Hacker News: obelos

New comment by obelos in "God Sleeps in the Minerals"

obelos — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:28:10 +0000

For us nerds in the Portland/PNW area, the Rice Museum out in Hillsboro—despite a name suggesting it has an exhaustive display of rice varieties—has a terrific collection of large and unique mineral specimens. https://www.ricenorthwestmuseum.org

New comment by obelos in "LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger"

obelos — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 19:35:56 +0000

I've most frequently heard this referred to as “Gell-Mann Amnesia,” and yes, LLMs are fertile ground to find it.

New comment by obelos in "Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers"

obelos — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 21:56:57 +0000

“Sure, it will probably happen again, but what if we made some money along the way?!”

New comment by obelos in "Congestion pricing in Manhattan is a predictable success"

obelos — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:49:33 +0000

I think there's also a dominating bias that people who walk/bike/bus are poor and thus make bad customers. “If they had money, they'd be in a car!”

New comment by obelos in "A Typical Workday at a Japanese Hardware Tool Store [video]"

obelos — Mon, 12 May 2025 18:52:36 +0000

Also nationalized control of healthcare costs.

New comment by obelos in "CVE program faces swift end after DHS fails to renew contract"

obelos — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 15:32:16 +0000

I'm pretty sure this is a joke reference to Ted Lasso.

New comment by obelos in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

obelos — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:31:19 +0000

It makes more sense when you interpret it as an attempt at humiliation, not diplomacy.

New comment by obelos in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

obelos — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 21:53:06 +0000

I think you're forgetting to put “all the times ignorance didn't produce a breakthrough” in the denominator.

New comment by obelos in "What's happening inside the NIH and NSF"

obelos — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 19:00:32 +0000

To a large degree their wealth is transnational and will move on to the next trough after emptying this one.

New comment by obelos in "The Origins of Wokeness"

obelos — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 20:41:58 +0000

“Can you believe it? That colored boy wants me to call him ‘mister!’”

New comment by obelos in "It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor"

obelos — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 17:43:58 +0000

I wonder if there would be as much pushback here on this article if the conclusion to these 10k words of cited historical analysis had been to discourage the phrase's continued use because “we're besmirching our reputation as engineers using this idiom inaccurately” vs. “we're inadvertently maligning and hurting people by using this idiom inaccurately.”

New comment by obelos in "Portland airport grows with expansive mass timber roof canopy"

obelos — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 16:10:26 +0000

In addition to the great lighting, the new design also has much improved acoustics. The sound dampening is impressive. I can have conversations without straining to pick up words through the din of echoes, and the ambience has a nice warm sense of quiet.

New comment by obelos in "Ask HN: Local RAG with private knowledge base"

obelos — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:10:40 +0000

You might find Rag to Riches' (R2R) built-in use of Unstructured for doc parsing, hybrid search, knowledge graphs, and HyDE queries improves the quality of your retrievals. https://github.com/SciPhi-AI/R2R

New comment by obelos in "Why Not Comments"

obelos — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 20:07:32 +0000

Do you really need to comment to yourself or anyone else that you did a thing the less efficient way because it was simpler? I guess I"m not seeing the use. When later you've perturbed the criteria that caused that function's inefficiency to be immaterial to overall performance needs and it suddenly becomes material, profiling is going to reveal the low-hanging fruit faster than digging through the code for a “this could be faster a different way” comments.

New comment by obelos in "We're in the brute force phase of AI – once it ends, demand for GPUs will too"

obelos — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 16:07:00 +0000

If you have ever not gone somewhere because “there's too much traffic” or chosen to go to a store because it has easier parking than an equivalent alternative store, you've experienced the rudiments of induced demand.

New comment by obelos in "Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization"

obelos — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 20:35:43 +0000

Counterpoint: most innovation sucks. Sure, innovation is necessary for improvement and adaptation to changing circumstances. Sure, sometimes innovative change is stifled to the point that organizations crumble under the stasis. But the larger and more stable the organization, the higher the bar should be between “I have a great idea that will make things better!” and its implementation. Most ideas of change do not take into account the complex, multiplicitous, overlapping, crossed-purpose systems that conspire to bring an organization to life. They account for only locally perceived changes, not weird, unpredictable knock-on effects that can arise from introducing an optimization. Adopting every ostensible innovation that comes along is inviting only chaos. Change should be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

New comment by obelos in "Apple unveils iOS 18 with new home screen & Control Center"

obelos — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 19:01:57 +0000

It's so bad I often wonder if I've done something to inadvertently screw up whatever vector database is used to weight the guesses on my particular phone. It's just hard to imagine having this bad of a user experience of a fundamental function be widespread.

New comment by obelos in "Apple unveils iOS 18 with new home screen & Control Center"

obelos — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 17:57:22 +0000

Many of these look like solid feature updates, but I'm waiting to hear about a native keyboard that doesn't pick the dumbest, most context-free possible word from the smear of letters I've fat-fingered into it.

New comment by obelos in "It's always TCP_NODELAY"

obelos — Thu, 09 May 2024 18:43:16 +0000

Not every time. Sometimes it's DNS.

New comment by obelos in "NPR suspends veteran editor as it grapples with his public criticism"

obelos — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 20:59:37 +0000

This opinion piece is less a incisive criticism of NPR than it is a resume line item for Berliner applying to The Atlantic. His three leading “big” examples are largely wrong. The Mueller report didn't say “no collusion”. Barr did. The report said that it was not possible to conclude with prosecutorial confidence what level of cooperation had taken place because there had been so much obstruction of justice, so charging for that would be the appropriate law enforcement action after Trump resumed his role as a regular citizen.

Conversely, the Hunter laptop thing has never been a compelling above-the-fold story. Hunter Biden is a politician's kid, not some elected official or, ahem, a politician's kid who has been appointed to a cabinet or advisory role within an administration. There has been no evidence that implicated Joe Biden was a meaningful participant or benefactor in whatever name-dropping grift he's gotten on at. Why would a news outlet spend airtime on this?

The lab leak story is somewhat more compelling. Although I think at this point because of analysis that concluded there were two different, yet closely related strains of the virus simultaneously present at different sections of the wet market, it's hard to conclude a lab origin is more likely than it coming from wild origins. But at the time he's referring to, it was simply a matter of dogma to conclude a lab origin was off the table.

And commenting that the DC staff is 87 Democrat is... amazing. That's the natural demographic of DC, one of the most Democratic regions in the country.