Hacker News: bostonpete

New comment by bostonpete in "Jane Goodall has died"

bostonpete — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 20:16:13 +0000

Not sure “thankless” really applies here. She enjoyed a sort of celebrity status for the past 40-50 years and was universally loved.

New comment by bostonpete in "Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)"

bostonpete — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 04:09:07 +0000

Ball spin would be trivial to simulate. The only way I could see the physics getting at all expensive is if they went overboard with fluid dynamics

New comment by bostonpete in "The Pumpkin Eclipse"

bostonpete — Thu, 30 May 2024 18:19:18 +0000

What is the significance of the article/post title...?

New comment by bostonpete in "We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services"

bostonpete — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 20:59:13 +0000

AWS has a denied party screening team and absolutely restricts access to services based on the BIS entity list and other sanctioned parties.

New comment by bostonpete in "Physically attractive attorneys tend to have greater success in federal court"

bostonpete — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 18:37:21 +0000

I believe Musk was wealthy basically from birth…

New comment by bostonpete in "The xz attack may be bad, but trusting Microsoft certs is worse"

bostonpete — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 17:10:36 +0000

Whether MS deserves credit or not, he's a very senior SW engineer at Microsoft so this should at least provide some reassurance that the company has technical leaders who are looking out for these sorts of security risks...

New comment by bostonpete in "Why you've never been in a plane crash"

bostonpete — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 18:21:08 +0000

> TIL that car fatalities were declining until 2019, and then reversed and are getting worse.

Per your link, fatalities per mile drive bottomed out in 2014 and barely dropped after 2010. There's been some speculation that this reversal in safety was tied to the rise of smartphones and a corresponding increase of distracted driving.

New comment by bostonpete in "Weather intelligence and cutting-edge tech is boosting grid capacity by 30%"

bostonpete — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 21:07:51 +0000

How so? The submission you linked is a different article?

New comment by bostonpete in "Gemini "duck" demo was not done in realtime or with voice"

bostonpete — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:38:32 +0000

Speech to text is often wrong too. So is autocorrect. And object detection. Computers don't have to be 100% correct in order to be useful, as long as we don't put too much faith in them.

New comment by bostonpete in "Google paid $26.3B in 2021 to be the default search engine"

bostonpete — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 18:14:40 +0000

This seems like a non sequitur -- the parent was just pointing out that the article's use of "browser" was probably a typo. In addition to being more correct using "search engine" or just "search" in place of "browser" would have made that sentence more accessible to the "rest of the population" you're describing.

New comment by bostonpete in "Early Europeans ate seaweed for thousands of years"

bostonpete — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 16:53:38 +0000

That seems like a leap -- there's other foods that can provide sufficient iodine (e.g. fish, eggs, milk)...

New comment by bostonpete in "Google vs. the Open Web"

bostonpete — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 16:03:57 +0000

You didn't really make a comment -- you just dropped in an Asimov quote. And xNeil's interpretation of the relevance of that comment matched my intuition. If you had some other intent with that comment, maybe you should clarify?

New comment by bostonpete in "X, the moonshot factory"

bostonpete — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 19:50:09 +0000

The USG isn't setting out to make money on major ventures. Publicly traded companies are.

New comment by bostonpete in "MIT’s Barry Duncan demonstrates the power of writing in reverse"

bostonpete — Mon, 20 Mar 2023 21:56:47 +0000

Can you share the palindrome?

New comment by bostonpete in "Has the Zodiac killer mystery been solved again?"

bostonpete — Sun, 25 Sep 2022 22:18:09 +0000

A Google search suggests that person may have been talking about the Black Dahlia killer, not the Zodiac killer

New comment by bostonpete in "Omega-3 fatty acids and exercise: a review of their combined effects (2011) [pdf]"

bostonpete — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 20:59:34 +0000

Would be nice if they linked the study or at least an article about it.

New comment by bostonpete in "Robinhood lays off 23% of staff"

bostonpete — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 22:41:37 +0000

Wow, TIL you can use sed syntax in vi. I'm not a heavy vi user but that's still a handy trick. :-)

New comment by bostonpete in "Robinhood lays off 23% of staff"

bostonpete — Tue, 02 Aug 2022 22:38:09 +0000

That's not really true, at least not in the same way being discussed above. Jobs already owned millions of shares in Apple stock, so yes, he profited from the stock but AFAIK that was only from the appreciation of existing stock, not from new grants.

New comment by bostonpete in "Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes"

bostonpete — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 15:08:32 +0000

10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.

New comment by bostonpete in "Why we ignore thousands of daily car crashes"

bostonpete — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 20:17:07 +0000

Makes sense, but that still doesn't explain why we ignore tens of thousands of auto deaths per year but talk about one Uber ATG death for 5 years...