Hacker News Reader

resoon Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?

In Toronto, the 427 is ~100m from the edge of 24R.

resoon Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?

You're making an assumption that the outcome would have been different if that wall wasn't there. You're wrong. 50m past that wall is another wall, 5m after that is a highway.

resoon Why was there a wall near runway at S Korea plane crash airport?

The wall is a red herring. The plane landed halfway down the runway at high speed. Something bad is going to happen if you do that at any runway on earth. In SFO you'll end up in the bay or hit the terminal depending on the orientation. In Toronto you'll crash into a highway. Stop looking at the wall and look at the minutes before the crash.

resoon U.S. Ambassador says Canadians are consuming 'unhealthy' amount of American news

Canadians who visit any major American city for a day think we're basically the same.

Canadians who visit for a year think we are totally different.

resoon The Nature of Consciousness

I believe the speaker, when saying that physicists have stopped asking "what is matter", means that physicists have focused themselves on questions about the rules that govern matter and energy, and not on the question of what meaning these concepts have.

If we imagine nature as a board game to which we don't know the rules, but can see some of the set of pieces set before us and observe their interactions, physics focuses on the question "what are the rules to this game?" Our speaker in this question is asking "what are these pieces made of?"

String theory, as an example, does not posit that particles are made out of strings, it posits that we can model particles mathematically with a structure that we call a "string". In this use of the word, "string" is a metaphor. What the nature of a "string" is--whether it is a coded abstraction in a computer simulation, whether the math is ground truth itself, whether this question is intractable to the human mind--is left up to philosophy.

resoon Coup Attempt in Bolivia

I highly recommend the book "The Jakarta Method" for those interested in this topic area.

resoon Are animals conscious? New research

We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on what it means.

That being said, its obvious to me that many animals have similar emotional complexity to humans, and many outperform humans on some cognitive tasks.

Humans have complex language, and that's about it, to separate us from other animals.

resoon Is it safe to use __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED?

I suspect this is a reference to a famous privacy-related module in the facebook codebase circa 2010ish, which had a docstring something like "DO NOT TOUCH. YOU WILL BE FIRED". Could be a cultural holdover from when react was an internal facebook project.

resoon Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

Silicon Valley culture encourages lying and some of its leaders are the biggest liars. I am more willing to believe that SBF is an earnest product of this culture who got in over his head and caused damage, than that he is some kind of medical outlier.

resoon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (April 2024)

  Location: Waterloo/Toronto, ON
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: For something special.
  Technologies: Seasoned eng leader & past founder, full-stack IC, TS/Express/NextJS, Python/Django/Flask, Postgres/MySQl/Supabase/Redis/etc., Tailwind, Material
  Résumé/CV: garethdmm.com / https://www.linkedin.com/in/garethmacleod/
  Email: gareth.macleod@gmail.com

resoon Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

Sam is a crook, no doubt, but even now I find him a funny figure. His trial defence was awful. He sincerely believes he was trying to do the right thing, so spent his time on the stand defending his actions at length, instead of keeping his mouth shut except to express contrition. This probably cost him years of freedom.

It's strange to say but there's an... authenticity to this that I find endearing.

resoon Boom announces successful flight of XB-1 demonstrator aircraft

Yes. The bet is still that the airlines can find viable routes to fly with a vehicle that creates sonic booms.

resoon Vancouver’s new mega-development is big, ambitious and Indigenous

I say this all as a YIMBY who is very happy to see 20k new units added to vancouver: something feels off about the plans for the Jericho lands but I can't describe it.

I feel like when you have these mega developments where 10 condos go up all at once in the space of a few blocks, they end up as "bedroom neighborhoods", where people sleep but don't do anything else. There are a lot of these happening in Canada right now. There's one on Victoria in Waterloo. Concord place in Toronto is another example. I don't see street life there. I only see people going to or coming from somewhere else.

The best neighborhoods are the ones where there is a broad-strokes master plan, but beneath that, some amount of decentralization in implementation. Then you get a diversity of ideas about how to live all in one place.

Maybe there are words for this I don't know.

resoon OpenAI board reappoints Altman and adds three other directors

Highly recommend people read that NYT article. That the CEO had reported issues with Altman to the board hadn't been previously reported.

Paywall free: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308043717/https://www.nytim...

resoon Ask HN: 57 sales totaling $1,539 for micro-SaaS? Is the idea dead?

Over what time period did you get 57 sales? If it was in a month or two, that's still excellent growth starting from zero.

Do you have any insights about the type of people who paid money for it? I would start from that image of your customers, and then think about where you can find more of them.

If you're generating marketing strategy for non-english speakers, I would figure out a particular vertical that you know exactly where to find those customers, and blast the crap out of it.

resoon Elon Musk sues Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI [pdf]

It's clear that OpenAI has become something that it wasn't intended to be at it's founding. Maybe that change happened for good reasons, but the fact that there was a change is not in doubt.

resoon Majority of workers at Mercedes plant in Alabama sign UAW authorization cards

Concentrated vs. diffuse greed.

resoon Generative Models: What do they know? Do they know things? Let's find out

Not gonna lie I upvoted this post based only on the title.

resoon Nobody ever gets credit for fixing problems that never happened (2001) [pdf]

This is true in a sense but also it isn't. Our institutions spend a lot of resources on preventing things from happening, are successful, and the people who work in these institutions get a paycheque every month.

One could frame the entire US military budget as preventative spend.

resoon OpenAI Deal Lets Employees Sell Shares at $86B Valuation

20x is roughly the revenue multiple between nvidia and open ai and they are businesses with similar margins.

resoon How to feel when your startup feels easy

Agreed, don't sweat the runners high, enjoy it!

resoon I'm an Old Fart and AI Makes Me Sad

I think all of this is legit and one shouldn't feel bad or "old" to say it.

resoon When Laws Make Divorce Easier, Women Benefit, Outcomes Improve (2019)

There’s no conflict between the facts that married people as a population are happier, and also that allowing people to leave marriages also makes them happier.

resoon When Laws Make Divorce Easier, Women Benefit, Outcomes Improve (2019)

Are you suggesting we restrict divorce in order to reduce male suicide?

resoon ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire

I was with you until chinese contested amphibious landing in occupied gaza. China’s big picture strategy is to grow while not being drained by small conflicts the way the US is. This would be totally against that strategy.

resoon Canadian man stuck in triangle of e-commerce fraud

The RCMP is an extremely troubled police force (like many). There was a mass shooting event in 2020 in rural Nova Scotia, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the RCMP response made Uvalde look good in comparison. RCMP officers attacked civilians at a designated safe shelter, failed to warn the public of the danger for 12 hours leading to more deaths, and there is circumstantial evidence that the shooter himself may have been a RCMP confidential informant. There has been no credible investigation or accountability. The podcast Canadaland Commons has an episode on the Portapique incident I highly recommend.

Accountability for police forces and other elements of the criminal justice system seems to be a critical unsolved problem in western societies.

resoon The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

But did they ever even cover their costs? If a business is stable for its current size, and then VCs push you to grow and that kills the company, then yes, that company was killed by VC pressures. However, AFAIK, ello never made much money at all, which is the most proximate reason they failed.

resoon The quiet death of Ello's big dreams

I'm not sure why this post focuses so much on the angel investment. There are probably 10 reasons why Ello failed, starting with the fact that bootstrapping social network userbases is hard, and ending with users won't pay for social networks. None of these are directly related to the fact they built the site with investor money and not volunteer hours.

resoon Maersk ship hit by missile in the Red Sea

Regardless where they get their weapons, Ansar Allah is a battle-hardened, professional fighting force. They have fought the powerful Saudi military to a stalemate. Not a group we should be underestimating.

resoon Biden pardons marijuana use nationwide

Marijuana criminalization was one of the dumber things about the world I was born into. Liberalization of these laws is one of the things I can point to in my life as being noticable progress. The fact that the state continues to destroy lives over simple drug possession is an ongoing tragedy.