Hacker News: MaxfordAndSons

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

MaxfordAndSons — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:00:18 +0000

ATC/GTC seems like a really strong candidate for partial automation with recent advances in AI. Obviously we'd still want some expert humans in the loop for exceptional situations, but I have to imagine there's a way to significantly reduce the cognitive burden/stress for these folks.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD"

MaxfordAndSons — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 02:08:05 +0000

Idk, you can still find outrageously potent weed in states where it's recreationally legal. But maybe it's just a residual from the fact that it was illegal not that long ago and binge consuming it is still quite normalized?

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

MaxfordAndSons — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:30:01 +0000

If they're actual flips, you don't know you're going to lose? You know your EV is 0. As others have noted, in the hierarchy of gambling a truly 0 EV game is fairly high up in the rankings if you're looking for less harm.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "OpenAI agrees with Dept. of War to deploy models in their classified network"

MaxfordAndSons — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 04:12:49 +0000

Attempting to kneecap the breakout front runner of the major American AI companies to ensure the shittier, politically compliant one wins in the short term? Gee I wonder.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "CIA to Sunset the World Factbook"

MaxfordAndSons — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 17:01:14 +0000

The ends are to create vacuums for big businesses to come in and provide the same services, for private profit rather than public benefit

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "The Great Unwind"

MaxfordAndSons — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 19:22:36 +0000

Can anyone recommend a good source to ramp up one's understanding of macroeconomics/monetary policy to a point where they can make sense of this? Starting from more or less a layman's understanding. Could be a book or course, but doesn't have to be university quality, a good blog or youtube channel could do.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Even in a Populist Moment, Democrats Are Split on the Problem of Corporate Power"

MaxfordAndSons — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 17:39:19 +0000

Counterpoint: The problems in the US are systemic. There will be no significant change without abolishing unlimited corporate campaign donations.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

MaxfordAndSons — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 21:09:45 +0000

lol yep. It's like they have the same mentality as being a schoolbus (which, it's similarly wild to me that kids are just implicitly allowed to not wear their seatbelts on them but I guess thats an even more intractable enforcement problem).

Also: people clapping the second the back wheels touch on landing is particularly hilarious to me because it implies an acknowledgement of the precariousness of flying, but a complete ignorance of the fact that you're just entering the second most dangerous 30 seconds of the entire flight.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

MaxfordAndSons — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 21:05:48 +0000

Having an understanding of the bell curve of turbulence makes you a bit more advanced than a normie on the aviation knowledge bell curve imo :)

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "How good engineers write bad code at big companies"

MaxfordAndSons — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 04:02:51 +0000

> Why is it necessary for big tech companies to act this way?

This question gets directly at the cause of the author's nihilism: the necessity is borne from the endless pursuit of positive quarterly growth, the "binding fiduciary duty to shareholders". Which is a lie, there is no such legally binding fiduciary duty. So the aforementioned necessity is also a lie. Companies could operate on a longer time horizon, let engineers write better code, make better products, maybe even consider societal good in their strategic planning, and still turn a healthy profit. But the cost of perhaps taking a few degrees off their YoY trend line is unacceptable to the insatiable greed of their controlling shareholders.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight"

MaxfordAndSons — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 03:44:28 +0000

The flight attendants/safety card will tell you to stay buckled whenever seated, even if the seat belt sign is off, but many (most?) people will ignore that guidance and stay unbuckled for as long as they are technically allowed.

Only aviation professionals or recovering flight phobics like me who have watched every episode of Air Crash Investigation will take proactive safety measure of their own accord. To normies it's all just a pointless hassle.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Migrating the main Zig repository from GitHub to Codeberg"

MaxfordAndSons — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 07:43:38 +0000

It doesn't reflect well, but also, is it not fairly par for the course from a BDFL type? Surely Linus Torvalds has said meaner things at some point on a listserv. Why does this guy get blasted for it? Because people still have generally positive sentiment towards Github? Just a day or 2 ago some other article was making similarly "ad hominem" attacks towards anonymous Youtube PMs, it got tons of upvotes and nobody clutched their pearls for the poor PMs. The Github/MS engineers who maintain actions (whose poor performance probably isn't even the result of any single individuals bad code), will be fine.

Seems like the HN mob is just as capricious as the author in deciding who gets as pass or not.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Unexpected things that are people"

MaxfordAndSons — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 04:42:45 +0000

I'd venture to guess that whatever legal logic resulted in the SC deciding that corporations should have the same right to free speech as individuals presumably doesn't hinge on any semantic blurriness between different subsets of "persons", and even if they didn't use overlapping terms it would still have ruled thus.

That said, it certainly is nice free marketing for our corporate overlords.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "UA 1093"

MaxfordAndSons — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 18:00:51 +0000

I think GP meant structural damage to the airframe. That said, I think there are some modes of structural damage a modern plane can sustain and still fly, but to gp's point, probably not many.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Addictive-like behavioural traits in pet dogs with extreme motivation for toys"

MaxfordAndSons — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 01:01:51 +0000

Yea the "No take, only throw" game seems more endemic to Mastiff descendants, as opposed to the true "retrieval" behavior described in the top comments about Retrievers. My boxer/bulldog mix loves to chase the ball, but will fight like hell to not give it up. Like you, I rely on bribery or manipulating the properties of the ball to make it more easily relinquished.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Be Worried"

MaxfordAndSons — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 17:50:24 +0000

Wouldn't exactly call that a grassroots effort, though...

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Claude Code 2.0"

MaxfordAndSons — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 02:34:56 +0000

Thoughtful comments can provide the why, but they can just as easily be a redundant re-statement of the what in the code, which llm comments quite often are.

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "OpenAI prepares to launch GPT-5 in August"

MaxfordAndSons — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:25:55 +0000

> Altman decided to let GPT-5 take a stab at a question he didn’t understand. “I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said.

If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "Show HN: A tool for creating blackout poetry"

MaxfordAndSons — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:27:48 +0000

Sweet! I love erasure (aka blackout) poetry.

If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:

- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report

- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.

- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost

New comment by MaxfordAndSons in "AI 2027"

MaxfordAndSons — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 20:31:57 +0000

As someone who's fairly ignorant of how AI actually works at a low level, I feel incapable of assessing how realistic any of these projections are. But the "bad ending" was certainly chilling.

That said, this snippet from the bad ending nearly made me spit my coffee out laughing:

> There are even bioengineered human-like creatures (to humans what corgis are to wolves) sitting in office-like environments all day viewing readouts of what’s going on and excitedly approving of everything, since that satisfies some of Agent-4’s drives.