Hacker News: amarka

New comment by amarka in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

amarka — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:59:38 +0000

Or in my context:

> Give a person code, and you help them for a day. Teach them to code, and you frustrate them for a lifetime.

New comment by amarka in "AI coding assistants are getting worse?"

amarka — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 17:51:53 +0000

While the author’s (banker and a data scientist) experience is clearly valuable, it is unclear whether it alone is sufficient to support the broader claims made. Engineering conclusions typically benefit from data beyond individual observation.

New comment by amarka in "Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down"

amarka — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 14:36:56 +0000

Let me fill you in on a secret: one of the reasons behind US’s dominance is that even though “there are other countries” that could do the hard science, the US is one of the only ones that did. Now the US is at risk of becoming just another one of those “other countries“.

New comment by amarka in "Websites hosting major US climate reports taken down"

amarka — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 14:30:29 +0000

From the article: “ The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law, but gave no further details.”

It doesn’t seem like the admin believes the reports are biased and need to be removed. Cool conspiracy though.

New comment by amarka in "Is the world becoming uninsurable?"

amarka — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:32:02 +0000

Not sure if this is accurate. It seems they’re refusing to take the risk.

New comment by amarka in "Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM"

amarka — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 02:10:14 +0000

They are indeed some of the best floors to roll on.

New comment by amarka in "Justin Trudeau promises to resign as PM"

amarka — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 20:39:51 +0000

I can’t believe Justin Trudeau would lowball your friend like that.

New comment by amarka in "Apple introduces M4 chip"

amarka — Tue, 07 May 2024 17:57:31 +0000

I get about 21 hours from mine, it's running Windows but powered off.

New comment by amarka in "One of the biggest landlords in Los Angeles just defaulted on $755M"

amarka — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 16:41:04 +0000

Ahh yes the "we'll rewrite this code from scratch" argument; known well to work every time!

New comment by amarka in "Boeing looked for flaws in its Dreamliner and couldn’t stop finding them"

amarka — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 22:50:28 +0000

Not sure if the last sentence is in jest or not, but here's a list of crashes for just one of their plane models:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...

New comment by amarka in "Twitter and Facebook's action over Joe Biden article reignites bias claims"

amarka — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 20:41:03 +0000

The road to hell is littered with "free ice cream this way =>" signs.

New comment by amarka in "I asked an online tracking company for all of my data (2018)"

amarka — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 17:00:13 +0000

Indeed it's totally worthless data, like what are you going to do, dissect people into groups that you could heavily target and try to sell them gizmos or swing an election? Pfft, not worth the effort. There are no companies or state actors are into that kind of thing.

New comment by amarka in "How I got the French Tech Visa to start my company in France"

amarka — Fri, 21 Aug 2020 20:39:38 +0000

What's worse is that I heard rumors they don't allow slave labor either. Labor laws, ugh, they're the worst.

New comment by amarka in "Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars"

amarka — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 16:06:33 +0000

Waymo can do inner city driving better than Tesla and GM can do highway driving better than Tesla.

I love the competition amongst the different platforms, as a consumer it's a win for us. I could care less on which brand does it better.

New comment by amarka in "“The China Study” and Longevity"

amarka — Thu, 28 Mar 2019 18:22:43 +0000

Why should I trust Denise Minger over Colin Campbell?

I read Capbell's China Study and I'm definitely interested in counter points to his findings, but it seems like Minger is a food blogger (and recent book author) while the other is a biochemist with a long history in their field.

New comment by amarka in "Tesla Is Doing Much Better Than Headlines Suggest"

amarka — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 18:46:23 +0000

My understanding is that the majority of his personal net worth is from Tesla (+Solar City) and SpaceX. Would that limit his ability to personally fund Tesla?

New comment by amarka in "Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit"

amarka — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 23:21:24 +0000

dsnuh - I haven't seen anyone argue against "[software+hardware] would beat a human behind the wheel", its just that developing the tech to achieve this feat with the same level of accuracy as the top 10-20% of current CDL drives is extremely expensive and caries a lot of risk. Nobody seems to of cracked the nut on it.

You're right in that there are many ways to do this, but none have come even close to beating a decent human behind the wheel.

New comment by amarka in "Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit"

amarka — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:25:59 +0000

That's a really good point. I also wonder if the cyclist accident changed the mood and/or culture at Uber when it comes to autonomous vehicles. I have to be honest that it would absolutely gut me inside to know that my software caused a death.

New comment by amarka in "Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit"

amarka — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:23:18 +0000

I think you trade one complexity (fixed vs variable routes) for many other complexities (larger vehicle with more demands). Think of the complexity of getting a driver license for a passenger sized car vs a commercial driver license, there's a lot more rules (physics and human regulations) around a CDL. So yes, you have a fixed route, but is that really the hard problem to solve, the route to take? Isn't the hard part monitoring road conditions, identifying objects, stopping for emergencies, etc?

New comment by amarka in "Uber shuts down self-driving trucks unit"

amarka — Mon, 30 Jul 2018 22:16:59 +0000

I don't mean to be sarcastic here, but I hear developers (myself included) throw out "it would be much easier to..." or "this should only take an hour to automate..." all day long.

If it was an easy and profitable problem to solve it would have been solved by now. I agree that it would be very beneficial for everyone if trucks/truck routes were automated (except maybe the truck drivers getting laid off) but it's obviously a very hard and very risky problem to automate.