Hacker News: rajnathani

New comment by rajnathani in "The Waymo World Model"

rajnathani — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 13:51:56 +0000

Not really I think, they built a simulation engine for autonomous driving, for which tons of such exist out there including ones from Nvidia and also at least 1 open-source one. Using world models is different.

New comment by rajnathani in "Animated Knots"

rajnathani — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 08:49:31 +0000

For these single-website to explain things, I really like that HN's 1-click link to view past submissions shows the past posts (I have seen this useful website come up in the past!):

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=animatedknots.com

New comment by rajnathani in "Aging muscle stem cells shift from rapid repair to long-term survival"

rajnathani — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 08:29:37 +0000

Interesting point:

> The research suggests that increased NDRG1 expression emerges through what the scientists call a "cellular survivorship bias"—stem cells that don't accumulate enough NDRG1 die off over time, leaving behind a population of slower but more resilient cells.

New comment by rajnathani in "English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings"

rajnathani — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 07:04:01 +0000

This exactly.

New comment by rajnathani in "Apple buys Israeli startup Q.ai"

rajnathani — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:01:40 +0000

If this works well, then I could finally see that AI wearable pins could be socially feasible. IMO speaking aloud in public to AI doesn't seem like something which will work but it is also what OpenAI is apparently investing a lot into with their hardware ambition with Jony Ive [0].

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-21/openai-to...

New comment by rajnathani in "Tesla ending Models S and X production"

rajnathani — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 07:34:25 +0000

> Tesla’s far more popular models are the 3 and Y, which accounted for 97% of the company’s 1.59 million deliveries last year.

TIL that Model S hasn't been as popular. But hopefully when the 2nd gen Roadster finally gets released that it will fill in the slight gap left by Model S's discontinuation.

New comment by rajnathani in "People who know the formula for WD-40"

rajnathani — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 10:08:59 +0000

As a side note: PTFE = PFAS forever chemical.

New comment by rajnathani in "Repatriate the gold': German economists advise withdrawal from US vaults"

rajnathani — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:28:26 +0000

Even India recently has repatriated some of its foreign gold reserves (from Bank of England (and possibly other places)):

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-29/india-cen...

New comment by rajnathani in "Bugs Apple loves"

rajnathani — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:16:03 +0000

Also, not on the list: iCloud having a hard limit of 50,000 total calendar events and silently not syncing beyond it (and similar to the first iCloud Photos issue mentioned on the website: no indication of syncing state to know what's going on). For perspective, as someone using the Apple ecosystem for 10+ years now, that this comes to 13 events a day for 10 years.

New comment by rajnathani in "Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age – study (2025)"

rajnathani — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 07:24:33 +0000

The OG quote by him is about rice. Nevertheless, very funny!

New comment by rajnathani in "The Post-American Internet"

rajnathani — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 06:03:59 +0000

I thought this article would have to do with the transfer of ICANN's power from the US government to a general non-profit thing in 2016.

New comment by rajnathani in "Hungry Fat Cells Could Someday Starve Cancer"

rajnathani — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 07:19:11 +0000

Really interesting research. Rest in peace. An aside: The cause of death was a stroke: https://nutrition.utexas.edu/about-us/memoriam

New comment by rajnathani in "USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994"

rajnathani — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:21:11 +0000

The key point, which at least the top comment here is missing and others may overlook of the article, is that the article states that the USD currency reserve is still the same but that the other currencies being present in the mix have increased and thus the USD proportion has decreased (not that the absolute amount of USD being held decreased). However, the implication is still the same and that is that the rest of the world's central banks are holding relatively less USD.

New comment by rajnathani in "Researchers develop a camera that can focus on different distances at once"

rajnathani — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 09:50:19 +0000

> Autonomous vehicles might see their surroundings with unprecedented clarity.

This is a pretty good point, which gets me to wonder whether the developers of autonomous vehicles use variable focus adjustments as a part of their ML stack? Or simply set the focal point to infinity.

New comment by rajnathani in "Contrails Map"

rajnathani — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 10:08:33 +0000

From the "about" it seems that the data is from atmospheric models based on flight paths. However, it would be cool if the data could be inferred from satellite sensing.

New comment by rajnathani in "“Super secure” messaging app leaks everyone's phone number"

rajnathani — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 06:53:27 +0000

Can someone please clarify: For the phone number to reach the enclave for use during search via XOR, won't it need to come in as regular RAM via the backend's API call?

New comment by rajnathani in "Diamonds and Lasers: Thermal Management for Chips"

rajnathani — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:04:22 +0000

Related discussion of the 2 articles (IEEE Spectrum articles themselves) mentioned in this IEEE Spectrum article:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45654512 (Diamonds)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45616791 (Laser)

New comment by rajnathani in "GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT"

rajnathani — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:29:43 +0000

Also, I wish there was a setting to disable ChatGPT in its system prompt to have access to my name and location. There was a study on an LLM(s) (not image gen) a couple of years ago (I can't find the study now) which showed that an unfiltered OSS version had racist views towards certain diasporas.

New comment by rajnathani in "Warren Buffett's final shareholder letter [pdf]"

rajnathani — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:41:07 +0000

Only a temporary fall:

> Our stock price will move capriciously, occasionally falling 50% or so as has happened three times in 60 years under present management. Don’t despair; America will come back and so will Berkshire shares.

New comment by rajnathani in "LM8560, the eternal chip from the 1980 years"

rajnathani — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 10:18:29 +0000

The part about the clock chip using the frequency of the AC power source as a clock source is pretty nifty, but then +-14 minutes/day of inaccuracy (+-2%) as the article mentions, is pretty off.