Hacker News: pinko

New comment by pinko in "The AirPods Effect"

pinko — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 08:44:45 +0000

It's a class thing more than a geography thing. Culturally working-class urban Americans are chatty in almost every American city, save the most recently-urbanized ones (like PHX -- and even there there Latinos are chatty even if whitey ain't...)

New comment by pinko in "Hackney"

pinko — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:17:27 +0000

I thought Uber & Lyft prevented this sort of thing? I'm not sure I understand how/why this exists now -- or given that it does, why it wasn’t a thing years ago -- but I just used it and it works. It's great!

New comment by pinko in "More common mistakes to avoid when creating system architecture diagrams"

pinko — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 17:12:46 +0000

Underrated comment in this thread, which is full of asserts of universal abstractions and patterns which are not universal. (And of course this insight applies to all kinds of written communication, diagrammatic or prose...)

New comment by pinko in "Sub-$200 Lidar could reshuffle auto sensor economics"

pinko — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 14:46:05 +0000

What are the chances some non-trivial proportion of the millions of cars on the road will not have their LIDAR designed, built, installed or calibrated correctly? I suspect this is going to be a recognized public health issue in a decade or two. (It will likely be an issue well before that, but unrecognized...)

New comment by pinko in "Dude, where's my supersonic jet?"

pinko — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 22:07:33 +0000

Underrated observation. The low-hanging fruit is all in the office/home-to-takeoff and touchdown-to-office/home blocks on each end, not the time in the air. The commute, checkin, security, airport transit, boarding, and taxiing are the time-sinks worth optimizing.

New comment by pinko in "Toll roads are spreading in America"

pinko — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 18:06:52 +0000

I'm not sure this is true. In Atlanta, on a very busy two-lane city-street commute into work, I follow traffic laws scrupulously, and have excellent driving skills, but I take every advantage I can that's not illegal or antisocial -- e.g., I always pass people going slower than me, preemptively change lanes to avoid buses and cars I can tell are slow or turning, take small shortcuts that add many more turns to the trip -- which means lots of lane changes, etc. My wife, on the exact same route and time, does not do any of this; she just follows the car in front of her until she arrives. My driving shaves a solid 10+ minutes off of her 40-minute commute this way. That's significant (>25%), and adds up to 20 minutes more time at home with my kids, etc.

And fwiw, I abhor illegal and antisocial driving and wish there were much more enforcement of traffic laws. And where it's a necessary cost, I'd be happy to have a longer commute if we were all safer for it.

I think congestion pricing is probably a net win, and the lesser evil right now, but tolls are so regressive I wish we could do better by making public transport not suck.

New comment by pinko in "Nvidia Acquires Schedmd"

pinko — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 16:19:10 +0000

Both slurm, and even more so HTCondor, power most of the major computationally-expensive physics projects worldwide (all the LHC experiments, LIGO, IceCube, etc.)

New comment by pinko in "Gemini 3 Pro Model Card [pdf]"

pinko — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:41:35 +0000

From https://lastexam.ai/: "The dataset consists of 2,500 challenging questions across over a hundred subjects. We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting." [emphasis mine]

While the private questions don't seem to be included in the performance results, HLE will presumably flag any LLM that appears to have gamed its scores based on the differential performance on the private questions. Since they haven't yet, I think the scores are relatively trustworthy.

New comment by pinko in "Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues"

pinko — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:11:37 +0000

Privacy through uniformity, operational security by routine, herd immunity for privacy, traffic normalization, "anonymity set expansion", "nothing to hide" paradox, etc.

I.e., if you use Tor for "normie sites", then the fact that someone can be seen using Tor is no longer a reliable proxy for detecting them trying to see/do something confidential and it becomes harder to identify & target journalists, etc. just because they're using Tor.

New comment by pinko in "Agentic pelican on a bicycle"

pinko — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:15:40 +0000

I see this all the time when asking Claude or ChapGPT to produce a single-page two-column PDF summarizing the conclusions of our chat. Literally 99% of the time I get a multi-page unpredictably-formatted mess, even after gently asking over and over for specific fixes to the formatting mistake/s.

And as you say, they cheerfully assert that they've done the job, for real this time, every time.

New comment by pinko in "Microplastics: No longer a "maybe""

pinko — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 22:09:03 +0000

I've been having a good time chatting with Deep Research LLMs about this. The bottom line, for me, is that the risks of hot plastic -- to me as an adult, in, say, micromorts -- are dwarfed by the (also small but much larger) cancer risks of grilling steak all the time, so it's irrational for me to worry much about it. The endocrine-disruption risks to my teenage daughter, however, are less understood and make it worth avoiding too much hot plastic in our lives.

New comment by pinko in "Michael Burry a.k.a. "Big Short",discloses $1.1B bet against Nvidia&Palantir"

pinko — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:18:25 +0000

I did exactly this last Friday as an experiment and Claude Sonnet 4.5 recommended that I go long in an inverse ETF lol. When I told it that was terrible advice, it apologized and suggested buying puts.

New comment by pinko in "Dicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way"

pinko — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:09:22 +0000

The post's dataviz in fact allows you vary the # of horizontal cuts and compare the results. Take a look.

New comment by pinko in "Replacing cron jobs with a centralized task scheduler"

pinko — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 19:47:41 +0000

HTCondor is always an option. Lacks shiny tinfoil, but works like a tank.

New comment by pinko in "Electric cars produce less brake dust pollution than combustion-engine cars"

pinko — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:13:07 +0000

Are there still a lot of hybrids without CVTs?

New comment by pinko in "First Hubble telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS"

pinko — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:26:22 +0000

At ~100s, it's already at about the minimum for Hubble; often it's 1-2 orders of magnitude longer.

New comment by pinko in "First Hubble telescope images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS"

pinko — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 19:23:44 +0000

I suspect, at ~4.5AU distance, even though 3I/ATLAS is moving at a relative speed of ~60 kms, its angular velocity across the sky is manageable for Hubble's current one-gyro pointing system, given non‑sidereal tracking and short (~100s) exposures.

New comment by pinko in "“Reading Rainbow” was created to combat summer reading slumps"

pinko — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:17:42 +0000

You may be right, but we have no idea what the scores would have been had Reading Rainbow not been on (i.e., maybe it held off a decline), so this isn't really meaningful one way or the other.

Wall Street Builds S&P 500 'No Dividend' Fund in New Tax Dodge

pinko — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 19:30:04 +0000

Article URL: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/wall-street-builds-p-500-150404125.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44493825

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

New comment by pinko in "Aesop in Words of One Syllable"

pinko — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:57:14 +0000

I don't disagree, but I still think it's funny that, not six pages in, they compromise the central conceit...