Hacker News: dibujaron

New comment by dibujaron in "When AI Builds Itself: Our progress toward recursive self-improvement"

dibujaron — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:15:06 +0000

If it's actively building the next generation of itself, I'd say that counts. It's more like a parent raising their kid well than it is like a parent modifying their own mind, but the result is still that you have a better model in a year than you do now.

New comment by dibujaron in "Geography is four-dimensional"

dibujaron — Fri, 15 May 2026 12:26:13 +0000

a heightmap is three-dimensional, where the third dimension is usually represented with color or contour lines.

New comment by dibujaron in "Has_not_been_viewed_much"

dibujaron — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 11:46:52 +0000

Does this strike anyone as bad api design to anyone else? I don't know what their definition of "much" is and it may not be the same as mine. behind the scenes they must have a real number like page_visits_in_last_30_days, which they're checking against a threshold value or "much". It'd be much more useful to just go ahead and return page_visits_in_last_30_days.

(to be fair, maybe the api does offer this too and it's just not the focus of the article)

New comment by dibujaron in "Artemis II safely splashes down"

dibujaron — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:39:30 +0000

It's hard to know who was right. All of these things can be true: it made it back ok; it had a high chance of making it back ok; it should've had a much higher chance of making it back ok. Most of the concerned people were stressing this last point, that it should've been safer than it was. They still thought it had a quite high chance of making it back ok. It took a lot of shuttle missions before Columbia failed.

New comment by dibujaron in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

dibujaron — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 15:02:06 +0000

A less cynical explanation: It's heavily trained to ask follow-up questions at the end of a response, to drive more conversation and more engagement. That's useful both for making sure you want to renew your subscription, and also probably for generating more training data for future models. That's sufficient explanation for the behavior we're seeing.

New comment by dibujaron in "Advanced Rail Energy Storage of North America"

dibujaron — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:11:12 +0000

It's true that track maintenance is costly but it's mostly costly because there's a whole lot of track to maintain; many hundreds of miles of it, often in hard to reach areas. This looks like it'd be a few hundred meters at most, all parallel to each other in one place. So hopefully it's easy enough. The tower crane also requires maintenance.

New comment by dibujaron in "Montreal's New Rail Line Is the Future – Macleans.ca"

dibujaron — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 04:01:18 +0000

The funding model where, if I understand correctly, the construction contractor gets paid less (maybe none?) up front but gets 0.75ca per passenger-kilometer traveled on the system, is cool and does seem like it'd help align incentives and keep costs down.

Some of the other advantages listed in this article were enormous free wins not easily replicated elsewhere though. Somebody else had already paid for the new bridge to be wider to have a transit reservation on it. The same is true for the mount royal tunnel, which was conveniently and cleverly reused for sure, but which cost a staggering amount to construct when new.

This article calls standardization a key, but this system is entirely separate from Montreal's existing subway, and therefore doesn't match any existing standard within the city. https://xkcd.com/927/

Many of the great features suggested here (platform screen doors, full automation) are only possible on a brand new system like this. Very few cities have enough leftover rights-of-way to piece together entire new networks like this for cheap, without enormous land takings or tunneling. If you do have space for a new network, then inventing a new standard and using it makes sense; but if you don't, the best you can do is incremental evolution of the one you have.

New comment by dibujaron in "Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case"

dibujaron — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 17:46:10 +0000

Not sure what you mean. apt-get, yum, and even things like snap act like app stores for free apps, no?

New comment by dibujaron in "The React Foundation"

dibujaron — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 12:42:29 +0000

When you're new it can be hard to tell what to ignore; it makes it tempting to pick a simpler framework that you can entirely grasp. Also any published examples, chatgpt etc won't be aware of the subset you've chosen to use when they're providing examples; they're gonna draw from the full set.

New comment by dibujaron in "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at SFO"

dibujaron — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 21:41:21 +0000

Ideally: there's a train close enough to walk, or a bus or tram that's nearby that runs frequently, is clean, and doesn't get stuck in traffic because there's not much car traffic.

Slightly more realistic: enough people can and do cycle or walk to the train that pressure is relieved on the roads for those who cannot cycle or walk.

New comment by dibujaron in "In Search of AI Psychosis"

dibujaron — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:00:36 +0000

Scott Alexander has issued many studies in his time and is surely aware of this phenomenon. He was very cautious even in this study to calibrate for this sort of noise; see the section about Michaels you know.

New comment by dibujaron in "Trump halts construction on nearly complete wind farm off Rhode Island"

dibujaron — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 13:21:39 +0000

Heh, both figuratively and literally quixotic. He's on a quixotic quest, but he's literally fighting against windmills.

New comment by dibujaron in "Spending too much time at airports"

dibujaron — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 02:42:43 +0000

The airline websites that I've used are remarkably bad with their UI/UX. Far from any grandma being able to use it, definitely. I can rarely get through the process without some inexplicable error or missing field that I can't find or misbehaving custom date picker.

New comment by dibujaron in "Union Pacific to buy Norfolk in $85B mega U.S. railroad deal"

dibujaron — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 13:48:10 +0000

The loaded cars can go coast to coast, but trains are broken up and reorganized often in yards, especially in places like Chicago. this is efficient because two cars from LA headed to Toronto and NYC can travel together until Chicago and only then be split into two new trains. Even within a single railroad this is commonly done.

New comment by dibujaron in "Mira Murati’s AI startup Thinking Machines valued at $12B in early-stage funding"

dibujaron — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:03:13 +0000

Thinking Machines was chosen over the Cray because they had more visual appeal. Sheryl Handler the CEO had (has) a real flair for and it showed; they were neat looking machines

New comment by dibujaron in "Riding high in Germany on the world's oldest suspended railway"

dibujaron — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 12:57:29 +0000

Why would they need a bigger tunnel? Monorails are usually built to a smaller loading gauge than conventional rail.

New comment by dibujaron in "Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War"

dibujaron — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:25:41 +0000

This is well written, readable, and seems logically consistent. However it fairly directly conflicts with the account of Jan Ruff O'Herne: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Ruff-O%27Herne

Does anyone know how to reconcile this?

New comment by dibujaron in "Show HN: JavaFactory – IntelliJ plugin to generate Java code"

dibujaron — Tue, 20 May 2025 22:00:21 +0000

This is not the case for LLMs running on GPUs (which is most of them); GPUs are non-deterministic for this use-case due to the floating point math involved. there is no way to get perfectly deterministic output from OpenAI despite the presence of seed and temperature parameters.

New comment by dibujaron in "The longest train journey is epic – but nobody's ever taken it"

dibujaron — Sun, 18 May 2025 12:28:52 +0000

I mean, the subway is still a train. it's just two transfers instead of one?

New comment by dibujaron in "Lena"

dibujaron — Thu, 15 May 2025 16:55:50 +0000

I love this story. anyone know why it's titled Lena, and not something like MMAcevedo? I can't see any reference to Lena anywhere in the story.