Hacker News: jackmott

New comment by jackmott in "Chinese villagers capture video of falling Long March rocket booster [video]"

jackmott — Thu, 28 Dec 2023 18:47:17 +0000

There is often some margin, and it doesn’t take much. Many early failed falcon 9 landings were very explodey

New comment by jackmott in "The first stable release of a memory safe sudo implementation"

jackmott — Mon, 06 Nov 2023 12:03:47 +0000

I remember a couple of years ago a root exploit in Sudo that was the result of failing to check for a sentinel value, thinking “that is a bug that wouldn’t happen in Rust, even though it isn’t related to memory safety!”

Rust enums are sum types, and imho are one of the few unambiguously good language feature ideas. I miss them any time I use a language where they are not built in. F# is another nice language where they are first class and where I first got familiar with them

New comment by jackmott in "Palantir has courted N.H.S. England with pandemic help and assertive lobbying"

jackmott — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:54:57 +0000

he doesn’t think women should vote and donated millions to trump, does that help with the ethics?

New comment by jackmott in "Profile of Sabine Hossenfelder"

jackmott — Sat, 23 Sep 2023 15:29:40 +0000

Really misplaced negativity, her youtube channel is a treasure, almost nobody in the world manages to produce a breakthrough in physics research, that doesn’t make them garbage.

New comment by jackmott in "Climate Change Tracker"

jackmott — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 17:52:59 +0000

Imagine a huge vat of water, you add some blue food coloring. it swirls around in there, predicting how blue any spot in the vat will be is very hard. predicting the total amount of blue is very easy.

the confidence on global temperature increase is quite high, you can arrive at the same trend that the serious efforts do with a random selection of a couple of hundred stations and without any corrections. I have done this in the past using raw noaa data.

That was sort of my “aha” moment

New comment by jackmott in "Tesla breaks down mid-turn and causes more than nine hours of travel chaos"

jackmott — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 12:41:52 +0000

yeah its a problem that comes up regularly, fails and can’t be rolled away. probably need legislation because so many ev fanboys pretend this isnt a problem. (i am an ev fanboy)

New comment by jackmott in "Unesco calls for global ban on smartphones in schools"

jackmott — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 13:08:24 +0000

ok, how?

New comment by jackmott in "Minify and Gzip (2022)"

jackmott — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:50:11 +0000

how does minify affect the times to decompress and load the css I wonder?

New comment by jackmott in "Rimac Energy: Stationary Energy Storage Technology"

jackmott — Fri, 05 May 2023 12:48:29 +0000

They excelled at building an ev supercar and components for porsche, ferrari and others

New comment by jackmott in "sudo and su Being Rewritten in Rust for Memory Safety"

jackmott — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 18:31:16 +0000

Sudo had a root exploit recently that wasn’t memory safety related, but the rust sun types would have prevented that too. They remove any urge to use sigils (ie negative 1 or 0 mean something special) which you can forget to check. Its easier and nicer to use rust sun types and they don’t let you forget.

New comment by jackmott in "Electricity from Space: The 1970s DOE/NASA Solar Power Satellite Studies"

jackmott — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 11:33:27 +0000

there is loss from the atmosphere when you beam it down

New comment by jackmott in "Methane may not warm the Earth quite as much as previously thought"

jackmott — Sun, 23 Apr 2023 11:36:14 +0000

Yet the warming continues at exactly the rate we expected since the 1980s, given the rise in co2 we are measuring.

Strange coincidence, or maybe the fact that the code is fortran doesn’t say anything about the accuracy of the math.

New comment by jackmott in "Starship Flight Test (Launch in 1 hour)"

jackmott — Thu, 20 Apr 2023 11:08:40 +0000

if the 2nd stage re entry turns out to be fundamentally unworkable, big setback. but if the rocket fails for any of 100 other reasons, no big deal

New comment by jackmott in "Tesla Model 2 will have 53kWh LFP battery pack"

jackmott — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 20:58:00 +0000

aerodynamics mostly, motor efficiency partly

New comment by jackmott in "Last night I read for the first time the company’s 8k announcing my resignation"

jackmott — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 09:20:22 +0000

Poaching sounds like capitalism to me, that idea rich CEOs love until it doesn’t work in their favor.

New comment by jackmott in "Switching from C++ to Rust"

jackmott — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 23:35:08 +0000

agreed, many language features have trade offs or limited usefulness, but after years in the profession I feel that sum types are something every language should have.

New comment by jackmott in "Germany raises red flags about Palantir’s big data dragnet"

jackmott — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 17:36:40 +0000

Its pretty gross that tech people look up to this company and its founder. We should be doing everything we can to bring them down. This company led by a man who regrets that women got the vote and that apartheid ended in south africa and runs a company that helps governments spy on citizens. He also helped trumps insurrection attempt while readying himself to bail out to new zealand in case whatever sick experiment he had in mind didn’t work out to his advantage. nevermind if the rest of us plebs die.

New comment by jackmott in "Do Large Language Models learn world models or just surface statistics?"

jackmott — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 14:38:56 +0000

poorly understood systems like humans?

New comment by jackmott in "EV batteries alone could satisfy short-term grid storage demand as early as 2030"

jackmott — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 22:12:12 +0000

cycles hurt a lot less than just time does, but of course there would need to be some incentive!

New comment by jackmott in "New video of Tesla crash demonstrates the problem of semi-automated driving"

jackmott — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 12:00:00 +0000

I have a Tesla, when using just cruise control it has slammed the brakes:

because of shadows that confused it

because of concern about cars crossing the intersection ahead where there is only the need to gently slow

because of a car crossing an intersection ahead that has already crossed!

because of a steep bridge that confused it

we can’t use cruise control in the car basically, we decided it is too dangerous at worst and jarring at least

because there is so much hype around Tesla people get the impression their software is “hardcore” but a lot of it is absolute garbage.