Hacker News: jakeinspace

New comment by jakeinspace in "The Beginning of Scarcity in AI"

jakeinspace — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:04:02 +0000

China is installing something like 500 GW of wind and solar per year now. Even if they're only able to build and otherwise access chips that have half the SoTA performance per watt, they will win.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Apple update looks like Czech mate for locked-out iPhone user"

jakeinspace — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:38:48 +0000

That's not really true in any country these days.

New comment by jakeinspace in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

jakeinspace — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:24:26 +0000

True, but BFS was mainly done in-house. Source: my best friend and I worked on some parts of it.

New comment by jakeinspace in "The Claude Code Source Leak: fake tools, frustration regexes, undercover mode"

jakeinspace — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 20:13:15 +0000

Aside from merges that combine commits from many authors onto a production branch or release tag. I would personally not leave an agent to do that sort of work.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Clojure: The Documentary, official trailer [video]"

jakeinspace — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 02:59:12 +0000

I'll never be as cool as them.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Olympic Committee bars transgender athletes from women’s events"

jakeinspace — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:19:01 +0000

I would argue that it's the formerly presumed binary nature of sex/gender that made it a logical split for all sports. While marital arts and weightlifting tend to seperate by weight as well, that is because those particular events are particularly biased toward muscle mass and height/reach by proxy. Most sports are less clearly advantaged by size (soccer, for example). You just can't practically divide entire team sports by gradations of height, because there aren't enough players in a school for more than a few squads.

If you wanted to divide by height or weight in a binary fashion to reduce the number of teams, then obviously you'll just have some sports where everyone in the under-6' team is 5'11.5, which seems not optimal and unfair.

I wish there was a good solution.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Palestinian boy, 12, describes how Israeli forces killed his family in car"

jakeinspace — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:28:17 +0000

Wasn't aware Israel had declared war on the West Bank.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Claudetop – htop for Claude Code sessions (see your AI spend in real-time)"

jakeinspace — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:00:30 +0000

Please type things yourself. Or at least prompt your LLM of choice to sound less canned.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"

jakeinspace — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:47:22 +0000

Location: Montreal, Canada

Remote: Preferable

Willing to relocate: To Ontario, or possibly US East Coast

Technologies: C/C++, Python, Linux kernel (yocto, kernel space dev), board bring-up, FPGAs (Xilinx), video, fault tolerance

Github: https://github.com/jmacneal

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakemacneal/

Email: jake [dot] macneal [at] gmail.com

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XBxf012ceSOb74_x7tzHvbxiNXo...

Embedded Software engineer with over 6 years of experience building software systems in the aerospace sector. Contributed to multiple spacecraft, including NASA Orion and Gateway (Artemis Program), Chorus Constellation (2026 launch), and EarthDaily Constellation (in- orbit). Built open-source flight software frameworks, application software, Linux kernel drivers, bootloaders, and test infrastructure. Comfortable designing and implementing safety-critical embedded software systems with fault tolerance in mind.

Interested in: Embedded/Firmware roles in aerospace, medical, robotics, semiconductors, and other fields. Especially interested in roles involving edge AI inference.

I have an undergrad computer engineering degree from McGill University, and a CS Master's from UT Austin.

I am a US citizen.

Regards,

Jacob Macneal

New comment by jakeinspace in "Analysis Suggests School Was Hit Amid U.S. Strikes on Iranian Naval Base"

jakeinspace — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:30:52 +0000

People need to be tried/court martialed for this.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Iran War Cost Tracker"

jakeinspace — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 20:52:29 +0000

Is this missing interceptors? My understanding is those probably dominate total costs at the moment, especially if you include the costs of allied Gulf State and Israeli interceptors. Thousands have been expended already on ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones. Those range from hundred of thousands to multiple millions per shot.

New comment by jakeinspace in "xAI and Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems"

jakeinspace — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 21:50:52 +0000

I was hoping our eventual Skynet would at least be cool. Now we're just gonna have killer robots yelling slurs at us, talking about race realism and the downfall of the West.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Ask HN: Who here is not working on web apps/server code?"

jakeinspace — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 21:28:59 +0000

Embedded, a mix of Linux (yocto), boot loaders (mostly C), some bare metal C/assembly. Have worked in aerospace for 6 years but am currently looking to hop over to another industry, ideally AI accelerators/semiconductors or medical devices. I enjoy it, for the most part.

New comment by jakeinspace in "How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips"

jakeinspace — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 20:06:18 +0000

If China actually catches up and surpasses the West/TSMC in fab technology and production, I think they'd have a better option, which is simply flooding the world market with high-end chips and obliterating the Taiwanese economy. Eventually, joining an economically dominant China might become more palatable, or a necessity.

New comment by jakeinspace in "AI capability isn't humanness"

jakeinspace — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 20:34:11 +0000

Blind people tend to have less spatial intelligence though, like significantly more. Not very nice to say like that, and of course they often develop heightened intelligence in other areas, but we do consider human-level spatial reasoning a very important goal in AI.

New comment by jakeinspace in "The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat"

jakeinspace — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:43:46 +0000

Because we live in a society, and all of us suffer if the average worker and citizen falls significantly in their competence and understanding of the world.

New comment by jakeinspace in "White House rules out bailout for AI as bubble fears grow"

jakeinspace — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:53:32 +0000

A federal guarantee of debt is a subsidy, one with horrendous potential downside. A CEO really shouldn't be so flippant, though I think he knows what he's saying.

New comment by jakeinspace in "BYD builds fastest car"

jakeinspace — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 02:30:38 +0000

28kW of dissipation is pretty solid, though obviously is irrelevant during a short burst with hundreds of watts of heat generated. I guess the frame itself act as the fallback heatsink for storing excess heat in these scenarios? Because by my math, a modest 100kg heatsink (no idea if that's reasonable) would reach 270°C in only around 45 secondw if it's trying to handle 250kW+ of heat transfer (270C is roughly the max differential for heat pipes,liquid cooling might be significantly lower limit). And obviously the batteries can't handle 270C.

New comment by jakeinspace in "BYD builds fastest car"

jakeinspace — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:03:11 +0000

3000 hp? Not sure if that's measured at the "crank" or the dynamo, but that's over 2MW, probably pushing 2.5MW of power draw from the batteries assuming a motor efficiency of 90% and some other losses. Apparently that's getting drawn at 1.2kV from the batteries, so "only" around 2kA of current draw.

That top power draw would drain the 80kWh batteries in around 2 minutes, though I'm guessing you'd hit thermal throttling or catastrophic failure before that. The batteries are allegedly rated to 30C, meaning 2 minutes to full discharge at max current.

I'm curious how the heat dissipation of EVs compares to ICE vehicles. You have much higher efficiency vs combustion and get to split the power between 4 motors instead of one engine, but you don't get the heat capacity of a massive engine block, or the convection of cold air intake + hot exhaust out the tailpipe.

New comment by jakeinspace in "Trump Orders US Troops to Portland, Authorizes 'Full Force'"

jakeinspace — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 19:40:33 +0000

A sanctuary city means not having local police cooperate with federal immigration officials. There is no constitutional requirement for local police departments to do so.