Hacker News: prestonh

New comment by prestonh in "Starlink broadband speeds slow as subscriber numbers grow"

prestonh — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 18:48:17 +0000

I'm curious, what sorts of speeds do you mean for "slow"?

New comment by prestonh in "How does find by example work in the Pharo Finder"

prestonh — Sun, 22 May 2022 14:57:07 +0000

New comment by prestonh in "US will now offer gender-neutral X option on passports"

prestonh — Thu, 31 Mar 2022 16:45:34 +0000

> The woke disease. Which has also taken our world close to WW3 recently.

Reference?

New comment by prestonh in "Book Review: “Viral” by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley"

prestonh — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 17:22:52 +0000

I don't think there's much direct evidence to support natural spillover event other than that much of the initial spread could be localized to a wet market, which may have had vendors selling meat from animals known to carry these types of viruses. That seems like pretty weak evidence, though. Other than that, IMO we should have very high prior weight assigned to the natural origin hypothesis in the Bayesian sense, so even without new direct evidence it's still reasonable to believe that hypothesis to be more likely.

New comment by prestonh in "Interactive C++ for Data Science"

prestonh — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 05:21:25 +0000

Just restart your kernel if you think something spooky related to state is occurring. This is the number one criticism I see of notebooks, but it is so easy to deal with if you are aware of it. The benefits of being able to rerun an isolated part of your code far outweigh the harms IMO.

New comment by prestonh in "Siberian town in arctic circle hits 101°F (38°C)"

prestonh — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 16:19:37 +0000

Why do you believe the next will be worse? Covid is already a global pandemic and will likely reach a majority of the global population before going away.

New comment by prestonh in "What is the unique value proposition of selling honey?"

prestonh — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 15:12:46 +0000

How does Windows hurt science?

New comment by prestonh in "No person who was born blind has ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia"

prestonh — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:33:11 +0000

It's because we usually dont multiply percentages, but instead work with normal decimal figures.

New comment by prestonh in "Tesla's self driving algorithm's overlay [video]"

prestonh — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 14:36:35 +0000

Sure, but if we can match that number of fatalities with self driving cars it will inarguably be a success from a utilitarian standpoint.

New comment by prestonh in "Show HN: Teapong – A two-player game for fans of Pong and the Utah teapot"

prestonh — Sat, 25 Jan 2020 02:24:54 +0000

Given your learnings, how are you going to redesign your engine to have less tightly coupled components?

New comment by prestonh in "Goodbye, New York, California and Illinois – Hello where?"

prestonh — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 02:14:36 +0000

I got that reference.

New comment by prestonh in "The Cybertruck is not brutalist"

prestonh — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 22:43:15 +0000

I know nothing about cars, but I've been wondering how anything remotely resembling what was shown could pass a crash test. It's going to have to be radically transformed, so why bother even showing a design at this point?

New comment by prestonh in "Tesla Cybertruck"

prestonh — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 20:42:05 +0000

Moving with a pickup truck sounds miserable. Why not just rent a uhaul?

New comment by prestonh in "Tesla Cybertruck"

prestonh — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 19:32:22 +0000

That's exactly what I thought of when I first saw the car.

New comment by prestonh in "SpaceX's Starship Mk1 just blew off its bulkhead in a pressurization accident"

prestonh — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 16:18:33 +0000

I agree calling it a success is too rosy, but I think people are really thinking od this as progress, not a regression like the event itself would naively suggest, because the company relies on hardware failure to inform design improvements.

New comment by prestonh in "There are many small orbital launch vehicles proposed or under development"

prestonh — Wed, 06 Nov 2019 01:37:47 +0000

I havent researched the orbital dynamics much here, but wouldnt it be possible for the satellite fragments resulting from a collision at orbital speeds to have much greater speeds, possibly ending up in elliptical orbits with lower total drag? Seems like just waiting for orbits to decay after a Kessler syndrome like event wouldnt be feasible.

New comment by prestonh in "YouTube autoplay gave a lost Japanese classic new life (2017)"

prestonh — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 22:46:27 +0000

This is hilarious, because this is the exact album I'm listening to right now (I've probably listened to it over 100 times...). Youtube's algorithm, for all the evils it does radicalizing people, has led me down a deep music rabbit hole and completely transformed my taste in music. I suspect that there are a lot of other listeners out there like me that have had the same experience.

New comment by prestonh in "Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook"

prestonh — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 19:26:50 +0000

It seems like the tool was mainly invented to deal with the issue of hidden state in notebooks, but I don't honestly see what the big deal is. Jupyter notebook is a tool with hidden state being a gotcha that you can learn how to deal with extremely quickly. I've been a Jupyter notebook for several years so haven't had this problem often in recent memory, but I've led workshops where we teach users how to use the notebook. Inevitably hidden state issues come up, but students very quickly learn that restarting the kernel is a necessary part of the workflow and figure out when they need to do it.

New comment by prestonh in "Tom Delonge’s UFO Research Center Is Making Politicians Demand Answers"

prestonh — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 22:58:57 +0000

Was there anyone there with you that also saw?

New comment by prestonh in "In effect, Seattle is decriminalizing the use of hard drugs"

prestonh — Sat, 24 Aug 2019 01:21:13 +0000

Perhaps you got lucky. Belltown isnt as bad as some other areas, but in my one year of daily walking commutes through Belltown I saw

1. A person OD'd (presumably dead) at a bus stop

2. Someone passed out, face down in the gutter

3. Multiple people shooting up (usually pants down, shooting into leg)

4. A guy that would regularly walk around shouting and gesturing angrily, making everyone near by visibly anxious

5. One guy literally rolling around in the middle of the street during rush hour, holding up busses and cars

6. A fight, fortunately broken up caused by a homeless guy spitting on another guy

7. People selling stolen goods in the open

8. Finally, some guy got shot in an alley in the middle of broad daylight on like, a Tuesday a couple weeks back.

Not offering suggestions, merely documenting my experiences. I am genuinely glad you had a good trip to Seattle, though