Hacker News: jessriedel

New comment by jessriedel in "SFO Quiet Airport (2025)"

jessriedel — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 18:55:10 +0000

Besides making the airport more pleasant, targeting announcements to the relevant travelers also means they are much more likely to be heard. When 99% of announcements are irrelevant, we just mentally screen them out.

Hackney

jessriedel — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:42:45 +0000

Article URL: https://hackney.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47645038

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by jessriedel in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

jessriedel — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 16:05:53 +0000

If that were really the risk they would spin them out.

New comment by jessriedel in "Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver"

jessriedel — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:17:56 +0000

Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again.

Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.

New comment by jessriedel in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

jessriedel — Sun, 04 Jan 2026 10:01:33 +0000

The UN security council is one reasonable and popular choice, although it has lots of problems.

But enforcement is not even my point. I'm referring to a moral principle.

New comment by jessriedel in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

jessriedel — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:59:37 +0000

Most of the people who make the argument I described probably believe the UN is the only legitimate body that could make this decision, based on some combination of practicality, historical precedent, and international agreement. And the UN absolutely has a mechanism for doing it (the security council). But one alternatively might argue the UN is broken/dysfunctional/corrupt enough that it can't be relied on despite having the "proper paperwork", just as national democracies can be for national affairs.

New comment by jessriedel in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

jessriedel — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:25:39 +0000

I think the (disputable) argument is that, for global stability and equilibrium reasons, there should be a general prohibition against kidnapping/assassination of de facto heads of state, regardless of whether they were legitimately elected or are dictators.

New comment by jessriedel in "Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors"

jessriedel — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 23:30:56 +0000

It's quite a bit about that, but it doesn't detract from my point. Mechanical disturbance alone can spread cancer and increase mortality.

"The risk of tumor seeding after liver biopsy is 2.7%"

https://easl.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Hepatocellular-Ca...

Tissue containment systems for uterine morcellation

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/up...

New comment by jessriedel in "Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors"

jessriedel — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:09:01 +0000

Cancers aren't perfectly optimized to metastasize, and metasteses (rather than, e.g., bulk pressure from the original tumor) are usually what kills you. It's perfectly possible that the procedure kills 90% or 99% of the cells in the original tumor but increases migration of the remaining cells such that the net effect reduces patient survival.

New comment by jessriedel in "Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft"

jessriedel — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 14:26:01 +0000

If that's your honest impression, it's incorrect and I urge you to spend more time working with frontier models.

New comment by jessriedel in "Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft"

jessriedel — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 02:18:57 +0000

Do you have a source on that? The current article describes the software very differently:

> In any case, the software updates rolled out by the company appear to be quick and easy to install. Many airlines completed them within hours. The software works by inducing "rapid refreshing of the corrupted parameter so it has no time to have effect on the flight controls", Airbus says. This is, in essence, a way of continually sanitising computer data on these aircraft to try and ensure that any errors don't end up actually impacting a flight.

New comment by jessriedel in "Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft"

jessriedel — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 02:15:52 +0000

I'm quite aware of the limitations. That's why I bothered to post a comment. But it's definitely better to do due diligence by asking first, since many responses can then be checked. Mentioning it in the comment shows the effort, similar to "Google turned up nothing".

New comment by jessriedel in "Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft"

jessriedel — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 18:51:06 +0000

I thought some combination of error correction and redundant systems was already widespread in airplanes to prevent cosmic-ray induced errors. (GPT agrees.) What am I missing? I've read multiple articles on this, and none of them address the fact that the problem, at the level of detail described in the article, should have been prevented by technology available and widely deployed for decades.

New comment by jessriedel in "Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix"

jessriedel — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:29:11 +0000

I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.

New comment by jessriedel in "Venn Diagram for 7 Sets"

jessriedel — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 12:46:09 +0000

I have normal vision. I wouldn't say completely identical when they are side-by-side, but they are very close. It's effectively impossible to discriminate them when they are not side-by-side, which for this plot is very important.

The author's mistake was this: "[my colors] are equidistant in the hue circle". The problem is that the hue circle (at least under the parameterization scheme he used) is not uniform over discrimination, i.e., the ability to discriminate two hues is not invariant under displacing them an equal amount along the circle. (I presume this is one of those situation where it's misleading to think about three primary colors on equal footing because of quirks of human vision biology.)

First, the author could have chosen 7 hues at max-saturation that were easier to discriminate than this. But more importantly, he should have used the other color axes: saturation and brightness. dark red (~maroon) and light red (~pink) are a lot easier to discriminate, even when not next to each other, than the two shades of green he used.

New comment by jessriedel in "Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv CS category"

jessriedel — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 10:16:57 +0000

As an outsider that's a reasonable thing to suppose based on a plain reading of copyright law, but in practice it's not true. Researchers update their preprint based on changes requested by reviewers and editors all the time. It's never an issue.

New comment by jessriedel in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

jessriedel — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:46:54 +0000

Yes, nerves from the brain to the heart can influence heart beat (and other features like heart conduction and blood flow to the heart itself) in response to stress and exercise. Heart transplant recipients lose these features. They make poor marathon runners :)

New comment by jessriedel in "Man still alive six months after pig kidney transplant"

jessriedel — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:41:08 +0000

He's asking about what the nerves do in a normal person

New comment by jessriedel in "MacBook Pro Insomnia"

jessriedel — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 22:09:41 +0000

Thanks!

New comment by jessriedel in "MacBook Pro Insomnia"

jessriedel — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 21:51:44 +0000

Batching isn't mentioned anywhere. Do you have a positive reason to think this, or is it just the easiest hypothesis (besides a typo) explain what the author wrote?