Hacker News: KSteffensen

New comment by KSteffensen in "Audio tapes reveal mass rule-breaking in Milgram's obedience experiments"

KSteffensen — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:08:28 +0000

Didn't the Dunedin study also find that childhood self-control and delayed gratification correlated with adult life outcomes?

https://dunedinstudy.otago.ac.nz/files/1571970023782.pdf

New comment by KSteffensen in "Reverse Engineering Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon for DOS from 1990"

KSteffensen — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 09:53:13 +0000

Please fix the integer overflow. Total income over the game was tracked in a 32-bit signed int, so if you earned too much money suddenly the total would turn negative and your stocks would crash.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise"

KSteffensen — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 08:07:50 +0000

I'll get some downvotes for this but PhD vs master's degree difference is mostly work experience, an element of workload hazing and snobbery.

Somebody with a masters degree and 5 years of work experience will likely know more than a freshly graduated PhD

New comment by KSteffensen in "InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel"

KSteffensen — Mon, 19 May 2025 09:28:07 +0000

Remember to factor in all the trees that will need to be cut down in order to provide the wood.

Of course, over time we can increase the amount of industrial forest, but that will take 40-50 years.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war"

KSteffensen — Mon, 12 May 2025 12:52:13 +0000

To someone that knows nothing about car SW architecture, that is surprising to me, I would have expected a number of control loops for things like fuel injection, ABS brake control, drive-by-wire, EV battery charge and discharge, etc. each running on their own processor due real-time safety considerations. These I would expect to be different implementations and parameterizations of the same control theory maths.

On top of this comes some functionality to control windshield wipers, lighting, AC, seat heating, etc. Stuff which is probably not top-tier safety critical, but still important. I would expect that stuff to run on one, maybe two processors.

Then comes the infotainment system, running on its own processor.

Sensors are supplying data to all processors through some kind of modernized CAN bus and some sort of publisher/subscriber protocol. Maybe some safety critical sensors have dedicated wiring to the relevant processor.

A lot of variations on this seems possible with the same SW platform, tuned and parameterized properly. The real-time safety critical stuff would need care, but is doable.

Am I completely off the mark? Can you give some examples of where I am going wrong?

New comment by KSteffensen in "Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war"

KSteffensen — Mon, 12 May 2025 08:54:01 +0000

There is a low-stress driving environment in Italy? Where's that?

Milan is the only place I have ever been where reversing on the high way is a reasonable solution to missing an off-ramp.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire"

KSteffensen — Mon, 05 May 2025 09:48:05 +0000

Lost techniques are the field of experimental archaeology.

New comment by KSteffensen in "New antibiotic that kills drug-resistant bacteria found in technician's garden"

KSteffensen — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 07:57:19 +0000

The main problem with development of new antibiotics is not that it requires groundbreaking new science to be invented, but that there is no business case for it. Or at least the business case for spending your R&D on anti-obesity medicine looks a lot better.

New comment by KSteffensen in "A brief meditation on formal systems and lying goblins"

KSteffensen — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:51:36 +0000

My preferred solution to this logic problem:

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0327.html

New comment by KSteffensen in "Xylella Fastidiosa: A crisis brewing in Europe's olive groves"

KSteffensen — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 10:48:12 +0000

To me that panoramic view is scary, not magnificent. It's a monoculture desert. There is no life there, other than the very carefully cultivated one organism.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Denmark will plant 1B trees and convert 10% of farmland into forest"

KSteffensen — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 06:51:15 +0000

Believe me the farmers have been doing their best to buck this.

New comment by KSteffensen in "ICC issues warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas officials"

KSteffensen — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 15:20:54 +0000

I don't understand how a tiny country like Israel has become so important in global politics. By population Rwanda is ~30% larger than Israel.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke"

KSteffensen — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 12:17:18 +0000

China has a lot of interest in the war not ending one way or the other. Their peer competitors are spending resources on it and a potentially problematic regional competitor is becoming more irrelevant the longer it runs.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke"

KSteffensen — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 12:13:31 +0000

It that really a precedent we would want to set? It sounds like it would be bad for global trade that state actors could arbitrarily seize privately owned property.

New comment by KSteffensen in "OpenAI to become for-profit company"

KSteffensen — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 08:34:28 +0000

Cure cancer? Solve this climate change thing?

New comment by KSteffensen in "Mourning and moving on: rituals for leaving a career (2014)"

KSteffensen — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 08:41:46 +0000

I don't know anything about the author and their situation, but in my experience the first time you realize that your life is not going to be as you expected in major ways can be quite hard.

I don't think mourning is an inappropriate word to use for this.

New comment by KSteffensen in "DUNE scientists observe first neutrinos with prototype detector at Fermilab"

KSteffensen — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 13:03:30 +0000

Are you absolutely sure there is no Arrakis involved in the choosing of that acronym?

New comment by KSteffensen in "ChatGPT Is Bullshit"

KSteffensen — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 19:28:15 +0000

LLMs don't have anything to gain, but the people publishing their output do.

I find it entirely appropriate to call LLMs "bullshit generators" rather than "hallucination generators".

New comment by KSteffensen in "Högertrafikomläggningen"

KSteffensen — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 18:15:21 +0000

Whichever is cheaper. My gut feeling says pallet, but I have no idea.

New comment by KSteffensen in "Högertrafikomläggningen"

KSteffensen — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 18:03:33 +0000

Aligning the EPAL pallet and the 30' container is another great candidate that is just not going to happen.