Hacker News Reader

babl-ycon A stalled Waymo brought Kamala Harris' motorcade to a halt in SF

If this is the the most concerning Waymo headline for the month @ 100k rides/week I'd say things are going pretty well on their end

babl-ycon Infineon's CO2 Sensor Monitors Indoor Air Quality

Seems similar to the SCD40 photoacoustic approach.

I used that for an open-source CO2 monitor I designed:

https://bitclock.io/

https://github.com/goat-hill/bitclock

babl-ycon Google Pixel 9 Pro

My main criticism with the camera bump on the Pixel 9 are the sharp edges. It makes it difficult to slip into pants without catching, and also collects dust.

I was hoping they'd chamfer the edge in future models but it doesn't look like that's happening.

Using a case solves this, but it shouldn't be required.

babl-ycon Silicon Valley's best kept secret: Founder liquidity

Founders cashing out early may be more of an "open secret" but it warrants more discussion. I don't find the title overly clickbait-y.

And a counterpoint to your perspective, I joined a startup a couple years out of college, had the most fun of my career, and the options were very much worth something. Working for a well-funded start-up is something I'd especially recommend early in your career when you can take more risk even if the equity doesn't always work out.

If anything, I'd discourage becoming a founder as a new grad more than SV typically discusses. I really appreciated taking time to build up my savings and get experience before taking a shot at that.

babl-ycon Ticketmaster breach affects more than half a billion users

That was my reaction. I assume my identity information is available for sale from multiple breaches already at this point.

It would take more personal information for me to really care (private messages, emails, social network interactions).

Unless there are lawsuits most people will forget about this breach in a week.

babl-ycon Sal Khan is pioneering innovation in education again

There may be "no money in EdTech" but that doesn't mean there can't be impactful products for it.

Students don't want to pay for Google but every student still uses it.

Some students will want to waste time if given access to more tools like AI agents, but the motivated ones will use it to their advantage. Even if it's wrong sometimes, it's right a lot, perfect for rubber ducking, and almost always gives answers that are at least interesting or point you in a useful direction.

As for "GPT-4" fabricating things, I remember in school how I wrote essays and was given A's despite citing NYT and Wikipedia. Fabrications exist all over the place. If anything, hallucinations might give more examples as to how to be skeptical of any source and look for direct sources as much as possible.

In college I went to office hours and there was 30 minute line to talk to the TAs. AI agents respond instantly. These things are going to overall transform education for the better.

babl-ycon Ask HN: How does modern FreeCAD compare with Solidworks?

I recently switched from Fusion 360 to Onshape and it is so much better. Fewer crashes, better performance, and clearer errors when an operation can't be computed. Just wish it was less expensive for personal use.

babl-ycon Indonesia's e-bike shops are building their own batteries

I would define "homemade" as assembling the batteries without any sort of regulation or safety standards.

I'd be a bit frightened if I knew someone in my apartment building was assembling their own batteries -- poor quality ones can burn down the building.

It's an increasing problem here in San Francisco. I know at least one friend who had to move due to smoke damage caused by a neighbor collecting these batteries. https://sfstandard.com/2024/01/09/san-francisco-e-scooter-bi...

babl-ycon Indonesia's e-bike shops are building their own batteries

Photos are showing Li-ion 18650 cells afaict

Those are the most common for e-bike batteries

babl-ycon How to Start Google

I couldnt finish reading the essay because I was distracted by the generally smug tone of it.

99.99% of people who read this article are not going to start the next Google. Being a successful entrepreneur requires an incredible amount of luck, timing, skill, and risk taking.

If you choose that path, great, but that in no way devalues the skill building, network building, and predictable income of working for someone else.

babl-ycon OpenAI Deal Lets Employees Sell Shares at $86B Valuation

Were the Profit Participation Units (PPUs) part of this sale?

I've heard that's what they are offering new hires but it's an unusual form of compensation as compared to traditional stock/options. Curious how it worked out for those folks.

(apologies if this is explained in the article, I don't have access)

babl-ycon Jeff Dean: Trends in Machine Learning [video]

Google certainly had influential papers on language models having emergent behaviors, but this isn't the one that inspired scaling up GPT. It was published August 2022 and GPTs at OpenAI were getting scaled up long before this.

babl-ycon Jeff Dean: Trends in Machine Learning [video]

Agreed -- given the talk is titled "Exciting trends in Machine Learning" it feels pretty incomplete to gloss over ChatGPT blowing up.

OpenAI bet big on (1) emergent behaviors as you scale language models and (2) RLHF / fine-tuning to follow instructions.

Both those topics were lightly covered but very much from the "Google did this" perspective (word2vec, step-by-step reasoning).

babl-ycon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

I drive and bike. It's more annoying on a bike to come to a complete stop.

babl-ycon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

I agree it would be good to share video if possible, but Waymo cannot realistically expect that there will never be an accident where they look bad.

There are 43,000 US road deaths per year. If all driving was autonomous, even if autonomous driving was 100x safer than humans, that would still be 430 deaths per year.

And some of those accidents will be failures that a human would not make (sensor failure, bad software update, edge cases).

What you _can't_ do is what Cruise did and hide evidence from the public and regulators fearing that the truth would impact your business.

babl-ycon Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

As someone who bikes on 17th street regularly, cyclists rarely stop completely. Most treat it as a yield (myself included) because it's a pain to start+stop at every stop sign.

But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.

babl-ycon Why buying tickets to a game has become so unaffordable

It seems more and more that sports tickets are exclusively available on Ticketmaster, who charges pretty significant fees of around ~18%. If you need to resell the ticket, they take their 18% again.

I've also seen A/B tests where they experiment with higher fees. Using a different browser sometimes gets you a different price.

babl-ycon Cruise slashes 24% of self-driving car workforce in sweeping layoffs

Blog post from Cruise leadership discussing the layoffs https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/cruise-team-updates/

Most of the layoffs are within the operations side that assumed broader immediate rollout, and engineering is "largely not impacted."

babl-ycon Beeper Mini is back

Selfishly I'm most excited about this project as a demonstration that secure and reliable communication across platforms is pretty straightforward. The only blocker is that Apple doesn't want it to exist.

If Apple were truly acting in their users best interest, they would want their users to have encrypted and fast communication with all devices, through an open protocol or otherwise.

And yes, iOS allows 3rd party apps but not nearly with enough permissions to act as a full Messages+iMessage alternative.

babl-ycon MLX: An array framework for Apple Silicon

I've found the process of porting custom ML models to iOS extremely difficult.

AFAIK the only way to leverage Apple Neural Engine (and get the best performance) is to use CoreML. The only documented way to use CoreML is via coremltools, which takes a trace of a PyTorch model and attempts to translate it into a protobuf graph understood by CoreML.

This process often fails and requires model changes, or worse "succeeds" but gives you the wrong output when you run the model. Additionally, you have to play detective to figure out why some operations run on the CPU, or GPU instead of ANE.

It's exciting to see more tools like this for working with tensor-like objects, but I really wish Apple would make porting custom models in a high performance manner easier.

babl-ycon OpenAI approached Anthropic about merger

If OpenAI ends up a shell of a company with billions in cloud GPU credits, in some ways merging makes a lot of sense?

babl-ycon Kyle Vogt resigns from Cruise

I don't see the situations similar at all.

Cruise is an extremely tough spot right now after its handling of the San Francisco accident, and it's nationwide pause of testing.

OpenAI has been extremely successful but is having strategic disagreements within its non-profit board.

babl-ycon Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

Why would he recuse himself? Sam seemed happy to work at OpenAI.

FWIW, radio silence from Ilya on twitter https://twitter.com/ilyasut

babl-ycon Greg Brockman quits OpenAI

So given that there are 6 board members, Ilya had to have voted to oust Sam?

babl-ycon Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

It could certainly be much cheaper than $75, that's just the ceiling. Arduino Nano BLE is $30 and one stepper on Amazon is $15. Plus other small hardware, plastic and assembly.

babl-ycon Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

The individual builds will be pretty cheap: sub $75 with an Arduino, NEMA stepper motor, PCB, a few other parts, and some plastic enclosures.

There's definitely some bootstrapping costs to acquiring tools (3d printer, soldering set up, adjustable power supply, Fusion 360 license). That's around $1k-1500 for a nice hobbyist setup by the time you get everything.

The real cost is when you decide to quit your software job to work on a hardware project :)

babl-ycon Lessons learned by a software guy venturing into hardware

I'm on a similar adventure right now, an ex-software person building a motorized iPhone stand that is Bluetooth controlled.

It's been fun to see how with Fusion 360, a 3D printer, and JCLPCB you can build all kinds of devices. YouTube and GPT-4 are excellent tutors for hobbyists entering the hardware space.

The 2 week wait for custom parts from China makes you realize the advantage they have over there when it comes to the rapid prototyping stage of product development.

babl-ycon [dead]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

babl-ycon [dead]

I'm not a big fan of Instagram, but the HN title is missing the "lawsuit alleges" part of the real headline.

babl-ycon Apple Hits Pause on iOS 18, macOS 15 Development as Bugs Spread