Hacker News: reportingsjr

New comment by reportingsjr in "Amazon to acquire Globalstar and expand Amazon Leo satellite network"

reportingsjr — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:03:36 +0000

I don't think that is very true in this day in age. Here in Cincinnati, the vast majority of houses now have fiber run to them. There are still some stragglers, but that's mainly because slumlord apartment owners don't feel like dealing with upgrades.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Data centers are transitioning from AC to DC"

reportingsjr — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:45:10 +0000

This is effectively how hot swapping is done for may modern systems. It seems counter intuitive to call it hot plugging, but it’s what you’ll find if you look up “hot swap controller”.

New comment by reportingsjr in "The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Observatory System"

reportingsjr — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:41:47 +0000

> what? These are telescopes, not telephones. There’s a very small amount of scientific grade ones in existence and they are all different.

Have you not been following modern satellite and telescope bus architectures? Both planet and spacex have been using this model to great effect over the last decade.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free"

reportingsjr — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:49:36 +0000

I believe google/waymo uses Swiss Re for reinsurance, so you are correct.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Ultrasonic Chef's Knife"

reportingsjr — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 21:41:05 +0000

There are surgical scalpels that are ultrasonic, and they are incredibly sharp when activated. They can cut through skin and tissue like butter!

New comment by reportingsjr in "William Gibson Reads Neuromancer (2004)"

reportingsjr — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 00:03:31 +0000

I had the same experience reading neuromancer in the last year. I felt like I got the vibe of what was going on, but struggled to understand the details and figure out what was actually happening in the story.

New comment by reportingsjr in "CDC terminates flu vaccine promotion campaign"

reportingsjr — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:24:57 +0000

Children are one of the high risk populations for flu. That is why kids are a priority of flu vaccines.

New comment by reportingsjr in "My washing machine refreshed my thinking on software estimation"

reportingsjr — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:15:21 +0000

Some noise cancelling headphones/earpods can absolutely provide hearing protection, but it does depend.

Here are the specs for Apple airpod pro 2: https://www.apple.com/airpods-pro/pdf/Hearing_Protection_dat...

New comment by reportingsjr in "San Francisco homelessness: Park ranger helps one person at a time"

reportingsjr — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 17:07:44 +0000

> We could "solve" the problem like Singapore or China (some of these 'many countries'), and simply throw everyone in jail for petty crimes.

This clearly isn’t true, as the US has a per capita prison population four to five times that of China & Singapore! We jail far, far more people than they do.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era"

reportingsjr — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 19:13:21 +0000

The Android on chip AI is and has been leagues better than what is available on iOS.

If anything, I think the upcoming iOS AI update will bring them to a similar level as android/google.

New comment by reportingsjr in "A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology"

reportingsjr — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 13:01:20 +0000

Yes, the iPhone has a laser array and sensor that it uses for lidar.

New comment by reportingsjr in "A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology"

reportingsjr — Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:59:50 +0000

Waymo's recent experiment with multimodal models and a purely camera based system (EMMA) validate some of the claims that using LIDAR data in training does help. Pretty neat! Still not as good as a LIDAR + RADAR based system.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Trump wins presidency for second time"

reportingsjr — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 12:46:02 +0000

> opening up more federal land for drilling and mining

I'm honestly not sure how much a difference Trump will make in this. The US greatly increased oil and gas production under Biden.

It seems that policies that supported an energy transition were generally working. If those get rolled back, hopefully things are in a good enough place that more sustainable energy continues dominating.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Only 5.3% of US welders are women. After years as a professor, I became one"

reportingsjr — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 02:36:39 +0000

Hahaha, wow. The other products on that page do a wonderful job of disagreeing with parent’s explanation.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Smartphone buyers meh on AI, care more about battery life"

reportingsjr — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 18:04:32 +0000

Google photos is way, way, way better than apple photos at this. It’s not even a competition.

I have my sister’s dogs named in my google photos library. Every time I a take a picture of either dog, they are automatically tagged and added to a shared album I set up for my sister.

I have nieces and nephews with photos from newborn age to 10+ years old, and it has managed to organize them across their growth and ages. It’s incredible. I can search for “ ” and get every photo of her on a certain vacation to make a family scrap book.

Apple photos search and tagging is pitiful in comparison.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Sam's Club CTO to Exit Due to Walmart Relocation Policy"

reportingsjr — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 21:59:33 +0000

As an avid mountain biker and having been to bentonville twice, the trails are just ok. Immaculately maintained and there are some neat features, but the hills there are seriously lacking elevation.

The small downtown area of bentonville is neat, but the greater area is… meh.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Exxon still expects fossil fuels to make up the majority of energy in 25 years"

reportingsjr — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 20:55:18 +0000

Non-fuel uses make up roughly 10% of oil demand. Certainly significant, but unless plastics, fertilizer, etc have absolutely insane growth in the next 25 years, it won't keep demand level.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Exxon still expects fossil fuels to make up the majority of energy in 25 years"

reportingsjr — Mon, 26 Aug 2024 20:55:18 +0000

Non-fuel uses make up roughly 10% of oil demand. Certainly significant, but unless plastics, fertilizer, etc have absolutely insane growth in the next 25 years, it won't keep demand level.

New comment by reportingsjr in "How NASA brought the F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life (2013)"

reportingsjr — Thu, 15 Aug 2024 14:26:40 +0000

A Raptor engine has about 1/3 to 1/4 of the thrust of an F-1 engine. However, the Raptor is far more efficient and much more impressive technically. They are really a marvel of modern engineering and science.

New comment by reportingsjr in "Solar energy breakthrough could reduce need for solar farms"

reportingsjr — Fri, 09 Aug 2024 12:28:16 +0000

On the flip side, I think if they can make slightly more expensive panels with technologies like perovskites, but they are significantly more efficient, they will gain a lot of market share.

The solar panels themselves have become an minor portion of the cost of an install. At this point, the land area and labor install costs have become massive. If you can counter this with panels that are 25% more efficient than current commercialized panels and only 20% more expensive, you need to pay for much less area and labor to install and maintain them. Could be a huge win overall.