Hacker News: Edman274

New comment by Edman274 in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

Edman274 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 19:44:33 +0000

Are you aware that hundreds of American fixed wing aircraft were lost to surface to air missiles in North Vietnam? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._aircraft_losses_t...

New comment by Edman274 in "Waymo blocking ambulance during deadly Austin shooting"

Edman274 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:52:49 +0000

Yes, why are we still talking about the robot whose behavior can be programmed and whose behavior is set by a company and rolled out to all of their vehicles deterministically, when another commenter correctly engaged in whataboutism?

New comment by Edman274 in "Modeling cycles of grift with evolutionary game theory"

Edman274 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:59:16 +0000

People that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.

New comment by Edman274 in "Intel XeSS 3: expanded support for Core Ultra/Core Ultra 2 and Arc A, B series"

Edman274 — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:23:01 +0000

Okay, and a B60 is also 5.25x cheaper than a 5090 in real dollars and has 75% the vram, so maybe less sad? I wouldn't expect a 650 dollar card to have the same performance as a 3500 dollar card, would you?

New comment by Edman274 in "Micropayments as a reality check for news sites"

Edman274 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:17:01 +0000

Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.

New comment by Edman274 in "Garment Notation Language: Formal descriptive language for clothing construction"

Edman274 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:51:25 +0000

Well, I actually had two interrelated thoughts and because of proximity I think I confused things. I guess what I was thinking was "garments are constructed not of "panels" but of threads of a given material which can be abstractly thought of as being panels when woven or knitted, but ..." and from there I thought of failure modes, like the fact that this doesn't have a way of specifying straight vs zigzag stitches, which doesn't have a way of specifying things that are not joined together via stitching panels together, etc. Like, I don't think this can specify a pair of jeans, because the hem of a jean requires a chain stitch at the bottom, which isn't unambiguously defined. This project feels like it devalues the complexity of something that is one of the defining features of civilization.

New comment by Edman274 in "Garment Notation Language: Formal descriptive language for clothing construction"

Edman274 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:00:40 +0000

Tech person - there's only one contributor, it's less than 48 hours old, and appears to be primarily vibe coded with the assistance of Claude Code. No mentions of types of stitches even though it's crucial to understanding how a garment is made. I wonder too if this grammar can represent a glove made from a single strand of yarn.

New comment by Edman274 in "Gen Z first generation since 1800's with lower cognitive performance"

Edman274 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 17:57:29 +0000

If old teaching styles / standardized testing / standardized schooling represent this moribund, stagnant thing that haven't changed at all and haven't kept pace over the past century, why wouldn't you expect measured learning performance to hold steady as well instead of declining? The students basically have the same brains that they've always had. There isn't as much lead in the water as there used to be, in the atmosphere as there used to be, and parents take prenatal vitamins. They're starting from the same raw stuff that they've always been starting from, if not better. So why would they be getting worse? Children one generation ago didn't need individualized curricula and testing to achieve the performance that they got. Why does the current generation need that, and by what mechanism would that improve their performance?

New comment by Edman274 in "Uber Found Liable in Rape by Driver, Setting Stage for Cases"

Edman274 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:47:38 +0000

If Uber had an internal policy of only ever hiring convicted rapists, didn't tell anyone using the app this, didn't warn about unsafe rides, didn't record ride information, and (crucially) also didn't tell their employees to do anything other than to be decent, good, hardworking drivers -- what do you believe their liability should be in this case? Nothing? I'm trying to "steelman" the implications of your point of view but I'm struggling here. When does liability kick in for you - is it only if they enshrine it as policy to do the criminal act?

New comment by Edman274 in "Uber Found Liable in Rape by Driver, Setting Stage for Cases"

Edman274 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:31:22 +0000

What incentive would there be for a gig company like Uber to not deliberately hire criminals if Uber isn't liable, but other companies could be? Reputational damage isn't enough to hurt the bottom line and to change behavior - if it were, they would've already done more, but they didn't because they were operating under the assumption that they were legally insulated.

New comment by Edman274 in "Uber Found Liable in Rape by Driver, Setting Stage for Cases"

Edman274 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:26:16 +0000

The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?

New comment by Edman274 in "The Great Unwind"

Edman274 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:34:51 +0000

> My job running the website and twitter has always been to give the people a voice. I think that's important, don't you?

Do you truly believe in your heart of hearts that people posting neo-MOASS wish fulfillment suffer from a lack of a voice, and no place for them to be heard? Take this seriously. More important than "a voice" is consistency and clarity of communication. The people involved in occupy wall street in 2011 weren't occupying it because they wanted to eventually join it, and I don't think that their form of economic justice would be for Wall Street to lose money in a gigantic market crash that again would result in taxpayer-funded bailouts that spurred the first protests. For transparency's sake, what are your market positions today?

New comment by Edman274 in "New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers"

Edman274 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:35:38 +0000

Afghanistan is a landlocked country on the other side of the planet, the soldiers didn't grow up with knowledge of the terrain, they had no knowledge of the language, culture, customs or social networks, no one locally (with few exceptions) wanted them there, and crucially they only lost once they left, and when they left, there were no penalties for the people who started the war; no US politicians were in any danger whether the war was won or lost, no land was lost, and no truly important geopolitical goals failed.

On the flip side in any domestic insurrection, the soldiers know the terrain, language, customs and culture of the people, the supply lines are nothing (rather than having to airlift materiel and people thousands of miles, you drive them on regular roads), the infrastructure supports espionage, most people support the regime and will collaborate to return to stability (since they voted for it), the regime never leaves (you can leave Afghanistan, you can't leave your own country or it ceases to be a country), and if you lose, you lose territory and/or politicians run the risk of violence. The stakes are why these comparisons are never relevant.

New comment by Edman274 in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

Edman274 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:00:39 +0000

I can't figure out your position, then. You were saying that human eyes suck and are inferior compared to sensors because human eyes require interpretation by a human brain. You're also saying that if self driving isn't possible with only camera sensors, then no amount of extra sensors will make up for the deficiency.

This came from a side conversation with other parties where one noted that driving is possible with only human eyes, another person said that human eyes are superior to cameras, you disagreed, and then when you're told that the only company which is approaching self driving with cameras alone has cameras with worse visual resolution and worse temporal resolution than human eyes, you're saying you respect the grind because the cameras require processing by a computer.

If I understand correctly, you believe:

1. Driving should be possible with vision alone, because human eyes can do it, and human eyes are inferior to camera sensors and require post processing, so obviously with superior sensors it must be possible 2. Even if one knows that current automotive camera sensors are not actually superior to human eyes and also require post processing, then that just means that camera-only approaches are the only way forward and you "respect the grind" of a single company trying to make it work.

Is that correct? Okay, maybe that's understandable, but it makes me confused because 1 and 2 contradict each other. Help me out here.

New comment by Edman274 in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

Edman274 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:44:08 +0000

What do you believe the frame rate and resolution of Tesla cameras are? If a human can tell the difference between two virtual reality displays, one with a frame rate of 36hz and a per eye resolution of 1448x1876, and another display with numerically greater values, then the cameras that Tesla uses for self driving are inferior to human eyes. The human eye typically has a resolution from 5 to 15 megapixels in the fovea, and the current, highest definition automotive cameras that Tesla uses just about clears 5 megapixels across the entire field of view. By your criterion, the cameras that Tesla uses today are never high definition. I can physically saccade my eyes by a millimeter here or there and see something that their cameras would never be able to resolve.

New comment by Edman274 in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

Edman274 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:56:13 +0000

Denial of Service is an attack, is it not?

New comment by Edman274 in "Television is 100 years old today"

Edman274 — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:43:41 +0000

It did always strike me as funny that Cronenberg had a movie about "what if TV was evil and made people murderous and the studio execs had to pay", and a movie about "what if video games were evil and made people murderous and their creators had to pay", but never a movie about "what if movies were evil and made people murderous and film directors had to pay". Obvious bias aside I wonder if it would work as a story - movies don't seem as hypnotic in the public consciousness, I believe.

New comment by Edman274 in "Lock-Picking Robot"

Edman274 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:21:29 +0000

People don't buy locks so that they can lose their keys and require the lock to be picked. They buy locks to secure access to items or places. The parent I was replying to is saying that locks aren't security because a sledgehammer breaks them. I argue that a sledgehammer is only important for certain threat models. I am quite aware that most lock picking is for lost keys. However, I am describing threat models for which locks are important security. Do you understand?

New comment by Edman274 in "Lock-Picking Robot"

Edman274 — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 16:11:31 +0000

The thing about a sledgehammer is that if you're asleep in your house, you, your dog, your SO, or your neighbors might be startled awake by the sound of metal splitting and cracking open. Your security system might be designed to alert on something like a window being smashed. The person attempting to enter the house may be trying to enter undetected, because they know that a broken lock and/or a replaced lock will alert the people they're trying to ambush or steal from. Imagine something like industrial espionage, where a person breaks in undetected, steals an item, and then leaves. The occupant only realizes the item is gone a week later, and wonders if they could've misplaced it. In your scenario, they'd see the sledgehammered lock and immediately call the cops.

I see comments like these all the time on Reddit and Hackernews. Hackers are like, "locks aren't security, a sledgehammer breaks them" and it appears to betray a mental threat model of "what if the cops want my thing" and never "what if someone wishes to do me harm while I am in my house" or "what if a criminal wants to not get caught taking my things" or "what if someone wants to lie in wait in my house", which are not risks to these commenters. They are to a lot of people though.

New comment by Edman274 in "Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy"

Edman274 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 21:41:01 +0000

But that's what happened. I mean, it doesn't mean that proposing public transit is pointless, but if someone in 1930 heard about a trolley track being run in town and another person said "it's only a matter of time before the car companies try to sabotage mass transit", they would've been right. That's what actually happened.