Hacker News: jetrink

New comment by jetrink in "GPT-5.5"

jetrink — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:52:18 +0000

I feel like if I attempted this, the bike frame would look fine and everything else would be completely unrecognizable. After all, a basic bike frame is just straight lines arranged in a fairly simple shape. It's really surprising that models find it so difficult, but they can make a pelican with panache.

New comment by jetrink in "Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution"

jetrink — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 00:29:10 +0000

The religious right, specifically. They would say that all people are descended quite recently from Noah and his family.

New comment by jetrink in "Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music"

jetrink — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 18:02:02 +0000

Hilariously (and appropriately), the decision cites Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., also known as the "Betamax case."

> (a) “The Copyright Act does not expressly render anyone liable for infringement committed by another.” Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 434.

> In Sony, copyright owners sued the maker and the retailers of the Betamax video tape recorder. Id., at 422. The tape recorder could be used to record copyrighted television programs for later personal viewing, which would not constitute infringement. Id., at 449. On the other hand, it could also be used to reproduce and sell copyrighted television programming, which would constitute infringement. Ibid. The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.” Id., at 428 (internal quotation marks omitted). This Court reversed, concluding that “[t]he Betamax is . . . capable of substantial noninfringing uses”—like personal use—so “sale of such equipment to the general public does not constitute contributory infringement.” Id., at 456.

New comment by jetrink in "After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes"

jetrink — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:13:15 +0000

It could create the right sort of incentives though. If I'm a junior and I suddenly have to take my work to a senior every time I use AI, I'm going to be much more selective about how I use it and much more careful when I do use it. AI is dangerous because it is so frictionless and this is a way to add friction.

Maybe I don't have the correct mental model for how the typical junior engineer thinks though. I never wanted to bug senior people and make demands on their time if I could help it.

New comment by jetrink in "Show HN: Formally verified FPGA watchdog for AM broadcast in unmanned tunnels"

jetrink — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 17:19:50 +0000

At first I thought the "unmanned tunnels" description was just a way to avoid broadcast regulator scrutiny, but it does look like it's genuinely designed to be used underground as part of an emergency alert system. That led me to "leaky feeders", a type of broadcast antenna used in mines and tunnels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_feeder

New comment by jetrink in "Treasures found on HS2 route"

jetrink — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 02:07:23 +0000

FTA

> Hand axes were held in the palm rather than attached to a wooden handle.

New comment by jetrink in "The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago"

jetrink — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:40:22 +0000

> their groceries won’t make it to the stores and packages won’t get to their homes without a robust road network.

A road network isn't the only solution. In the early 20th century, for example, there was a separate narrow-gauge tunnel network beneath Chicago dedicated to freight. Deliveries were made directly to businesses via subbasements or elevator shafts. The network had stations at rail and ship terminals for accepting freight arriving from outside the city. At its height in 1929, the network had 150 locomotives pulling 10 to 15 cars per train.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

New comment by jetrink in "Games’ affordance of childlike wonder and reduced burnout risk in young adults"

jetrink — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 16:15:20 +0000

> Did the average person throughout history have more leisure than we do? I doubt it.

Recent anthropological and archaeological research is challenging the traditional view that ancient lives were "nasty, brutish, and short." Instead, it appears that many ancient peoples worked less than eight hours per day and frequently took time off for festivals or to travel long distances to visit friends and family. And unlike today, work usually had a more flexible rhythm where short periods of hard work were separated by long periods of light work and rest.

New comment by jetrink in "In New York City, congestion pricing leads to marked drop in pollution"

jetrink — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:29:11 +0000

Since this is generating revenue for NYC, you can't consider whether this tax is good or bad in a vacuum though. The alternatives are a different tax with its own effects, or more debt, or less spending. (In this case, the revenue goes to the MTA.) Any opportunity costs due to less traffic are at least partially offset by opportunity costs you aren't having to pay somewhere else.

New comment by jetrink in "Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now"

jetrink — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 17:32:22 +0000

Also, many of the posts seemed intended to be humorous and satirical, rather than merely 'futury.' They made me laugh anyway.

> Google kills Gemini Cloud Services

> Running LLaMA-12 7B on a contact lens with WASM

> Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?

> Show HN: A text editor that doesn't use AI

New comment by jetrink in "Unbound Academy hasn’t replaced teachers with AI"

jetrink — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 21:22:34 +0000

I heard one of the founders interviewed on the Hard Fork podcast[1] (which confusingly is primarily concerned with AI, rather than crypto.) I went in with very negative expectations, but came away with a positive impression and optimism that they might be onto something. As you say, AI is not core to the project. Instead, the focus is on using technology to facilitate individualized learning. It is true that teachers are 'replaced', but by humans whose job it is to keep the students focused and motivated, rather than to convey information.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/podcasts/hardfork-educati...

New comment by jetrink in "Stop writing CLI validation. Parse it right the first time"

jetrink — Sat, 06 Sep 2025 23:38:08 +0000

The author credits Alexis King at the beginning and links to that post.

New comment by jetrink in "Will Smith's concert crowds are real, but AI is blurring the lines"

jetrink — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 10:52:11 +0000

The videos are more subtle and it's not apparent in every frame. Look for things in the background snapping into and out of focus, weird textures appearing on Will's head and neck, and people's faces looking unnaturally sharp at the edges, while their skin is uncannily smooth (sort of like Max Headroom.)

New comment by jetrink in "'Safety Today Is a Luxury,' Giorgetto Giugiaro Says After His Crash"

jetrink — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 20:07:30 +0000

I understand the point he's making: New cars are much safer than old cars, and the average person is driving a car that is 12 years old, while new cars are bought primarily by the wealthy. However, that seems like a natural consequence of two things that are very good for everyone. First, cars are lasting much longer than they used to, which lowers the lifetime cost of ownership. Second, cars have gotten much safer in the last fifteen years. As long as these trends continue, the safety gap will exist, but I think everyone would still prefer cars keep getting safer and more reliable.

New comment by jetrink in "Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations"

jetrink — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 01:46:39 +0000

"Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW9J3tjh63c

New comment by jetrink in "Denver Museum finds dinosaur vertibra under its parking lot"

jetrink — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:25:20 +0000

This is such a wonderfully unlikely story. The museum, known for its dinosaur displays, was drilling a borehole in its parking lot as part of a building improvement project. The 5cm borehole happened to go straight through the spine of a small dinosaur.

Denver Museum finds dinosaur vertibra under its parking lot

jetrink — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:25:20 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/denver-museum-dinosaur-bone-fossil-parking-lot-a035df2d4c9b1cbcaa32137ebb4bfa2a

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44532515

Points: 1

# Comments: 2

New comment by jetrink in "The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization"

jetrink — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:31:09 +0000

The Bitter Lesson is specifically about AI. The lesson restated is that over the long run, methods that leverage general computation (brute-force search and learning) consistently outperform systems built with extensive human-crafted knowledge. Examples: Chess, Go, speech recognition, computer vision, machine translation, and on and on.

New comment by jetrink in "Photos in a Similar Style Aren't Copyright-Infringing–Woodland vs. Lil Nas X"

jetrink — Tue, 20 May 2025 21:57:14 +0000

It turns out that Woodland v. Hill is not about landscape photography.

New comment by jetrink in "Internet Artifacts"

jetrink — Thu, 15 May 2025 13:17:27 +0000

I jumped over to the Wikipedia page of early blogger Justin Hall to see what he's up to. He has another distinction that he can probably claim: The longest recorded gap between registering a domain and finally using it to start a business.

"In September 2017, Hall began work as co-founder & Chief Technology Officer for bud.com, a California benefit corporation delivering recreational cannabis, built on a domain name he registered in 1994."