Hacker News Reader

Aronon Tesla big battery defies skeptics

I'm not the biggest fan of Tesla, but they might be the most impressive company of this decade

Out of curiosity, why do you think you included 'not the biggest fan'?

Aronon Is ‘Oumuamua an alien spacecraft? First scans show no signs of technology

So if this was the movie Gravity, we could just scoot voyager over to see it as it passes by.

Aronon 512-year-old Greenland shark may be the oldest living vertebrate on Earth

Article also discusses the required preparation for safely eating said shark.

Aronon E Pur Si Muove

> "If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment"

This one has been around FOREVER but he was surprised to hear it this year? doubtful. I think Sam actually picked safe examples for his contrarian essay. e.g Notably absent Damore.

Aronon F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

I hope all the loud voices that are against this move have codified their predictions in a way that they can look back and see if they were accurate.

Aronon Nearly 5M Americans in Default on Student Loans

"A debt is just the perversion of a promise...."

That entire quote reads as completely incoherent to me. I feel like I would have to learn entirely new brands of logic and language to decipher it.

Aronon What if a bulk of Bitcoin owners all try to cashout today?

A rush for the exits at 10 global transactions per second, or about the rate of Visa transactions in a Manhattan city block at lunch time.

Aronon The Latest Bull Case for Electric Cars: The Cheapest Batteries

Government policy would cave-in if the private companies lacked innovation and told them it was impossible. You need existence proofs like Tesla, who are highly leveraged to making EVs work and don't care a wit about preserving the old business.

Aronon Capsule Networks Tutorial [video]

I think if you have good natural instincts about artificial intelligence you realize that Hinton really is the god in this space. If you don't, you get distracted by LeCunn and Schmidhuber and whatever lesser minds. The capsule theory here is maybe not the best implementation, but the intuition behind it is still leading the way. The undifferentiated mass of neurons is not how evolution has solved our problems. 3d geometry is intrinsic to the low level design. It shouldn't be learned. It should be assumed.

I reject your generic devotion to process. The real leadership and the process are far different. The process of peer review might do a good job of rejecting bad ideas, but it does a lousy job of accepting revolutionary ideas. I bet you don't understand the difference.

Aronon Britain has abandoned its claim to be the world's fifth largest economy

I'm mostly only interested when they pass us on per capita income. It is notable though that some of their megacorps are achieving valuations akin to our largest. Maybe some day they will have a global brand.

Aronon Show HN: Boltzmann Machines in TensorFlow with Examples: RBM, DBM, AIS

I remember writing the RBM in straight CUDA back in ~2008. Back then we had to do our tensor work uphill both ways against the gradient.

Aronon Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

Gah -- reminds me of the press at the time talking about detectable radiation on the West Coast of the US. Yeah -- you know what else is detectable radiation? Stars from light-years away. I was shocked to see Germany respond so strongly to Fukushima. I think fortunately for the world solar and wind have become so cheap we can give up on making the world more rational about nuclear power.

Aronon Tesla Semi

He wasn't saying that air resistance is currently a problem. The current problem is that the robots don't move fast enough for air resistance to be a problem. He's basically pushing the question 'Going faster is obviously good. What happens if we go really really fast?'

Aronon Boston Dynamics has a new creepy dog-like robot called SpotMini

My memory of this was that Google PR thought that humanoid robots might end up leading to associations with automation and job destruction. Also, it was never clear to me how much influence the PR position had vs. other reasons.

Aronon Google A.I. researchers develop alternative architecture for neural networks

Can anyone give an intuitive explanation for why standard CNNs are unable to learn geometry?

Aronon Entrepreneurs Aren’t a Special Breed – They’re Mostly Rich Kids

People generally don't give money away for nothing, and spend it carefully, so when someone figures out how to get a lot of people to pay them for something, I figure that's pretty high evidence they've done something helpful. Certainly exceptions exist.

Aronon Bob Lutz: Kiss the good times goodbye

I agree with this 90 year old codger, and that's why Tesla should stay profitless for another 10 years. The real prize is ahead.

Aronon Entrepreneurs Aren’t a Special Breed – They’re Mostly Rich Kids

Entrepreneurs are good so I guess we need more rich kids. I'll assume that was the conclusion.

Aronon Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

Think about it, if you have even the remotest capability in reading DL research and simultaneously a decently impressive ability to gab, you can sell a startup idea to GM/Ford/etc. for billions on no real insight. Of course some of these people are gonna stew angrily about whether their 500k compensation is the limit. I bet anyone making that 300k+ at Netflix thinks they could easily do some basic spinoff utilizing their main job objective and further they could use the Netflix background as a credential. It gets ludicrous, but you'll never have much better than what Netflix right now is achieving in employee satisfaction. In fact it's a wonder it's so good.

Aronon Batteries with 50 per cent more energy with pure silicon anode

I agree that cobalt is a fairly small proportion of the total cost of the vehicle. Tesla should be able to weather many multiples in the increase in cobalt price. I'm more worried about the dreadful notion of a complete supply disruption (akin to 70s oil crisis). I don't think this is a common situation and is generally unlikely in most markets but with cobalt there is a confluence of factors that seems to make it more likely: the byproduct of nickel/copper effect, the political factor in DNC, the lead-time to new mines, the potential for alternative chemistries to pop up and obviate cobalt, the generally pessimistic view of EVs outside of the narrow pro-Tesla, California green circle, etc. I basically think it's possible that the EV growth curve (50+% Y/Y kind of stuff) is only believed by Tesla and a relatively few people, and that these people aren't particularly common in mining circles.

My general perspective is that Tesla should derisk the miners by putting some money upfront on a contractual basis. Maybe it's Panasonic that does this. I'm happy to see that the rumor is the price spike to 25$\lb was brought on by hedge fund speculators. I think that's a perfect example of how Wall Street greed is actually good. The high price signal helps motivate the entire supply chain.

Thanks for your lengthy answer.

Aronon Netflix Employees Are Happier with Their Job Than Facebook or Google Employees

The competition is starting your own company and cashing in on many millions or billions from it. I think it's perfectly reasonable for the highest achievers to have that in mind as the alternative to compare against and hold some ambivalence on whether they are maximizing themselves.

Aronon Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

This site is pretty good at sniping comments that would pass a 'is this reddit quality?' discriminator on generic NLP but I think the underlying idea is interesting under the context of 'what now brown cow?' Elon Musk has done his job getting EVs kickstarted. I suspect he's happy to move along and work on tunnels and rockets. Tesla principally needs some capital security, some quality tech managers and bench, and some just plain maturity in investor relations. The two would do pretty well in brand alignment in general. Apple needs, on a shareholder concern basis, to find markets of large enough size to matter, and Tesla has its toes in some extremely large markets. Anyway that's the hypothesis for those that want to ponder 'how does Apple do something other than make iPhones'. Thanks for the downvotes anyway, bots.

Aronon Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000 B.C

disaggregation is the key in everything. If 90% of the world decelerates at -1% a year but 10% accelerates at 10%, then for a few years it looks pretty close to flatline but the extrapolation of that is garbage. You have to have exact factor analysis.

Aronon Is There an Ideal Amount of Income Inequality?

If all people benefit from something then it's hard to find a problem with it. That's presumably not the case for someone who is a high level producer comparing a UBI world to a non-UBI world and seeing only an outflow.

Aronon Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

Come on Apple. Buy Tesla. Let's go. OBVIOUS.

Aronon Hinton's 'Capsule Networks' Unveiled

Is this the only reference to this on HN? I'd be surprised but I didn't see it. Hinton is a powerhouse and he's been wanting to make progress on this for years.

Aronon Batteries with 50 per cent more energy with pure silicon anode

I've been trying to figure out whether Tesla has its head in the sand on the cobalt issue. Just today they had their quarterly conference call and they again played the same game of naming every element in the battery as if they were of equal concern, when quite clearly cobalt is the only thing to worry about. Anyway, I wrote this suspicious that you may have also pondered this. Even the spot price on the cobalt market stopped going up this year despite almost every major auto-manufacturer ramping up their plans. I just keep wondering what I am missing here.

Aronon Is There an Ideal Amount of Income Inequality?

I'm curious how that's wrong.

Aronon Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

"Capital expenditures were $1.1 billion in Q3. The majority of capital expenditures were attributable to Model 3 and Gigafactory 1 production capacity increases. "

Aronon Tesla posts big loss, cuts production of Models X and S to catch up on Model 3

They aren't stopping at 500\week. They are admitting it's broken.