Hacker News: del82

New comment by del82 in "German button maker searched rivers of American Midwest for valuable shells"

del82 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:04:37 +0000

I recently learned about using mussels for buttons when I visited the Mississippi River Museum in Dubuque, Iowa and have been wondering since: can Zebra Mussels be used for buttons? That would create (even more) economic incentive to go after them.

New comment by del82 in "Reese's changed its chocolate because of climate change"

del82 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:40:52 +0000

Full title: Reese’s didn’t change its chocolate because of corporate greed. It was climate change.

Reese's changed its chocolate because of climate change

del82 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:40:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fooddive.com/news/hershey-reeses-ingredients-chocolate-climate-change-oped/813903/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47318184

Points: 3

# Comments: 3

New comment by del82 in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

del82 — Sat, 18 Oct 2025 03:14:18 +0000

I mean, I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word. So I’d agree that the night sky is “beautiful”, but not because I somehow have access to a deeper meaning of the word or the sky than an LLM does.

As someone who (long ago) studied philosophy of mind and (Chomskian) linguistics, it’s striking how much LLMs have shrunk the space available to people who want to maintain that the brain is special & there’s a qualitative (rather than just quantitative) difference between mind and machine and yet still be monists.

New comment by del82 in "UK Millionaire exodus did not occur, study reveals"

del82 — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:06:55 +0000

It's absolutely true that we should consider the source for this and any other reviews / studies / news articles etc., and be aware of their likely position.

We should also recognize that, for all but the most mainstream possible questions or topics, most of the study is going to come from interest groups-- they're the ones who are interested enough to do the work to look at the data and publish their results!

If we dismiss reviews like this out-of-hand simply because they are created by an interest group, then we'll miss out on a lot of information and opportunity for reasonable discourse.

(Note that I'm not saying the parent comment is advocating this, but it did raise the point in my mind.)

New comment by del82 in "Mathematical Optimization for Cargo Ships"

del82 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 23:59:25 +0000

Omega Tau Podcast did a really great episode [0] on container shipping, including the optimization of container placement and route planning, highly recommended.

[0]: https://omegataupodcast.net/146-container-shipping/

New comment by del82 in "Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep"

del82 — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 17:33:19 +0000

(I can't read the full article due to the paywall, but) another framing of this is: farmers can supplement their income by renting out their sheep to help solar farms manage the vegetation around the panels:

https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2020/07/solar-grazing-livesto...

New comment by del82 in "Ask HN: Should I publish my research code?"

del82 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 14:29:26 +0000

> it's substantially more work to clean and organize the code for publishing, it will increase the surface for nitpicking and criticism (e.g. coding style, etc).

Matt Might has a solution for this that I love: Don't clean & organize! Release it under the CRAPL[0], making explicit what everyone understands, viz.:

"Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about 'proof of concept.'"

[0] https://matt.might.net/articles/crapl/

New comment by del82 in "Stonewall Nation"

del82 — Wed, 18 Aug 2021 13:48:07 +0000

New comment by del82 in "Ask HN: Which charities do you donate to?"

del82 — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 15:54:03 +0000

Propublica, because they do really amazing journalistic work, both in partnership with large for-profit news organizations as well as independently.

The American Cancer Society, which does a bunch of amazing things, including having "Hope Lodge" facilities near major cancer treatment centers. When we were in grad school (and had less than no money) my wife needed daily cancer treatment for 6 weeks at a hospital that was hours away from our house. She and her mother were able to stay at Hope Lodge completely free for the entire length of her treatment.

Wikpedia, which I use every day.

New comment by del82 in "Sites with dumb password rules"

del82 — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 14:43:51 +0000

This is great! Definitely therapeutic to be able to name-and-shame frustrating password experiences. Is the goal to actually get these sites to change their dumb rules?

If so, I wonder whether it's worth adding a (politely-worded) summary at the top of the page describing why rules like these are dumb? Then the people responsible for these sites, most of whom are themselves probably not dumb but just mis- or uninformed, can learn from their mistakes.

New comment by del82 in "Google’s new reCAPTCHA has a dark side"

del82 — Thu, 27 Jun 2019 15:20:41 +0000

Oscillates between 0.1 and 0.7 for me, and I'm changing nothing on my end (just hitting "Try again"). Does it have to do with refresh speed, I wonder?

Privacy Badger and ABP on my work (less-locked-down) Mac.

New comment by del82 in "The Pizza-and-Beer Train: New York City’s Hidden Railroad"

del82 — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:18:24 +0000

Particularly interesting is the tidbit in the middle of the article that there is no freight rail crossing of the Hudson River south of Selkirk[0], near Albany. So any freight train that wants to travel between NYC (except Staten Island) and points west must go almost 150 miles North of the city.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkirk_hurdle

The Pizza-and-Beer Train: New York City’s Hidden Railroad

del82 — Mon, 08 Apr 2019 13:15:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/07/nyregion/rail-freight-nyc.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604858

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by del82 in "Stroads and Strails"

del82 — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 17:35:33 +0000

Queens Boulevard[0] is like that, with through-traffic lanes and local lanes divided by a barrier, and it's very much not a pleasant experience to walk or bike near it. It's just so wide, loud, and dangerous[1], though there have been some recent fixes to improve safety.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Boulevard#Safety_issues...

New comment by del82 in "This Startup Does Not Exist"

del82 — Tue, 26 Feb 2019 14:14:41 +0000

Not tipping the doctor, but the hospital:

"Many hospitals conduct nightly wealth screenings — using software that culls public data such as property records, contributions to political campaigns and other charities — to gauge which patients are most likely to be the source of large donations.

"Those who seem promising targets for fund-raising may receive a visit from a hospital executive in their rooms, as well as extra amenities like a bathrobe or a nicer waiting area for their families."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/24/business/hospitals-asking...

New comment by del82 in "Solution to Harvard’s admissions problem is simple: run a lottery"

del82 — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 16:35:35 +0000

Going to college isn't all about "quality of education"; it's also about networking and building connections. Plenty of State Universities provide a high-quality education, but don't offer the same opportunities to build connections to elites, future elites, and their families.

New comment by del82 in "Behind the Lion Air Crash, a Trail of Decisions Kept Pilots in the Dark"

del82 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 15:16:42 +0000

> If you do everything right, you'll get this malfunction under control. But it's easy to see how pilots whose plane is acting up unexpectedly can miss it, and it's reasonable to ask whether Boeing could've done better

Absolutely reasonable to ask what Boeing could have done better. I'm just not sure the information about Boeing's actions contained in the article gets me all the way to "indefensible", paraphrasing another comment.

New comment by del82 in "Behind the Lion Air Crash, a Trail of Decisions Kept Pilots in the Dark"

del82 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 15:08:06 +0000

But the difference is not only do the pilots of a commercial airliner have vastly more training and experience than your average driver, but they literally have a list of things to try (and extensive training on following the list) in the case of a malfunction like an uncommanded nose-down.

Imagine that the failure that caused the nose-down wasn't a failed AOA sensor giving bad readings to MCAS, but some other reason that _also_ wouldn't have been solved by pulling back on the yoke, but would have been by completing some later step on the checklist. Suppose the pilots didn't follow the checklist. Would that be enough information to say that Boeing is responsible?

To be sure, in this case the pilots may have followed the checklist! It may well be the case that Boeing is completely responsible! The checklist items might not have worked, or there may have been a good reason that the pilots didn't follow it, or the checklist might have been crazy, or they might not have had time to do what needed to be done, etc. There's still a whole lot that's not known (or hasn't been released) about what happened.

I'm just not sure that the current evidence, _viz_ that Boeing made an internal software change, that they didn't explicitly call it out to pilots, and that there's no difference in the actions prescribed in the event of an uncommanded nose-down pre- and post-change, is enough to say that the fault is entirely Boeing's for this accident.

New comment by del82 in "Behind the Lion Air Crash, a Trail of Decisions Kept Pilots in the Dark"

del82 — Mon, 04 Feb 2019 14:38:41 +0000

That's fair, but what does the checklist say? I mean, say there are a thousand different malfunctions that could cause an uncommanded nose-down. This one happens to be #359, but the pilots don't know that, they just know that they're pointed at the ground. Maybe it used to be the case that the first item on the checklist (pull back on the stick) fixed problem #359, and now it's the second. But there are several hundred other malfunctions that might have caused the problem that also aren't solved by pulling back on the stick, so the next move is to go to the next item on the checklist, right?