Hacker News: mostly_harmless

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

mostly_harmless — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:04:00 +0000

skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient.

It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

mostly_harmless — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 17:37:37 +0000

no. As per the link, that is 64% of <> fatalities were "lost in thought". not 64% of <> fatalities. Distracted driving is the 2nd or 3rd largest factor in fatal accidents (behind speed and alcohol I believe). Somewhere around 20-30%. Though this is for fatalities. Distribution is going to be way different for just hospitalization or property damage accidents.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:33:06 +0000

Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.

(https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...)

The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "No Man's Sky Cosmos"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:19:35 +0000

Spelunky and Terraria do a good job with Procgen.

Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.

Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Decathlon Germany adds Wero payment option to decathlon.de website"

mostly_harmless — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:36:03 +0000

Can confirm they do this in Canada too. Though I'm not sure they have much of a presence outside of Quebec.

It was very cool to try, and very much a "why doesn't everyone do this?" feature. I've never seen it anywhere else.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Show HN: I've built a words game based on binary search"

mostly_harmless — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 15:08:47 +0000

7 letter words are too long. I'm finding trouble thinking of any.

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

mostly_harmless — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 19:06:08 +0000

I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Steam Machine"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:56:24 +0000

> you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter].

This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Dyson, techno-centric design and social consumption"

mostly_harmless — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 16:39:38 +0000

I don't hate Dyson because it's trendy, I hate Dyson because my $700 vacuum wont pick up cheerios; a common spill with toddlers.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "An NFC movie library for my kids"

mostly_harmless — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:52:05 +0000

Somewhat related: I wanted to track watch time, and perhaps set a time limit with Plex and HomeAssistant. Has anyone come up with a solution I can cheat off of?

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Project Hammer: reduce collusion in the Canadian grocery sector"

mostly_harmless — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 18:20:44 +0000

It also ignores that they often own the suppliers. "Woops, our supplies raised the price, so we need to too."

New comment by mostly_harmless in "The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Can Be Cleaned for $7.5B"

mostly_harmless — Mon, 09 Sep 2024 17:09:51 +0000

Maybe a dumb question, but why? I don't like that it exists, but isn't it self-contained? The main reason for cleaning it up seems to be quoted as [1], which oversimplfies to 'animals might eat plastic, and it affects them', and it will make microplastics. But these problems seem to be localized to the garbage patch. I could see it as a asbestos situation where its only problematic if you disturb it. Ongoing dumping seems to be a bigger problem as it's not localized.

[1] - https://microplastics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s435...

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 19:54:40 +0000

I feel this way for photography, about filtering. If you take 1000 photos, only show people your 20-50 best. Now you are a good photographer.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "The standard American household is now a millionaire, according to the Fed"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 01:51:19 +0000

The most important part is this article is that this is the mean.

The median net worth is $192,900 (as per the article).

This just shows there is an extreme wealth disparity.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "US economy returned to growth last quarter, expanding 2.6%"

mostly_harmless — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 16:25:16 +0000

Yes, but not directly. If you listen to the last FOMC meeting, Powell mentions there will likely be significant weakening of the labor market and a rise of unemployment. As well as his famous "there will be pain" remarks.

I don't think he directly said "he won't stop until" though.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Rooftop wind energy innovation claims 50% more energy than solar at same cost"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 26 Oct 2022 15:29:04 +0000

If you look on their website (https://www.aerominetechnologies.com/) you can see there is a downward facing turbine hidden underneath

New comment by mostly_harmless in "The anti-inflation pivot of 2022"

mostly_harmless — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 16:23:00 +0000

supposedly about a 1/3 of mortgages are variable in Canada. But more importantly, fixed mortgages are almost all 5 year terms (or less). That is, every 5 years you have to renew your rate (even though the mortgage amount is for 25 years). That means every year, about 20% of homeowners are updating to the current fixed rate (assuming an random distribution of purchase date). Perhaps a big chunk renewed early in 2020, but by 2025/2026 all mortgaged homeowners will have a new higher rate.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Stanley Druckenmiller warns the stock market will be ‘flat’ for an entire decade"

mostly_harmless — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 15:52:42 +0000

I don't know if it's moores law. except for servers, CPUs are mostly running near idle.

My intuition would say tech saturation would make more of a difference. That is, worldwide pretty much everyone have now has adopted a computer and all businesses have automated the low hanging fruit.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "One year on, El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment has proven a failure"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 14 Sep 2022 16:07:28 +0000

My theory behind this is there are many BTC holders with cap gains (or assets acquired through illegal methods) that can't easily cash out, and El Salvador's BTC support was a grab at capturing tourist revenue through state sponsored money laundering.

Through that lens, it would be interesting to see if there was any anomaly in GDP, luxury goods sold, real estate sales, or tourism in the country.

New comment by mostly_harmless in "Estonia clocks fastest inflation in the Eurozone at 20.1 percent"

mostly_harmless — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 12:41:15 +0000

I think what's missing here is in case 1, it's not just the amount of money, but how much money is chasing each available good. You can imagine if the money supply doubles, a loaf of bread can be the same price as before if there are twice as many people demanding the same portion of bread (for a very crude approximation)

Or to put it another way, maybe case 1 is demand-side inflation, and case 2 is supply-side inflation.