Hacker News: lkbm

New comment by lkbm in "High Diesel Prices Bankrupted 16 Trucking Companies in Just 30 Days"

lkbm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:53:44 +0000

Noise is also a form of pollution we never seem to price in. You can hear trucks on the highway from several miles away in many cases, and I was regularly woken up by very loud construction vehicles going by my house in Austin around 5am.

New comment by lkbm in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

lkbm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:34:28 +0000

A room temperature antiferromagnetic semiconductor would be a big deal (much faster memory with much less energy usage or waste heat).

New comment by lkbm in "Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates"

lkbm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 14:28:31 +0000

> There is nothing special about a room temperature semi conductor, your CPU, RAM, and storage drives have worked at room temperature for decades…

This is a magnetic semiconductor (and antiferromagnetic). All non-experimental magnetic semiconductors require cryogenic temperatures. If this pans out (works, cheap-ish to produce), it could mean significantly faster memory, with significantly less energy usage and significantly less waste heat (and thus, even less energy usage).

Obviously it's very far from "panning out", but "room temperature" is not a given here. It's not normal, and it would be a huge deal.

New comment by lkbm in "Automatic Transmission – a data-privacy study of connected vehicles"

lkbm — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:52:49 +0000

Why would they care about how you drive other than safety? Who are "they" in this situation?

New comment by lkbm in "Why don't more developers “use the platform”?"

lkbm — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 13:18:24 +0000

fwiw, your comment would almost certainly have positive karma if you had left off the final paragraph. Asking for sources is popular here. Grousing about how you're oppressed by the dumb voters on the site is not.

New comment by lkbm in "Our AI Midwife"

lkbm — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:01:11 +0000

You're complaint is that he's in favor of considering both pros and cons of things, rather than just the cons?

New comment by lkbm in "Workers KV Instant"

lkbm — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 20:21:46 +0000

It's not fully clear to me what the use-case for this is at this price point (reads are cheaper, but writes are 20,000x the price, storage 200,000x). Feature flags or something? It's gotta be small, rarely updated, and important to be Very Fast, and I'm unsure what that would be.

I'd love to hear from people how they're using it or planning on using it.

New comment by lkbm in "America.gov"

lkbm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:21:36 +0000

Okay, but I don't understand what you're getting at with them not learning? They acquire more information, get better at providing accurate and relevant information, and acquire new skills. What is the learning they're not doing?

Maybe a human should be available as a backup or something, but not because LLMs don't "learn" -- the system seems to learn in all relevant senses.

(I'd also object to the no accountability, but another subthread is already on that.)

New comment by lkbm in "America.gov"

lkbm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:04:04 +0000

> a bot that doesn’t learn

New comment by lkbm in "America.gov"

lkbm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 15:00:22 +0000

This is one of the best examples of the absurd cynical conspiracy theories that abound these days I've seen.

Law exists the way it does for a lot of reasons. It's not a government make-work program.

New comment by lkbm in "America.gov"

lkbm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:51:19 +0000

We shouldn't use an LLM because...LLMs never improve?

This seems like a great source for domain-specific RL, but even without that, we can expect there to be higher-quality LLMs that can be trivially swapped in within a year, if not a week.

New comment by lkbm in "America.gov"

lkbm — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 14:47:08 +0000

Useless, perhaps, but generally say true things rather than false things, in my experience.

New comment by lkbm in "I switched to Brave"

lkbm — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:09:39 +0000

There are Firefox forks out there. LibreWolf, Pale Moon, and WaterFox are the bet known. Unsure which, if any, are still active.

New comment by lkbm in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

lkbm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 18:25:23 +0000

This isn't about car seats, it's about baby carriers, and it's not about protecting you in a car crash:

> When our babies were little, carriers were massively helpful in flying. The baby likes it, and your arms are free.

> The carrier means the baby can sleep wherever we are, and I can have my hands free. If you can breastfeed in the carrier, even better because the baby can eat as you’re navigating the airport, etc. Carrying the baby centered on your body is easier on your back than carrying them in the carseat. Plus it’s good for walking / sightseeing at your destination.

New comment by lkbm in "Toyota is taking the Corolla electric"

lkbm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:21:56 +0000

I mean..that's a problem, but apartment-dwellers are around 20% of Americans, and disproportionately the ones who don't need a car at all, and it's not a problem at all apartments.

Does the ICE marketshare only drop to 10-20%? I feel like that could be describes as "it's over".

New comment by lkbm in "Allow babywearing carriers on planes"

lkbm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 14:43:31 +0000

Not sure how much we need to optimize for this. Plane crashes are rare. I'm happy to risk a baby seat crashing into me if my plane crashes if it means the 99.99987% of the flights are slightly better.

New comment by lkbm in "Claude Opus 5.5"

lkbm — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:07:22 +0000

It does, but "pace yourself" is something we say to kids (for example) to tell them to slow down because they're going too fast. We don't tell people to pace themselves because they're going too slow.

New comment by lkbm in "Claude Opus 5.5"

lkbm — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:48:28 +0000

It is that, but it's also your speed. When running, you typically pick a pace that's slower than your max, so it can be sustained for the full distance.

"Pace yourself" specifically means "slow down".

New comment by lkbm in "Cloudflare Quick Tunnels"

lkbm — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:59:16 +0000

It's fine on light mode. It's just the dark mode that's terrible. Seems likely they only tested the former.

New comment by lkbm in "How to Write with an LLM"

lkbm — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:13:10 +0000

It's been a common phrase for many years.[0]

[0] https://x.com/search?q=%22load%20bearing%22%20until%3A2020-0...