Hacker News: kj4211cash

New comment by kj4211cash in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

kj4211cash — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:56:10 +0000

When you think the only group we should allow to immigrate is white South Africans, then, yea, it's racism. At least be honest about it.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe"

kj4211cash — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 04:29:34 +0000

You're probably right about (social) media being a factor but overindexing on Gini. Here's a chart that shows dramatically rising wealth gaps in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

If I got this right Gini measures inequality in either income or spending but as Piketty showed we have crazy rising inequality in capital / wealth.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Young People Hate AI CEOs So Passionately That It's Almost Hard to Believe"

kj4211cash — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:34:29 +0000

I wonder how much of this is caused by income inequality. There are some young people I talk to that are genuinely worried about whether AI will take all the jobs. But there are a lot more that rightfully realize that they probably can't afford the middle class life their parents had and are annoyed at all the money AI is hoovering up and how rich these CEOs are. And that's the surface level. There's all sorts of resentment that hasn't really been thought through and wouldn't exist if we had the sort of real growth in lower- and middle-class incomes that we used to.

New comment by kj4211cash in "US hires over 2k video gamers as air traffic controllers"

kj4211cash — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 04:01:11 +0000

Worked in this area for a couple of years. We have automated collision avoidance systems and have for years. But things can go off nominal fast and you don't want passenger aircraft making drastic maneuvers that fast. Because conditions can change so fast, queueing theory isn't that useful either. It's useful for more strategic as opposed to tactical air traffic control, what we call air traffic flow management. There's been a ton of research in this area for decades, for example at the National Center of Excellence in Aviation Operations Research (NEXTOR) and at NASA's Aviation Systems division. I could say a lot more offline about why, in my humble opinion, progress has been unbelievably slow, but the short answer is that it's government plus modern day academia operating in an environment where funding is low and risk tolerance is lower.

New comment by kj4211cash in "The revenge of the philosophy majors"

kj4211cash — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:53:23 +0000

I think this line of thinking is a bit dangerous. It reminds me when I used to teach in a Civil Engineering department and the other faculty members focused exclusively on how well our coursework prepared our students to become civil engineers. Of course, very few of our students actually did become civil engineers and those that did both required years of additional training and often didn't last long in the profession before transitioning to something else. I used to teach maths and decision making. Had numerous students thank me later on for teaching some of the only material they actually used in their (non-civil-engineering) careers. No one knows what students will do post graduation. One of the best things we can do is to give them tools that are broadly useful.

New comment by kj4211cash in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

kj4211cash — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:49:24 +0000

I had a particularly bad experience with a hotel in Silicon Valley that had outsourced the front desk duties to remote workers. I was stuck outside in the rain, fighting a bad internet connection, trying to check-in. Probably saved them the space taken up by a front desk inside the hotel but I made a mental note never to use that hotel chain again.

New comment by kj4211cash in "My Mathematical Regression"

kj4211cash — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:52:27 +0000

This is basically my professional career. I've stayed 5+ years at the same place now and it's gotten to the point where people ask for me to build an optimization before it's even clear they have a problem amenable to optimization. Yay! My work has a good rep. But also I'm called upon entirely too frequently to explain work I did years ago or to answer questions like which constraint "comes first". Honestly it's getting very tiring. I think a switch to a new company would help but I wonder what will happen to the optimization work at my current company after I leave. It's weird that such a useful academic field still feels like black magic to much of corporate America. I guess it's just sophisticated enough.

New comment by kj4211cash in "How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024)"

kj4211cash — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:41:33 +0000

The two things you reference are very loosely related. I studied Transportation Engineering in the Civil department at UC Berkeley. I have always been very interested in public transportation. But I work as a Data Scientist in Silicon Valley rather than at one of the public transportation agencies. Because it pays roughly 10x as much. Every single one of the smartest people I went to school with is also now working in tech in Silicon Valley. A lot work on stuff like advertising optimization. Sigh.

New comment by kj4211cash in "How to earn a billion dollars"

kj4211cash — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:01:16 +0000

The politician wasn't making a statement about startups or growth rates. She was making a statement about what it means to "earn" money.

New comment by kj4211cash in "What if remote working, not AI, is to blame for weak junior hiring?"

kj4211cash — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 12:34:02 +0000

Yes! I'm "only" a parent of 3 and live nowhere near my coworkers and would be happiest never going to the office. I have been told to travel across the country to HQ every 2 months for vague reasons. I wish I could better articulate to my managers the costs of this policy to my family. Usually female managers understand.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now"

kj4211cash — Tue, 26 May 2026 04:26:35 +0000

Hmmm... On the one hand, yes, silt deposition would tend to expand the delta and that's what you saw over the last 5,000 years up until the 1930's. And yes, it was work done by the Corps of Engineers to fix the course of the Mississippi River that broke this system. That plus logging, oil and gas extraction, and tons of other "local land use" things then led to sinking ground levels. As the article mentions, the governor cancelled a(n expensive) effort that would have resulted in more silt deposition ... in the general area that most experts think would have helped.

On the other hand, the silt wasn't ever being deposited in large quantities in New Orleans itself, but more in other places. The delta is huge. New Orleans is famously below sea level and always has been. There's always been hurricanes. It's always been dangerous to live there and I'm not sure you can blame the dynamic nature of the river.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now"

kj4211cash — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:32:40 +0000

Yup. The article mentions this, briefly.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Rising seas will swallow New Orleans. People need to start relocating now"

kj4211cash — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:37:19 +0000

Oh hey, something I used to work on. The story here is coastal erosion / land subsidence much more than it is sea level rise, although that is a contributing factor. The land subsidence has been caused by Engineering works of the past, including the construction of levees and floodwalls around the city. When I worked on this a decade ago, we were already telling people outside of the city to move and spending a fortune to protect people inside the city. The most cost-effective option is often getting people to move, but good luck convincing everyone. Also this is such a shame because New Orleans is one of the most unique, charming places in the US.

New comment by kj4211cash in "The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA"

kj4211cash — Mon, 25 May 2026 05:02:33 +0000

The Southern Strategy destroyed the GOP as we knew it. It is now the party of dumb. Say that and you get accused of being elitist, but it's the truth. You can win elections as the party of dumb. But, man, it's tough being dumb in the USA today. There's so much misinformation and marketing of harmful products.

New comment by kj4211cash in "Childhood Computing"

kj4211cash — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:46:54 +0000

Love this! You've inspired me to write my own blog post about my early days with an Amiga (1000?). I wonder how many of us have similar experiences.

New comment by kj4211cash in "The Invention of Buses"

kj4211cash — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:40:15 +0000

It's interesting that taxis and shared vehicles came so many years before buses. Also interesting to think about through the lens of aviation. I wonder how soon after we had powered flight someone launched a commercial fixed route service. And how much economics has to do with all of this.

New comment by kj4211cash in "The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam"

kj4211cash — Tue, 19 May 2026 03:23:00 +0000

If you read the article, it's mainly about data centers. Which is understandable regardless of your feelings about the technology. There's a ton of money, energy, labor, water, etc. going into building and operating data centers. It's a big change and a big topic for a lot of local governments. Because there's so much money involved and local government is so dysfunctional, there's also at least the appearance of the public will being given short shrift.

Then you add in on top of that people hearing that everyone's job is in jeopardy, like right now, even if it's not really true. Plus rumors about how untrustworthy people like Sam Altman are. Not to mention that they are San Francisco elites. Lawsuits. Cozying up to Trump. Etc. It's not surprising most of the sentiment around AI is incredibly negative and getting more negative by the day.

New comment by kj4211cash in "AI is a technology not a product"

kj4211cash — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:23:40 +0000

Can you really think deeply in 20 min, while on zoom or in a meeting room?

I think this gets to the heart of my complaint. I thought this would increase the water level on our technical discussions. It hasn't. Like I say, could be the documents or people are poor. In any event, I'm one person that believed in this right up until my org implemented it.

New comment by kj4211cash in "AI is a technology not a product"

kj4211cash — Tue, 19 May 2026 00:20:57 +0000

Well they don't say they didn't read the thing. But 10-20 minutes often isn't enough time to truly digest the arguments. And even it were, I'm not sure it would matter. What I've seen is 10-20 minutes of awkward silent time followed by a level of discussion that isn't notably better than meetings before we adopted Amazon ways. Probably we are doing it wrong and/or have the wrong people in the room.

New comment by kj4211cash in "AI is a technology not a product"

kj4211cash — Mon, 18 May 2026 03:33:13 +0000

We have a bunch of Amazon transplants who newly arrived at my company and have started doing this. I thought I would love it, because I'm a good writer, a great reader, not great at PowerPoint or meeting gamesmanship, etc. Turns out I kind of hate it. The silent reading time is annoying, especially when you've already read the doc or when most people are on zoom, etc. The intellectual bloodbath doesn't happen at my company. The most senior people are given the floor and they usually spout nonsense because they haven't had time to read the doc, are miles away from the intellectual details, are too busy playing office politics, etc. And then there's just as much meeting gamesmanship as before. I was hoping decision would be more scientific but that just hasn't happened. Maybe we're doing it wrong. Maybe we've hired the Amazon rejects. I don't know. Hoping it improves.