Hacker News: pieix

New comment by pieix in "Suspension of inbound parcels from China and Hong Kong"

pieix — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 13:52:50 +0000

A huge portion of USPS international package volume is “ePackets” from China. These are a special service provided by USPS since 2011 for Chinese/HK goods that are cheaper and faster than normal USPS international shipping.

These ePackets are then bundled up into big sacks that are basically not inspected at all at US international mail facilities due to the de minimis exemption, which was just rolled back. The special status granted to ePackets meant that the volume shipped grew far beyond the processing capacity for normal packages at US IMFs. This pause (and subsequent unpause) from USPS on packages from China is because they don’t know how they’re going to handle that volume if it isn’t given special status.

Source: I worked on a project adjacent to this a couple of years ago. Close enough to pick up the basics but this isn’t quite what I was working on, so take my comment with a grain of salt.

New comment by pieix in "AI, but at What Cost? Breakdown of AI's Carbon Footprint"

pieix — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 14:38:21 +0000

The solution is to grow our way out of it — make more energy, make cleaner energy, develop new technologies — rather than browbeat people into submission with moral arguments because you don't like how they've chosen to deploy their resources.

New comment by pieix in "I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project"

pieix — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:30:02 +0000

Thanks for explaining my intent, you nailed it.

New comment by pieix in "I trusted an LLM, now I'm on day 4 of an afternoon project"

pieix — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 22:00:11 +0000

> AI isn’t a co-pilot; it’s a junior dev faking competence. Trust it at your own risk.

This is a good take that tracks with my (heavy) usage of LLMs for coding. Leveraging productive-but-often-misguided junior devs is a skill every dev should actively cultivate!

New comment by pieix in "Janus-Pro: Autoregressive framework unifying multimodal understanding&generation"

pieix — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 16:49:29 +0000

Anybody used this yet and can share example outputs?

New comment by pieix in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

pieix — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:01:25 +0000

Right, and that doesn't contradict what I wrote.

New comment by pieix in "DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via RL"

pieix — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:00:26 +0000

Regular coding questions mostly. For me o1 generally gives better code and understands the prompt more completely (haven’t started using r1 or o3 regularly enough to opine).

New comment by pieix in "How far can you get in 40 minutes from each subway station in NYC?"

pieix — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:44:49 +0000

Are there any metros with intra-city high speed trains like this?

New comment by pieix in "OpenAI's o1 Playing Codenames"

pieix — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 12:50:19 +0000

Elo on different card games/board games would be a great eval metric now that the systems are general enough to play Codenames, chess, poker…

New comment by pieix in "French police free kidnapped Ledger executive"

pieix — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:46:40 +0000

I’m a big 2A supporter but would still want the would-be kidnapper to be deterred by other means. I can be incapacitated or caught unaware, JP Morgan and Charles Schwab cannot.

New comment by pieix in "French police free kidnapped Ledger executive"

pieix — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 03:38:25 +0000

This shows another of the many ways in which a having a trusted third party involved in your finances is actually a good thing.

New comment by pieix in "A standards-first web framework"

pieix — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:26:13 +0000

Do you have any favorite Flutter projects I could click around? It’s an intriguing concept but I’ve been offput thus far by Google’s lack of adoption of its own framework.

New comment by pieix in "Starship Flight 7"

pieix — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:04:53 +0000

I might have missed it, but I’ve never seen a Soyuz booster fly twice, let alone 25 times.

New comment by pieix in "Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]"

pieix — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 15:56:03 +0000

Wasn't my intention at all to imply that they did something wrong and need to scramble to fix it. Just observing that a large portion of the web is built around the assumption that traffic is intermittent, where even a small burst of requests can knock it over. No shade — I've built plenty of sites like that.

New comment by pieix in "Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]"

pieix — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:21:26 +0000

Makes you wonder how many sites out there are just ~10k requests per hour away from being bricked.

New comment by pieix in "Zuckerberg approved training Llama on LibGen [pdf]"

pieix — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 14:52:15 +0000

The controversy here is that LibGen doesn't legally distribute its content. Mass-scale training on pirated content is... legally murky, to say the least.

New comment by pieix in "Show HN: Atlas of Space"

pieix — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 14:39:16 +0000

Thanks for the feature request, guys — I just shipped a realtime clock with the ability to go backwards through time :)

New comment by pieix in "Show HN: Atlas of Space"

pieix — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 14:08:50 +0000

Hey, thanks! I hadn't seen Celestia until another commenter mentioned it. Cool project, definitely some UX cues to take from it like the progressive hiding of labels and ellipses as you zoom out.

New comment by pieix in "Show HN: Atlas of Space"

pieix — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 03:23:41 +0000

Thank you for sharing this with your family and for maybe increasing the number of space nerds on this planet! Exactly what I was hoping for with this project.

New comment by pieix in "Show HN: Atlas of Space"

pieix — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 02:57:54 +0000

Yep, all open source: https://github.com/gordonhart/atlasof.space

It's a static React app using Three.js for rendering and a few backend functions deployed on Netlify. It's been a pretty great experience deploying to Netlify, though I didn't expect the attention from HN to go way over my 100GB of free tier bandwidth!