Hacker News: akamaka

New comment by akamaka in "NTSB pulls docket after AI recreates dead pilots' voices"

akamaka — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:42:29 +0000

The article quotes the creator saying he used AI

New comment by akamaka in "NTSB pulls docket after AI recreates dead pilots' voices"

akamaka — Fri, 22 May 2026 21:41:50 +0000

It says in the article that the creator used OpenAI Codex, presumably because the spectrogram image wouldn’t have enough resolution by itself.

New comment by akamaka in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

akamaka — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:46:50 +0000

I have no idea what you’re talking about at this point. Do you have any interest in understanding why CPPIB invests the way they do and doesn’t seek the highest returns?

New comment by akamaka in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

akamaka — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:17:32 +0000

During the Great Depression, the stock market stayed below 50% of its peak value for about 20 years. Imagine that the $600 billion turns into $300 billion overnight. It will only last 5-10 years without inflows, but the GDP has also dropped by 40% and inflows have plummeted.

New comment by akamaka in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

akamaka — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:43:09 +0000

$780 billion divided by 6 million current recipients is a little over $100,000, which is hardly comparable to your wealth retiree example.

New comment by akamaka in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

akamaka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:01:27 +0000

> Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.

That wouldn’t work in a major depression when there is high unemployment and inflows drop.

New comment by akamaka in "Canada's first sovereign wealth fund"

akamaka — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:00:41 +0000

Yes, if a retirement fund had put all their money into a stock index in 1926, it wouldn’t have been able to pay out pensions throughout the 1930s and 1940s and would have been bankrupt before the market eventually recovered.

Going full index is a great strategy for an individual person aged 20-50, but not a strategy for a pension fund which needs to continuously pay out.

New comment by akamaka in "Android now stops you sharing your location in photos"

akamaka — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:18:45 +0000

I just tested this and the default setting is to include location, but once turned off it stays off (unlike the iPhone share sheet where you need to turn it off each time).

New comment by akamaka in "Renewables reached nearly 50% of global electricity capacity last year"

akamaka — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:28:22 +0000

What’s the point of saying one stat is better than another, when all of them are meaningful in a different way? When renewables reach big numbers of TWh, someone will say “total generation is misleading if doesn’t line up with demand; what matters is capacity for power when we actually need it”.

New comment by akamaka in "A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind Europe"

akamaka — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 19:03:58 +0000

I did the same math. The closest guess I have is that it is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).

New comment by akamaka in "A new way to measure poverty shows the US falling behind Europe"

akamaka — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 18:30:45 +0000

Nope, I just spent 15 minutes reading the original paper and can’t make any sense of what he is calculating.

International dollars are normalized to USD, so there’s no conversion necessary. The figure he quotes of 63 min per dollar converts to $8343/year. However, his original paper states that he created this measure by inverting income, so the number 8343 is his starting point.

The closest guess I have is that is derived from the poverty line for a family of four, $32150 (which divided by four is $8037).

If that is the case, what he is really doing is comparing poverty line definitions between countries.

New comment by akamaka in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

akamaka — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:48:16 +0000

Yes, the original procedures didn’t find the problem, but it says they were eventually able to duplicate it in the lab and the new material has passed that test.

New comment by akamaka in "Artemis II is not safe to fly"

akamaka — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 04:14:24 +0000

There’s been plenty of coverage of this issue, and this article discusses some of the changed they made: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/the-artemis-...

The only thing the author of this blog piece has to offer that’s new is his very strong personal intuition that the new design hasn’t been properly validated, without any engineering explanation about why the testing the performed won’t adequately simulate real world performance.

New comment by akamaka in "The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck"

akamaka — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:31:12 +0000

It would be a stronger argument if you first tried looking at the cases where hydrogen has an advantage. The port example you brought up, where hydrogen is produced on site, is a good one to analyze. If you can look at cost projections of fuels cells and electrolyzers vs. batteries over the next 20 years and demonstrate that there’s no chance hydrogen will catch up, that would be a very strong argument, since it doesn’t rely on the hand-wavy “fueling infrastructure will never happen” argument.

New comment by akamaka in "The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck"

akamaka — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 00:55:38 +0000

This is a very poor analysis, since it doesn’t account for the capital costs. Even if hydrogen is inefficient compared to batteries, it could win if the upfront investment was low enough to offset the additional fuel cost. This is quite obvious, since that’s why diesel trucks are winning today — the upfront cost of a diesel engine is cheap enough that it offsets the higher lifetime fuel costs.

I do think that batteries will win, but the correct argument is one that shows that capital costs of batteries are going down faster than the cost of hydrogen production.

Oxford PV targets 20-year lifetime for perovskite-silicon tandem modules by 2028

akamaka — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 16:11:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/16/oxford-pv-targets-20-year-lifetime-for-perovskite-silicon-tandem-modules-by-2028/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707665

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by akamaka in "U.S. Emissions Jumped in 2025 as Coal Power Rebounded"

akamaka — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:42:32 +0000

Great analysis.

New comment by akamaka in "Microsoft to replace all C/C++ code with Rust"

akamaka — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:01:57 +0000

Great to know that all of the existing bugs in Microsoft’s code will be faithfully translated into Rust using LLMs.

New comment by akamaka in "Solution to US debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity"

akamaka — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:38:13 +0000

Both of the charts I posted have GDP as the denominator (although I incorrectly said the first was “share of budget”).

I think it’s very important to use GDP as a denominator, because otherwise you’ll be stuck crying wolf, saying “debt always keeps going up” even during the good times.

There are a lot of people who simply don’t believe that the government budget needs a trim right now, because people have been continuously saying there was a debt crisis even when the financial situation was relatively favorable.

New comment by akamaka in "Solution to US debt crisis is severe austerity triggered by a fiscal calamity"

akamaka — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 18:27:35 +0000

I was mistaken to say “share of budget”, because the chart I linked to is actually share of GDP, which hopefully isn’t affected by the problem you pointed out.