HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

sweettea

1,313 karma · joined July 14, 2010

sweettea@dorminy.me
submissionscomments
sweettea··on Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds
I didn't realize Ello was so young! One of my kids went from barely a reluctant reader to a proficient reader near the start of your lifetime then, I am deeply grateful we had tried so many things. Massive props.
sweettea··on We Need to Die
In sum, the author proclaims that without human death, nothing people do has a time limit so people wouldn't have any incentive to do.

But this is false - even if we were a sovereign observer only, the universe is constantly changing and evolving, species go extinct, the seasons are never the same. And we are not just observers, we are also actors - we have opportunities to create today which will not be available in the future. You cannot create the Internet today, it already happened. You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there. Perhaps time motivates us, but our death is not the only thing which limits time.

sweettea··on Three Hapsburgs and a Reporter Walk into a Canadian Vault
Already addressed: "While the family spells its last name with a B, the New York Times stylebook spells Hapsburg with a P, which brought no shortage of scolding emails upon publication."
sweettea··on WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model
My understanding is that it's an expected value based on coverage in each of the ensemble scenarios, not quite as simplified as "how many scenarios was there rain in this forecast cell".

At least for the US NWS: if 30 of 100 scenarios result in 50% shower coverage, and 70 out of 100 result in 0%, this is reported as 15% chance of rain. Which is exactly the same as 15 with 100% coverage and 85 with 0% coverage, or 100 with 15% coverage.

Understanding this, and digging further into the forecast, gives a better sense of whether you're likely to encounter widespread rainfall or spotty rainfall in your local area.

sweettea··on Toucan Wireless Split Keyboard with Touchpad
Many keyboards use the qmk firmware these days, qmk.fm, which can be programmed with the Vial configurator, get.vial.today .

Here's one typical qwerty-ish layout for 42 keys: https://mark.stosberg.com/markstos-corne-3x5-1-keyboard-layo...

And for something more weird but still fully featured, Miryoku is a fairly common micro-keyboard layout, https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku .

Why? Well, I really admire Jonas Heitala's documentation of his journey to find a layout that fit his aesthetic: https://www.jonashietala.se/blog/2023/11/02/i_designed_my_ow... . My layout isn't as extreme, it's still qwerty-ish, but I've been heavily inspired by his thorough analysis.

sweettea··on Toucan Wireless Split Keyboard with Touchpad
Super minimal finger travel. I have a 34-key layout personally, and while I give up the F-keys, everything else is not very difficult to access and I really love how little my fingers move.
sweettea··on Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year
It's OSS and self-hostable. And it's got a great UI and the most joyous technology I've ever had the pleasure of using. https://zulip.com/self-hosting/
sweettea··on Cloud-forming isoprene and terpenes from crops may drastically improve climate
I mean, we're already having democratized geoengineering: Make Sunsets (https://makesunsets.com/) allows you or anyone else to fund deploying high-altitude clouds for geocooling.
sweettea··on How to Store Data on Paper?
See also: the first part of A Canticle for Leibowitz.
sweettea··on Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)
Have you seen k0s or k3s? Lots of stories about folks using these to great success on a tiny scale, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43593269
sweettea··on Battle of the Mallocators
Note also that, on Linux, RSS is not guaranteed to be accurate: "For making accounting scalable, RSS related information are handled in an asynchronous manner and the value may not be very precise." [1]

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/proc.html

sweettea··on Fire-Flyer File System from DeepSeek
Fuse over io_uring has just been merged: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-FUSE

So has uncached buffered IO: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Uncached-Buffered-IO-Linux-6.1...

6.14 is an exciting kernel!

sweettea··on Ross Ulbricht granted a full pardon
Despite Silk Road explicitly banning CSAM, and the feds not charging Ulbricht with it when you know they would love the positive PR if they could?
sweettea··on Kudzu, the vine that never ate the South (2015)
Yes, kudzu is incredibly good forage and produces some of the tenderest, sweetest meat you'd ever taste.
sweettea··on Starlink tells Brazil regulator it will not comply with X suspension
Sonic.net or various other ISPs? https://www.theverge.com/2013/7/21/4541342/isp-owner-describ...
sweettea··on X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to judge's content orders
Harand Godwinsson still reigns in my heart.
sweettea··on How Does OpenAI Survive?
A well reasoned article that fundamentally downplays both the pace of innovation and the exponential increase in capabilities per dollar happening over time. AI is rapidly accelerating its improvement rate, and I do believe its capabilities will continue growing exponentially.

In particular, GPT-2 to GPT-4 spans an increase from 'well read toddler' to 'average high school student' in just a few years, while simultaneously the computational cost of training less capable models goes down similarly.

Also worth noting: the article claims Stripe, another huge money raiser, had an obviously useful product. gdb, sometime-CTO of stripe and its fourth employee, is now president of OpenAI. And, most of all, the author doesn't remember how nonobvious Stripe's utility was in its early days, even in the tech scene: there were established ways to take people's money and it wasn't clear why Stripe had an offering worth switching to.

For an alternate take, I think https://situational-awareness.ai provides a well reasoned argument for the current status of AI innovation and growth rate, and addresses all of the points here on a general (though not OpenAI specific) way.

sweettea··on Nasa nears decision on what to do with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft
They did - and the first one failed so they did a second: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_Orbital_Flight_Test_2
sweettea··on SpaceX Tender Offer Said to Value Company at Record $210B
I don't think this is correct. As far as I understand it, Elon/SpaceX did attempt a previous investment in satellite internet, but it had died long before Starlink came to be in 2014.
sweettea··on Allan McDonald refused to approve Challenger launch, exposed cover-up (2021)
I am curious why you avoid ads - personally I view them as a tremendous good for the world, helping people improve their lives by introducing them to products or even just ideas they didn't know existed.
sweettea··on OpenAI appoints Retired U.S. Army General Paul M. Nakasone to Board
This seems very much the beginning of the situation predicted by Aschenbrenner in [1], where the AI labs eventually will be fully part of the national security apparatus. Fascinating to see if the other major AI labs also add ex-military folks to their directors or whether this is unique to OpenAI.

Or conceivably his experience is genuinely relevant and unrelated to US national security going forward, completely unrelated to the governmental apparatus and not a sign of the times.

[1] situational-awareness.ai

sweettea··on How many EV charging stations does the US need to replace gas stations?
Its unsafe, and there are warning signs everywhere warning you to supervise the fuelling and not leave it unattended. You could walk away from a fuelling car... but the failure mode of burning down the whole gas station is so severe it seems a poor idea.
sweettea··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2024)
Location: Greenville, SC, USA

Remote: neutral

Willing to relocate: yes, particularly to Boston

Technologies: Linux kernel: FUSE, device-mapper, filesystems; C, C++, Python, Make.

Resume: https://sweettea-resume.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/resume-cs...

Email: dorminy@alum.mit.edu

Are you building the next great FUSE filesystem? I'd love to join you.

sweettea··on Mourning Google
>* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?

levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.

sweettea··on Designing bridge trusses with Pytorch autograd
West Point Bridge Designer maybe? That was such a good educational tool.
sweettea··on Zuckerberg's bunker plans fuel speculation on billionaires building bunkers
Zuck is doing a great job of working to improve human life with his money, having promised to give away 99% of it, and making concrete steps to do so:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-explains-giv... https://www.statnews.com/2023/10/19/mark-zuckerberg-priscill...

sweettea··on 20 years later, the Y2K bug seems like a joke–because some took it seriously (2019)
One actual effect of Y2K I learned about only yesterday: the NHS gave false Down syndrome risk assessments to 154 women: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/sep/14/martinwainwright
sweettea··on A 1690s Peanut is Reborn
Tomatoe flavors are (in addition to variety) extremely sensitive to nutrients and growing condition. I've had Barrys Crazy Cherry be one of the best flavors ever one year, rich and lowacid and textured and sweet, and absolute watery cardboard the next year - from the same seed batch on a semipro scale.
sweettea··on LED Industrial Piercing
Very cool! Have definitely thought about this for mine, have never actually gotten past looking around and seeing nobody makes them yet. It'd be amazing to throw some bluetooth on there and be able to flash different patterns, or to throw a fullblown mini screen on it...

I wonder how hard it would be to make a set of large-gauge lobe jewelry with a screen in it. Perhaps 1/2" or 3/4" would be doable?

A thought re sales and sizing, though: industrials are usually sold in quarter-inch increments and most people buy 1-2.5" from what I understand, so it should be doable to make them to sell.

sweettea··on Wikipedia exec salaries are sparking a debate on tech sector wages
Depends on the company. Meta vests quarterly.
Page 1 of 7Next →