduction in insurance rates might have a payoff within a few years. Especially if adoption starts to push rates up for customers who don’t automate. I can’t take a taxi everywhere, but I’d sure like it if my car drove me everywhere and did a better job than me at it too.

condiment··on AI-Generated Voice Evidence Poses Dangers in Court
In this case, chain of custody needs to extend to the capture device itself, and to any software that exists in the supply chain for the video content.

There are some experimental specifications that exist to provide attestation as to the authenticity of media. But most of what I’ve seen so far is a “perjury based” approach that just requires a human to say that something is authentic.

condiment··on Building a personal, private AI computer on a budget
On a 3090 (24gb vram), same prompt & quant, I can report more than double the tokens per second, and significantly faster prompt eval.

    total_duration:       10530451000
    load_duration:        54350253
    prompt_eval_count:    36
    prompt_eval_duration: 29000000
    prompt_token/s:       1241.38
    eval_count:           460
    eval_duration:        10445000000
    response_token/s:     44.04
Fast prompt eval is important when feeding larger contexts into these models, which is required for almost anything useful. GPUs have other advantages for traditional ML, whisper models, vision, and image generation. There's a lot of flexibility that doesn't really get discussed when folks trot out the 'just buy a mac' line.

Anecdotally I can share my revealed preference. I have both an M3 (36gb) as well as a GPU machine, and I went through the trouble of putting my GPU box online because it was so much faster than the mac. And doubling up the GPUs allows me to run models like the deepseek-tuned llama 3.3, with which I have completely replaced my use of chatgpt 4o.

condiment··on Starship Flight 7
FAA launch licenses require substantial liability insurance. 500 million in this case.

https://drs.faa.gov/browse/excelExternalWindow/DRSDOCID17389...

condiment··on I automated my job application process
The flag you want to see from a senior is reasoned examples of how they use it effectively. Ask for stories about successes and failures. By now, everyone has some.
condiment··on Server-Sent Events (SSE) Are Underrated
So it’s websockets, only instead of the Web server needing to handle the protocol upgrade, you just piggyback on HTTP with an in-band protocol.

I’m not sure this makes sense in 2024. Pretty much every web server supports websockets at this point, and so do all of the browsers. You can easily impose the constraint on your code that communication through a websocket is mono-directional. And the capability to broadcast a message to all subscribers is going to be deceptively complex, no matter how you broadcast it.

condiment··on Show HN: I made a tiny device for automatically recording digital pianos
Congrats on the launch, I bought one.

This is a really cool example of ambient technology. Typically when people talk about ambient technology they're talking about something like an e-ink display that is pushing information to you, but in a way that doesn't require interactivity and isn't screaming for your attention. This is a little different in that it's always _receiving_ information from you without any need for interaction or maintenance, except on your terms.

The interaction model is pretty clever too. Since it's collecting data from the instrument they've found a way to cue the device to perform an action without the user needing to open an app. (black keys to bookmark) There is an app of course, but it connects directly to the device, with no annoying setup requirements. I've seen this same approach with several other devices - Xbloom coffee maker, Combustion thermometers, Week Aqua lights - it works really well. I'm understating it. It's astounding how pleasant it is to use devices like this.

As hardware continues to improve I expect this will be the default mode for pretty much every new technology appliance. Ambient operation, local data, local app, with cloud and accounts as _options_ to extend functionality if it's necessary.

condiment··on Even Microsoft Notepad is getting AI text editing now
You’ll be warned when you accept the terms and conditions. And after the first lawsuits, there will be some fine print on the bottom of the page for you to ignore.
condiment··on Exploring 120 years of timezones (2021)
This is unlikely. I work with people all over the world and generally we communicate our own time zone plus the top local time zone for our audience.

In an organization where people are accustomed to indexing their activities to other people who live in a different time zone, it’s actually easier to use the most common time zones than it is to switch everyone to UTC. When using UTC, you have to do the mental gymnastics twice. You first have to relate your own time zone to UTC, and second relate your audience time zone to it. But what happens in practice is that you quickly learn what times in your local time zone correspond to movements of the day in your peer time zones. And because everybody has the same mental model, it’s easier (and less error prone) to just to use local time zones.

condiment··on Cox slows Internet speeds in entire neighborhoods to punish any heavy users (2020)
This reads as though the cable companies aren’t aware of the limitations of their tech and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The last mile isn’t the same as today. Docsis technology continues to improve, more RF channels are being allocated to high speed internet, and cable companies are wholesale replacing their CMTS infrastructure with higher frequency (read: more channels) equipment.

The truth is that only some cable companies make these investments - you can look up “fiber node size” for respective performance across different companies. A fiber node being the place where optical is terminated and switched to coax. These have been getting smaller everywhere, but it only makes sense to invest there when the upstream infrastructure can support it. So from a consumer perspective, your “Linux isos” will be slow to download in any case until the upstream network is upgraded and your node is split to offer higher performance.

condiment··on Startup Mortality Rates
It’s disingenuous to claim that the success rate is .3%. The success rate for the first stage (pre-vc) of venture might be one percent, and the success rate for the next stage (post) is 10 to 25%, depending on how a founder perceives success.

These rates are independent. You can’t aggregate them because the level of effort to secure VC funding is very different from the level of effort required to take a funded start up to unicorn heights.

If I understand your argument to be that startups are relegating themselves to the trash bin because they’re attempting to get attention from venture capitalists at the expense of some fundamental “goodness”, some data supporting that point would be helpful. But that’s not what’s in the article.

condiment··on Drug Development Failure: how GLP-1 development was abandoned in 1990
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsptsci.9b00048

^^ Here's an article written by Lotte Knudsen, referenced in the original post, that further tells the story of how GLP-1 was first developed into a drug (as liraglutide) and approved for human use. There were a lot of false starts and additional practical problems that needed to be solved in order to yield a viable medication.

After reading the OP I was surprised to learn that Novo Nordisk picked up the research only a couple of years after GLP-1 was abandoned by Pfizer, after which it took 5 years to develop the initial medication and another 12 years to make it through FDA approval. Even after all that, the primary indication was for diabetes. It took another 7 years for semaglutide to make it through approvals and bring GLP-1 into the public consciousness.

When you consider the amount of time involved, and the sustained investment required, it's difficult to fault the execs at Pfizer for their decision to shut the project down. Obesity wasn't nearly as prevalent then as it is now, and it seems likely they had funded the startup specifically because of the author's prior research into nasally-administered meds. It's even possible that the shutdown decision had little to do with the primary area of research.

condiment··on Cancer Incidence by Country
It would be useful if the data differentiated by type of cancer. For instance, skin cancer diagnosis is straightforward and inexpensive. Visual identification and a biopsy, led by the patient noticing a difference. Contrast that with pancreatic cancer, which requires imaging for diagnosis.

As it is the only meaningful conclusion to draw from this data is that we need more data.

condiment··on Structured Outputs in the API
I’ve noticed this as well with coding questions. I will give it problematic code and ask a question about behavior, but it will attempt to reply with a solution to a problem. And even if I prompt it to avoid providing solutions, it ignores my instruction and blasts out huge blocks of useless and typically incorrect code. And once it overwhelms my subtle inquiries with nonsense, it gets stuck repeating itself and I just have to start a new session over.

For me this is one of the strongest motivators for running LLMs locally- even if they’re measurably worse, they’re a far better tool because they don’t change behavior over time.

condiment··on Ask HN: Any way to borrow compute from Apple M1
I had to do this fairly recently to make krita-diffusion available for my friends and family who don't have a 3090ti laying around. Probably the simplest way would be to run a local http service on your friend's M1 that is ssh tunneled to a server that you'll access over http. On the server you'll need to reverse-proxy the tunneled port to a public address and port.

You make http requests to the shared server, those get proxied via the ssh tunnel to his machine, and the client on his machine could make the determination when/whether to run the workload.

condiment··on A hydrogen-powered air taxi flew 523 miles emitting only water vapor
This is pretty cool. They built the taxi to do battery operated flights, with the longest flight so far was 150 miles at a top speed of around 200 mph.

For reference, 500 miles is the distance between San Diego and San Francisco. That’s a 90 minute flight that would take closer to 2 1/2 hours with this air taxi. So I suspect that this demonstration is less about any sort of aspiration to replace batteries and fossil fuels with hydrogen, and more a demonstration of an operationally clean burning fuel.

The criticisms that hydrogen is environmentally expensive are valid, but what’s interesting is that the operational use of the vehicle, whether it’s battery or fuel cell, is effectively emissions-free. When the operational fuel is clean, emissions improvements can be centralized. That’s a really big deal.

https://www.jobyaviation.com/news/joby-progresses-next-phase...

condiment··on Reverse engineering Ticketmaster's rotating barcodes
This is trivial and solutions exist in the wild already. If you buy tix for the Paris Olympics, you can transfer them to your friends or you can assign their names to the tickets directly.

The interesting mechanism there is that you can buy a lot of seats at once, but you don’t get to choose where they are exactly, only the section. So in every case you’re going to have people buying big lots of tickets and distributing them to friends and family after the fact.

condiment··on Ask HN: Have coders made stuff complicated on purpose?
It might be helpful to compare the production values and reach of today's software with the software of the past. Yes, software is complex. Yes, it's on purpose. And yes, it's largely necessary. For an indie project a coder is free to relax any number of constraints, which is why we sometimes see incredible work from independent developers and small teams. Sometimes lightning strikes, too. For everyone else, the rules unfortunately apply.

Then: Support a single platform, Windows or Mac

Now: Support Windows, Mac, and Linux, ARM or x86, as well as mobile.

Then: Support a single market

Now: Support a global market with region-specific localization

Then: Write software for wealthy and highly technical early adopters

Now: Write software that anyone in the world could possibly consume

Then: No accessibility

Now: Accessibility requirements for software being codified into law

Then: Zero or low consumer expectations, win by creating something new (blue ocean, lotus123 versus literal paper)

Now: Nearly everything has been done, win by differentiating on comparative quality in a field of options (red ocean, figma vs keynote)

condiment··on Is there ever a good reason to disable swap?
I’ve always disabled swap on my servers. There’s a severe performance penalty when swap is used for a real workload, and that’s far more difficult to diagnose than OOM messages from the kernel. And in every case, swap or not, the resolution is the same. You either get a bigger box, or fix the application.
condiment··on Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone
Disappointing that the article doesn’t show a trend in the dead zone over time. NOAA has a better write up and a forecast for this year. It’s gonna be bigger. Apparently there’s a task force in place already to reduce the size of the hypoxic zone by a factor of three by 2035.

https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-forecasts-above-avera...

Edit found the historical data: https://cdn.coastalscience.noaa.gov/page-attachments/Forecas...

condiment··on Perplexity AI is lying about their user agent
If an AI agent is performing a search on behalf of a user, should its user agent be the same as that user’s?
condiment··on Parable of the Sofa
There's plenty of good furniture out there, made by plenty of good brands that haven't sold out. We seem to have forgotten that brands build cachet for a lot of reasons, quality being only one of them. The main issue today is that we've inadvertently traded off quality for variety - there's a huge variety of furniture being made, in every conceivable style, size, and texture. But if you want good stuff, you have to pay in time and money to get it, and you might not be able to get exactly what you want.

Which is why it's strange to see people surprised that their $3,800 CB2 sectional isn't built to the same standard of quality as a $13,000 Roche Bobois sectional. Especially when they could have easily gone to the showroom and lifted a section up by a corner to learn exactly what they were buying. Or gone online and searched for clones, or called up any interior decorator in the region and just asked "where do I get a good couch?"

condiment··on Tesla Cybertruck deliveries halted for 7 days
Toyota’s unintended acceleration was a yearslong scandal during which many accidents involving Toyotas became national news.

Manufacturers don’t get a bye from safety just because they haven’t sold many units yet.

condiment··on The Apple Vision Pro
Reading this article, it's nice to see I'm not alone in my thinking about the vision pro. Ignoring the remarks on entertainment (it's excellent!), I've believed for several years now that VR headsets are going to replace computer monitors, and the vision pro is a step in the right direction. But a 1:1 monitor projection from my macbook is not quite enough of a benefit to merit the drawbacks of the headset. And it turns out that all of the business software I use is highly interactive, so very little, if anything at all, can be run as a separate native vision pro app.

Teams? I'm not using a persona in a professional setting. Also MSFT's implementation has really low information density. Slack? I need to be able to copy and paste, and the ipad compatibility app stinks. Outlook? Again, the ipad compatibility app is no good. Excel? Give me a break. I had tried the browser first, but it turns out that I have keyboard workflows that are very efficient, and requiring my gaze to shift is no good. To add to it, the gaze tracking highlights controls all over the app when I'm just trying to type, and if I glance at another window for reference, shifts my keyboard and mouse attention.

Multiple monitors projected from a real computer really would be ideal here.

condiment··on Ask HN: IRS section 174 – cause of layoffs?
Two things that I don’t see talked about much with respect to section 174 are the long-term projections and the difference between foreign labor and local labor.

On a five-year time frame, section 174 is equivalent to the existing tax code. You have five years of labor expense, and after five years 100% of it is amortized from a cumulative point of view. So the look of it is that the tax code is favoring companies that are established and survive, which doesn’t seem like so bad of a thing. If your start up is operating at a loss and you don’t have the capital to afford taxes while you’re operating at a loss, It’s a harder road to climb. So from an economic stability point of view, it makes sense to me that you would want startup companies to be well funded and for them to have a business model that doesn’t rely on a tax loophole to cannibalize existing aspects of your economy.

The foreign labor deduction Requiring 15 years of amortization versus five years for local labor is an interesting one too. That is a very clear shot at offshoring and I’d guess is the reason this wasn’t proactively revised.

Most of the analysis is “look at my million dollar ARR business and how bad it is now” but without a time component, that’s a disingenuous take.

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