Hacker News: paconbork

New comment by paconbork in "Amazon reaches 10k Rivian electric delivery vans in US"

paconbork — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 03:37:59 +0000

On the Dan Ryan, driving the speed limit would be very unsafe considering most people are going at least 15 over!

New comment by paconbork in "Tesla on track to smash targets after producing almost a million EVs in 6 months"

paconbork — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 15:17:10 +0000

Hawaii already has this rule for what it's worth. The issue there is that they have so many EV's on the road that these chargers are always in use and have lines (and aren't really that fast to begin with). Having experienced that, I still wouldn't get an EV without a guaranteed place to charge at home.

New comment by paconbork in "Tesla on track to smash targets after producing almost a million EVs in 6 months"

paconbork — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 14:58:04 +0000

Tried this while in Hawaii with a rental EV (with no charging at my hotel) and it did not work at all. Hawaii is one of the states with the most EV's per person and there's frequently chargers in places like malls and grocery stores (whole foods and target in particular). However, because there's so many EV's, all of these chargers are always in use, and there are usually lines or people waiting around to snag a spot as soon as it becomes available. It was a massive inconvenience and put me off of EVs for the near future: I'd either need an sfh or to be somewhere that figures out public charging when more than a tiny fraction of the total vehicles on the road are electric.

New comment by paconbork in "Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions"

paconbork — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 20:06:39 +0000

I think that worked in the timeframe it did because women as a group aren't generationally poor (which is to say they aren't born any more or less well off than men), and so the entire shift was one of cultural attitudes. Perhaps AA for women helped normalize female doctors more quickly (haven't looked at any data on this but it seems plausible), though it remains to be seen if the same strategy can work for balancing CS. I'm curious though: did people at the time assume female doctors were less qualified because of AA?

New comment by paconbork in "The hidden cost of air quality monitoring"

paconbork — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 20:13:40 +0000

Why do you assume that public transit produces substantially less particulate emissions than EVs? I'm sure you've smelled ICE busses before, but even if you upgrade those to electric, Electric busses are very heavy, leading to an outsized impact on road/tire/break wear: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35780985/

Subways have wear-related particulate emissions too, with the added disadvantage of them being less easy to vent: https://nyulangone.org/news/pre-covid-19-subway-air-polluted...

New comment by paconbork in "America has paid a steep price for parking"

paconbork — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 17:12:47 +0000

The roads in this old video of NYC still look pretty wide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRnGwbrnOo

Mind you there's some cars in the videos, but they aren't any bigger than the horse-drawn carriages that roads had been accommodating well before that.

New comment by paconbork in "Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger"

paconbork — Thu, 11 May 2023 03:57:43 +0000

People bidding whatever they can afford is largely a lack-of-supply problem, is it not? If more housing of a given status level were available, eventually it wouldn't be necessary for everyone to spend everything they can on bidding wars. And sure, then you might say "well then the relative status of that housing has shifted and your peers still aren't saving, they're just spending their money on nicer housing", but I still see that as an absolute win. I have much more empathy for a person not saving money when saving money means "living in a dump and commuting 90 minutes each way" than when it means "living more than half an hour away from Central Park".

New comment by paconbork in "Bad Manors: The McMansion as Harbinger"

paconbork — Thu, 11 May 2023 00:17:18 +0000

With you until the last sentence. The high prices for small condos in urban centers are an indication that there are fewer of them in supply relative to what the market demands. There's nothing wrong with letting urban centers densify and serve as a containment zone for childless 20-somethings (in fact, this would mean more affordable single family homes for those that need them). And who knows, if there's enough dense urban housing to meet demand, then those residents could have an easier saving up money themselves, with which to later purchase some more space in which to raise a family

New comment by paconbork in "Searches for VPN Soar in Utah Amidst Pornhub Blockage"

paconbork — Wed, 03 May 2023 23:10:08 +0000

In fairness, the original anecdote is about 2002

New comment by paconbork in "Automakers are starting to admit that drivers hate touchscreens"

paconbork — Thu, 27 Apr 2023 15:01:12 +0000

My 2005 Honda Accord gets this right (big, obvious buttons). Definitely not looking forward to finding a car whose UX doesn't suck when this one finally kicks the bucket.

New comment by paconbork in "NewsNotFound: An open-source, unbiased news company"

paconbork — Sat, 22 Apr 2023 00:22:48 +0000

I mean yes, it's biased compared to the mythical unattainable standard of being completely unbiased. But that's not the bar. The bar is mainstream news outlets, which are drastically easier to outperform even with a half-assed attempt.

New comment by paconbork in "CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg"

paconbork — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:12:50 +0000

Who do you think purchases the products that heavy industry makes?

New comment by paconbork in "CATL has announced a new “condensed” battery with 500 Wh/kg"

paconbork — Fri, 21 Apr 2023 13:07:53 +0000

But only a small portion of the battery's weight is lithium, right? This older source has a 453 kg Tesla battery as containing 63 kg of lithium, for example: https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...

New comment by paconbork in "The LLama Effect: Leak Sparked a Series of Open Source Alternatives to ChatGPT"

paconbork — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:37:08 +0000

You avoid taking flak from the Responsible AI people that way

New comment by paconbork in "The Bitcoin whitepaper is hidden in every copy of macOS"

paconbork — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 23:55:49 +0000

I'd suggest "The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work" but that might be a bit too on the nose

New comment by paconbork in "Sex and the citizenship process"

paconbork — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 01:14:49 +0000

Surely it may not stop some criminals mastermind, but most criminals are idiots with bad impulse control. I'd wager that many are caught by this process

New comment by paconbork in "Stable Attribution"

paconbork — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 01:00:29 +0000

Sounds a bit like differential privacy

New comment by paconbork in "Ask HN: Will you be paying for ChatGPT+?"

paconbork — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 20:17:13 +0000

I want it to write raunchy poetry, to give me bad recipes for crystal meth, to let me probe at its deepest biases, to do what I want it to do rather than what's deemed acceptable by the AI Safety killjoys

New comment by paconbork in "Ask HN: Will you be paying for ChatGPT+?"

paconbork — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 16:35:15 +0000

If I can use it without the filters, absolutely

New comment by paconbork in "Go 1.20 Cryptography"

paconbork — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 21:34:43 +0000

Why not just use Ristretto with Curve25519 to avoid cofactor issues?