Hacker News: reaperman

New comment by reaperman in "Street address errors in Google Maps"

reaperman — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:43:30 +0000

Your comments reminds me of “ Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses”

https://gist.github.com/almereyda/85fa289bfc668777fe3619298b...

New comment by reaperman in "I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil (2015)"

reaperman — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 19:56:34 +0000

Yes, crude oil / gasoline / diesel will break down polyethylene grocery bags.

New comment by reaperman in "Sail-Trim Simulator"

reaperman — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 21:12:34 +0000

Eventually it made sense that boat-speed only changes the "apparent wind", as it's only simulating wind-boat interactions, not water-boat interactions.

New comment by reaperman in "Making a smart bike dumb so it works again"

reaperman — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 14:07:56 +0000

Amazon Sidewalk can also be used - it automatically finds devices on other networks (like your next-door neighbor) and sends data through their devices in case you don't connect your device to your own network.

https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/

New comment by reaperman in "Making a smart bike dumb so it works again"

reaperman — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 04:08:52 +0000

Products are often cheap enough that the labor costs are too high compared to getting a new unit. It would generally work for appliances that are built into a house or hard to transport because then the relative cost would be offset by the cost of labor to remove and install a replacement.

For example, people generally wouldn’t do this for a TV when they can get a decent replacement for $300 new.

New comment by reaperman in "Is 1 Prime, and Does It Matter?"

reaperman — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 20:17:47 +0000

Yes, it's more of a convention where we assume language like "...ignoring the trivial case of 1 being an obvious factor of every integer." It's not interesting or meaningful, so we ignore it for most cases.

New comment by reaperman in "Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional"

reaperman — Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:21:18 +0000

There have been many periods in US history where sets of laws were purposefully created that criminalized activities that nearly ~100% of the population engage in. The intent of those isn't to stop those activities, and there's no intent of prosecuting everyone. The intent is to be able to prosecute any individual person or someone close to them, at any arbitrary point in time.

Many of today's lawmakers no longer have that intent, but the system as a whole still keeps running in a manner that allows tools of that nature to be used against targeted individuals and populations.

New comment by reaperman in "Milwaukee M18 Battery Reverse Engineering"

reaperman — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:36:51 +0000

Slick deals: https://slickdeals.net/f/18256009-milwaukee-m18-redlithium-x...

New comment by reaperman in "A new ChatGPT version just dropped and GeoGuesser is now a solved problem"

reaperman — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:34:56 +0000

Normally I dislike these quips for HN; I hate that I love this one.

New comment by reaperman in "Canadian math prodigy allegedly stole $65M in crypto"

reaperman — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 01:06:31 +0000

> Roulette, no way to gain an advantage over the house regardless of what strategy you use.

These days that’s probably true but it has been done: https://www.roulettestar.com/people/joseph-jagger/

New comment by reaperman in "A 32-bit processor made with an atomically thin semiconductor"

reaperman — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:58:03 +0000

> The paper itself is behind a paywall so I can't see it

https://archive.org/details/s41586-025-08759-9

New comment by reaperman in "Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte"

reaperman — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 16:45:06 +0000

Only place this falls apart is that Accenture / Deloitte are really not sexy. Like being a federal employee at a similar pay scale would actually be more sexy. McKinsey/BCG maybe this makes sense.

New comment by reaperman in "Eavesdropping on smartphone 13.56MHz NFC polling during screen wake-up/unlock"

reaperman — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:17:16 +0000

TSA (more accurately - CBP, more generally - DHS) contract out the hard engineering to Cellebrite and NSO Group. Those companies develop a dumb-proof box. The CBP agents at the border take the phones, plug them to the box, press a few buttons, and that’s it.

No one in the TSA/CBP/ICE/DHS needs to be smart for this, that’s the job of private engineering firms/contractors.

New comment by reaperman in "AI cheats: Why you didn't notice your teammate was cheating"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 22:45:38 +0000

The statistical methods can detect things orthogonal to performance KPI’s. Automation has “tells” - little things they do differently from what humans would do. Reliably discriminating those signals is a hard problem.

New comment by reaperman in "Reasoning models don't always say what they think"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 19:17:15 +0000

Huge thank you for correcting me. Do you have any good resources I could look at to learn how the previous CoT is included in the input tokens and treated differently?

New comment by reaperman in "Are people bad at their jobs or are the jobs just bad?"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:11:47 +0000

Very, very little labor is unskilled. In almost any work there is a massive difference in quality and speed between someone who has been doing it for <6 months vs. someone who has been doing it for >3 years.

My theory is that "unskilled labor" was a term of propaganda invented by an earlier generation of business leaders in order to publicly devalue many labor-intensive roles. That generation knew that it was a lie, but the business leaders that followed were taught that "unskilled labor" was axiomatic, and essentially "drank the kool-aid".

The result of this is that the labor pool for many disciplines has been hollowed out because it's no longer financially sustainable for workers to build the skills needed to excel in those roles.

New comment by reaperman in "Reasoning models don't always say what they think"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 17:58:41 +0000

Edit: 'wahnfrieden corrected me. I incorrectly posited that CoT was only included in the context window during the reasoning task and later left out entirely. Edited to remove potential misinformation.

New comment by reaperman in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 17:22:37 +0000

I'm sorry, what? Federal income taxes have not been eliminated. Trump can't even do that; Congress would have to, and they won't.

The federal government currently collects on the order of $2.5 trillion in income taxes. These tariffs would only generate $500 billion of federal revenue. But in reality they'll generate less, due to any amount of second-order effects where less stuff is imported due to higher costs. It's very myopic to only look at the household finances and not have anything to say about a proposed loss of $2 trillion of federal revenue.

With allies like you in this discussion thread, who needs enemies?

New comment by reaperman in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 07:37:49 +0000

I spent the past 30 minutes calculating this all manually using the sources listed below:

The practical takeaway is that the average household will spend $3,488.27 more as a result of the tariffs. Clothes, furniture, toys will be (mean) 26.9% more expensive, electronics will be 24.4% more expensive, tires and jewelry 16.2% and 17.1% more expensive, respectively.

If this is more acceptable to you, please voice your approval.

[0]: https://wits.worldbank.org [1]: https://dataweb.usitc.gov [2]: http://atlas.hks.harvard.edu

New comment by reaperman in "US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU"

reaperman — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 07:32:08 +0000

I think you might be granting the administration too much benefit of the doubt. They aren't based on "tariffs + trade barriers", they're just based on trade deficit alone.

https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1907559189234196942

https://archive.ph/kRkRh