Hacker News: lisper

New comment by lisper in "Tesla Roadster"

lisper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:47:15 +0000

I'm not saying it's not cool. Parlor tricks can be very cool, and this one is. But it's still a parlor trick because it's not good for anything other than being cool. When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.

New comment by lisper in "Tesla Roadster"

lisper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 23:20:01 +0000

> It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment

Many of the best parlor tricks are.

New comment by lisper in "Tesla Roadster"

lisper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:45:52 +0000

> Ok, so it actually flies.

For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.

The Tesla Roadster 2 Is Here–and It Flies

lisper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:26:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-roadster-2-launch/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114833

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

Tesla's Flying Roadster Revealed [video]

lisper — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 06:20:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHXrLzUKJc

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114791

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by lisper in "Things to know when you get cancer"

lisper — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 06:19:27 +0000

Maybe things have changed, but in my day when deploying code to an interplanetary spacecraft, code reviews (emphatically plural) were not optional, and being offended by them would have been a career-ending move.

New comment by lisper in "Apple/macOS silently removed from official Unix registry"

lisper — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:40:12 +0000

Why would anyone care about what the Open Group has to say in this day and age? Is anyone actually still using SCO or AIX any more?

Przybylski's Star

lisper — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:53:00 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przybylski%27s_Star

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50008313

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by lisper in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

lisper — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 02:04:53 +0000

> Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.

Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.

New comment by lisper in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

lisper — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:40:44 +0000

> Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly

I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).

The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.

New comment by lisper in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

lisper — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 23:04:42 +0000

> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best

This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)

New comment by lisper in "Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones"

lisper — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:05:18 +0000

> Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom?

It offers protection in the event that your /dev/urandom is compromised. Otherwise no.

(Of course, if your /dev/urandom is compromised then whatever process you use to compute a hash of a photo is likely compromised as well.)

OpenAI scraps release of Astra 6.1 model over safety issues

lisper — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:38:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/09/28/chatgpt-maker-openai-scraps-release-astra-61-model-over-safety/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49886459

Points: 21

# Comments: 27

New comment by lisper in "Owed a billion dollars in Nvidia stock"

lisper — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:41:35 +0000

I don't understand how your name could not have been carried along on the cap table all these years. In my experience when I've made an investment in an early stage company and they have a liquidity event, they come looking for me.

Earth Harp

lisper — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:13:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.williamearthharp.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49795185

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

iPhone 18 Pro Teardown: What Changed Inside? [video]

lisper — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 06:17:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS_HMre7vk0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783619

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

A Relativity Visualization

lisper — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 17:05:32 +0000

Article URL: http://blog.rongarret.info/2026/09/a-relativity-visualization.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49777676

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by lisper in "NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami"

lisper — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 22:20:37 +0000

Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.

New comment by lisper in "Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit"

lisper — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:25:00 +0000

You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.

New comment by lisper in "The Computer Museum of America reclamation project"

lisper — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 10:57:07 +0000

It is at once obvious and hard for people to internalize that there will come a time in the future when our time will be as far in the past as ancient Rome is to us. We might not be interested in old magazines and artifacts from our grandparent's childhoods, but they will be (at least one hopes). There are so many ways that we ought to be more considerate of future generations, and this is one them. These museums are our Libraries of Alexandria.