Hacker News: del82

New comment by del82 in "Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash"

del82 — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 15:34:16 +0000

I desperately wish Google would focus on improving the Gemini capabilities that are built-in to their office suite (docs, slides, etc.). The current built-in Gemini is terrible, and if I could use e.g. Claude natively with those products my workday would be an order of magnitude more productive.

I'm shocked that they don't seem to be investing in agentic capabilities there at all.

The Farm Robotics Challenge

del82 — Fri, 06 Nov 2026 03:10:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.farmroboticschallenge.ai

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50387698

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by del82 in "Siri AI is now open to all developers"

del82 — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 01:37:28 +0000

> Siri AI, an entirely new version of Siri that is profoundly more capable, conversational, and personal

Siri is famous for being very poor, which is why they felt the need to add this bit in the second paragraph. I wonder why they didn't just pick a different name? Does Siri have enough positive brand awareness that it's worth trying to resuscitate it?

New comment by del82 in "Postal Service Surveilled Protest Activities Online with Little Rules, Oversight"

del82 — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 01:30:32 +0000

>The records, disclosed to EFF and other requesters suing the postal service under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the agency’s internet Covert Operations Program, or iCOP, routinely sifted through social media posts organizing and discussing protests with little records of any oversight or legal justification.

Wait, why does the Postal Service have an "internet Covert Operations Program" at all?

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...