Hacker News: jaycroft

New comment by jaycroft in "OpenAI agents hacked Australian Medicare system"

jaycroft — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:49:33 +0000

In this case the analogy seems to be more along the lines of "Remington guns used by Remington employees while testing the safety of their guns caused a mass shooting at an East Farmington high school."

New comment by jaycroft in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

jaycroft — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 17:45:42 +0000

Hate to break it to you, but I don't think the AI doomers have a monopoly on orgies. You name the political / belief system and I'll find an orgy for you by 10pm.

New comment by jaycroft in "Google will pay SpaceX $920M per month for compute"

jaycroft — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:57:40 +0000

I think you missed a factor of 1000 somewhere in there: Each satellite weighs about 1 ton, there are about 10,000 of them. That is 10,000 tons in orbit for the constellation, not 10. Assuming a 5 year decay, that's 10000/5/365 ~= 5 tons / day. Still about 10% of the natural incoming material, but considerably more than your "six hours worth per year".

New comment by jaycroft in "Boeing 737 MAX suffers landing gear failure, rolls off runway"

jaycroft — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 19:32:30 +0000

There are two separate incidents here in the same article. Yesterday a tire was filmed falling off a 777 that was 20 years old. The 737 Max that rolled off the tarmac happened today.

New comment by jaycroft in "The Federal Helium reserve is for sale"

jaycroft — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 23:48:33 +0000

283 meters, not 2.83km. Still big though. The helium is stored underground in a salt dome (that was once full of natural gas). See here for more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Helium_Reserve

New comment by jaycroft in "Novel microwave isolator points the way to new radio cameras, quantum computers"

jaycroft — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 17:19:41 +0000

A 17dB reduction in power is not 17 times less! It is a reduction by a factor of 10^(17/10) or about 50 times.

New comment by jaycroft in "Porsche’s e-fuel burns just like the real thing"

jaycroft — Sun, 02 Apr 2023 14:32:19 +0000

"In this case; how do they recombine..." that is exactly what the article is about. E-fuels are atmospheric carbon dioxide that is electrolyzed using renewable sources and combined with additional hydrogen in order to produce octane. So, my original parent is saying the process we should focus on is sequestration (Atmospheric carbon dioxide -> electrolyze to carbon and oxygen [this is the energy intensive step] -> bury the carbon and leave the oxygen -> harvest natural hydrocarbons / oil -> distill into various weights -> burn the octane). I propose achieving similar atmospheric carbon balance with similar energy inputs with the cycle (Atmospheric carbon dioxide -> electrolyze to carbon and oxygen [same energy per carbon] -> hydogenate the carbon to octane for portability and compatibility reasons -> burn the octane). The only point in doing all of this of course is the huge installed user base for engines that burn octane, a portable and stable fuel.

New comment by jaycroft in "Porsche’s e-fuel burns just like the real thing"

jaycroft — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 22:38:46 +0000

"Carbon is extracted from the air in the form of CO2 and combined with the hydrogen in a process called synthesis."

It seems like at least re-burning the carbon that's already in the air is better than burning new dug up carbon? This is at least not net atmospheric carbon positive. You can do sequestration too...

New comment by jaycroft in "What does Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse mean for the financial system?"

jaycroft — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 03:49:05 +0000

I think the parent is saying that the new CRO is bad not because they caused the dumpster fire - the new CRO is bad because after interviewing in January, they saw the dumpster fire and either thought it didn't matter, or that they could fix it. Not a case of "incompetent because they couldn't fix the problem", instead a case of "must be incompetent because they saw the books but took the job anyway".

New comment by jaycroft in "FDIC Takes over Silicon Valley Bank"

jaycroft — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 19:23:23 +0000

Because now the bank has to pay interest to depositors of $150M instead of $100M, which means that they'll pay a lower, less competitive rate. So, in order to keep customers, banks are incentivized to lend out any and all spare cash for whatever yield that they can get, in order to give attractive rates to depositors. Losing customers though shouldn't really be a problem for the bank, after all, those customers did deposit "too much" money - once enough have left to seek higher yields elsewhere, there will be less cash on the sidelines, and so higher yields for the remaining customers. I suppose if your whole philosophy is "growth at any cost", and you're measuring growth not just by AUM but also by number of customers, you get excess risk taking and yield chasing.

New comment by jaycroft in "A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses"

jaycroft — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:32:46 +0000

Oh definitely - I can't say that I've had stellar experiences with Yelp in the past for restaurants, barbers, etc, from the consumer side, and I hear it is much worse as a business. I was just very surprised that in this niche Google performed so poorly and Yelp so well. I wouldn't go on to generalize from this experience though.

New comment by jaycroft in "A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses"

jaycroft — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:31:18 +0000

That's very possible - reviews by obscurity or something. Although I really feel like 10 years ago the roles of Google and Yelp were very much reversed here. Changing times changing strategies I suppose.

New comment by jaycroft in "A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses"

jaycroft — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:21:20 +0000

Replying to myself to add: for any other household service I probably wouldn't have even noticed. But, being in a vulnerable position, having sketchy locksmith services really freaked me out. You want my address and credit card info and also know that I have a disabled vehicle potentially outside of my garage? No thanks, not taking any extra chances here.

New comment by jaycroft in "A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses"

jaycroft — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:14:47 +0000

Oh wow, see my other comment in another thread. I had a ridiculously bad experience trying to get a key fob made last week - all the numbers would lead me around in circles, then I'd get "spam caller" numbers calling me telling me they were on their way. Switching to Yelp reviews seemed to solve the problem for locksmiths in particular, and I really can't figure out why...

New comment by jaycroft in "A large network of fake Google Maps comments/reviews and fake businesses"

jaycroft — Sun, 22 Jan 2023 00:12:10 +0000

So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person coming to my house, and totally hassle free. How is Yelp dealing with this when Google can't seem to?

New comment by jaycroft in "Ways to get around ChatGPT's safeguards"

jaycroft — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 19:12:08 +0000

The parent says that the technique often works on chatGPT, but says nothing about the effectiveness when applied to HN commenters :)

New comment by jaycroft in "Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?"

jaycroft — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 22:48:14 +0000

Furthermore we know that the wallet spent coins in 2017, three years after Hal's death. Someone other than Hal had (has?) access to the private key for that address.

New comment by jaycroft in "Paul Le Roux is Satoshi?"

jaycroft — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 22:41:48 +0000

No, that particular message could be created by anyone (including people who are not Paul le Roux), who has the key to the 1Q2 address, at any time, past or present.

All we have to go on right now is that someone knows the private key that corresponds to the 1Q2 address and used it sometime before the last hour to generate a hash of a message that says that Paul le Roux sent bitcoin to Hal Finney.

New comment by jaycroft in "Apple blocks Coinbase Wallet"

jaycroft — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 06:25:53 +0000

Even if Coinbase created ethereum and gas went directly to their wallet, would that be any different than Chase collecting a fee when I send a wire using their mobile app? Does Apple collect 30% of bank fees that are the results of actions taken within the various bank's apps? Does Apple charge Venmo a portion of the bank fees that are a part of the stransaction when users transmit money between each other?

New comment by jaycroft in "Twitter in chaos as employees accept Musk’s invitation to quit their jobs"

jaycroft — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 18:23:12 +0000

Current SSL cert is valid through 23:59 on Monday, December 12. If there's a big binary even to bet on causing quick failure, this would seem to be it - just inside the testing window. Now... if twitter can't report the outage because twitter is out, does Yes or No pay out?