HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

yourMadness

52 karma · joined July 28, 2017

submissionscomments
yourMadness··on Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck
Intelligence Is Not the Main Bottleneck - being allowed to apply intelligence to the problem is.

And that has been true for centuries, not just since AI.

Allowing intelligence means ceding control over the outcome. And that is often a bigger issue than the actual issue.

yourMadness··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
It's not physically impossible. But the engineering reality isn't promising.

You'd need micro-meter alignment accuracy across the constellation for optical observation. For radio observation it might be possible - but I'm not sure if it would be useful.

Launching complimentary ordinary space-telescopes would also be good PR.

yourMadness··on Looking Forward to Postgres 19: It's About Time
If you sell a product where the customer can buy the future version today (for delivery in the future), that doesn't work.
yourMadness··on Satellite powered estimation of global solar potential
There are enough panels available to do both and there is no overlap in financing for both. So just do every installation that is economically viable, they don't compete for money or panels.
yourMadness··on Qwen2.5: A Party of Foundation Models
14B with Q4_K_M quantization is about 9 GB.

Remarkable that it is at all comparable to Sonnet 3.5

yourMadness··on Potential ozone depletion from satellite demise during atmospheric reentry
Is there even an estimate of the impact on ozone in the paper?

You don't need a science paper to end up with "letting satellites burn up in the atmosphere results in burned satellite dust in atmosphere", do you?

yourMadness··on The high price of empty office space
How expensive is it to not build a single-purpose building like an office or housing condo in the first place, but a true multipurpose building that can do both well with manageable retooling costs?
yourMadness··on Germany’s solar power generation hit record high at weekend
Some of that is lost due to regulatory 70% limits during peak times.

Also the rated capacity is for some synthetic sun conditions. I have no idea what's the conversion factor between ideal sun in Germany and the PV rating sun.

yourMadness··on API Mismatch: Why bolting SQL onto noSQL is a bad idea
It seems fairly well shown that the "SQL stuff" can be build on top of it on the server side.

Building the "SQL stuff" on the client side seems less well proven to me.

yourMadness··on Analyzing Carbon Dioxide levels while attending IETF-115 in London, UK
You could add 80% nitrogen and 20% oxygen to dilute the CO2 to the desired level.

But that's not exactly easy or cheap. And dangerous when done wrong.

yourMadness··on Dear startups: I hate subscription services (2021)
Would you use a service that converts subscriptions into one time purchases at 20x the yearly subscription cost?
yourMadness··on First human injected with cancer-killing virus in clinical trial
The control group is needed to measure process properties / systematic error.

It does not need to be a placebo group. Previous data at the same hospital does not help because the regular medicine does not run according to study protocols.

yourMadness··on Storing UTC is not a silver bullet (2019)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time just was ahead of its time.
yourMadness··on Images of the the samples returned to earth from the asteroid Ryugu
Asteroids on earth have been changed by the environment on earth. Part of it during entry, part of it during impact, part just lying there for long times.

The Ryugu sample provides an opportunity to check our understanding of the changes that happened to asteroids on earth.

yourMadness··on SpaceX Starship SN4 launch vehicle prototype explodes after static engine test
You care too much about the vehicle. What they are testing isn't the vehicle, they are testing the production processes.

I'm confident the vehicle design will work once they get a handle on the production. They got really good simulation tools for the vehicle flight part of the problem.

yourMadness··on The McDonnell Douglas-Boeing merger led to the 737 Max crisis
Of course the customer accepts the lower quality.

Dying once every 10 million flight hours instead of every 1000 million flight hours is a fair price to pay for 10 USD of savings.

yourMadness··on Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters: Time Series
For the evaluation of costs of prevention measures it is exactly the right way to measure it, isnt it?

Prevention measure cost dollars are identical to catastrophe damage cost dollars.

yourMadness··on Energy Storage Investments Boom as Battery Costs Halve in the Next Decade
Whatever seems useful. Or do the inverse of the power satellite idea: send the excess energy to space as microwaves.
yourMadness··on A new book critiques medicine
Modern medicine has some aspects that are miraculously good and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that those are representative for all of medicine. It's a kind of halo effect bias.

In my opinion the most amazing thing still is antibiotics (and vaccination). Treatmeant of war/vehicle/sports injuries taking the second place (including anesthetics). Both can take people from a path of sure death within hours or days to often complete recovery within weeks or months.

If that is the performance expectation of the general public for all of medicine, then it certainly is overrated.

yourMadness··on Tesla’s Autopilot was engaged when Model 3 crashed into truck, report states
That might very well be the case.

Still we as a society usually decide not ban things that hurt only irresponsible people. There is an exception to this for children, but they are banned from driving already.

If the autopilot crashes start resulting in a number of deaths outside of the drivers car that might shift the public opinion.

yourMadness··on Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
For those of you that want to see the data behind this story: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p...

I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years.

There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies. None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.

yourMadness··on 'Big Data' Has Come to Mean 'Small Sampled Data'
Why spend years learning those results when you can ignore them at no cost?

And have a happy client that finally gets the results he wanted when the other analysts said it was impossible.

yourMadness··on OpenAI Five Benchmark: Results
Reaction time is usually measured as time from stimulus to a button press.

For many things in Dota you also need to move the mouse cursor to a specific point on the screen which obviously takes longer than just pressing a button.

yourMadness··on Comparing the C FFI overhead in various programming languages
Or just unroll the loop a few times.