Hacker News: rindalir

New comment by rindalir in "Trump says 'a whole civilization will die tonight' if Iran does not make a deal"

rindalir — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:55:54 +0000

They are literally on vacation and will do absolutely nothing.

New comment by rindalir in "Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info"

rindalir — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 21:06:05 +0000

I TA’ed for Harriet, she’s awesome!

New comment by rindalir in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

rindalir — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 12:53:35 +0000

As someone who raises horses and other animals, I can say with pretty high certainty that most of the horses were not allowed to "retire". Horses are expensive and time-consuming to care for, and with no practical use, most horses would have been sent not to the glue factory but (at that time) to the butcher and their non-meat parts used for fertilizer.

New comment by rindalir in "Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations"

rindalir — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:41:33 +0000

Was wondering about that but then came across this passage in the paper: “ The last date on which a transient was observed within a nuclear testing window in this dataset was March 17, 1956, despite there being an additional 38 above-ground nuclear tests in the subsequent 13 months of the study period.” I would expect to see artifacts of the tests themselves continue under that hypothesis. Of course this raises a whole bunch of other questions…

New comment by rindalir in "Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?"

rindalir — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 19:00:47 +0000

I think this expresses how many of us feel very eloquently.

New comment by rindalir in "Let's properly analyze an AI article for once"

rindalir — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 14:17:58 +0000

Professor Felleisen, is that you?

New comment by rindalir in "Delta moves to eliminate set prices, use AI to set your personal ticket price"

rindalir — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:00:41 +0000

Forget the "AI" label, this has been a goal of pricing people for ever. Who knows how good they are at it (note: used to work for a consulting company that specialized soley in pricing)

Somewhere in there, there's a model trying to estimate your willingness to pay and then present you with that price. What I don't know what other data they will use, it seems to me like a critical piece would be your previous purchase behavior (assuming it's personalized). But also your behavior of selecting other airlines because of price. So ... if Delta has access to all your airline purchases not good. If they don't, maybe an agent (human, code, whatever) can game the system, searching for airfare, starting the purchase process and then abandoning.

[edit: spelling]

New comment by rindalir in "The road to hell is paved with lithium-ion batteries"

rindalir — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 21:22:12 +0000

I love videos like this. Shenzhen looks like a great urban environment. But ... on a second watching all I could see were the cameras everywhere.

New comment by rindalir in "US man jailed for cloning giant sheep for trophy hunting"

rindalir — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 18:30:01 +0000

Far more coherent write up of the initial charges: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/02/07/montana-man-charged-by-...

Also note the charges of conspiracy. He and his co-conspirators knew what they were doing was illegal and took steps to falsify records.

New comment by rindalir in "Museum Fatigue"

rindalir — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:38:08 +0000

My solution when I lived near a museum I liked (the MFA in Boston, USA) was to get a membership and go once every week or two and only spend half an hour to an hour, in one specific room or exhibit.

When I'm visiting, I try to look a museum up ahead of time and then focus on a small but good subsection of stuff. I hit full saturation/fatigue at about two and a half hours.

New comment by rindalir in "The number's up for 999. And 911. And 000. And 111"

rindalir — Tue, 21 May 2024 19:57:39 +0000

I can't be the only person to think the correct universal number should be 0118.999.88199.9119.725...3

New comment by rindalir in "'Lavender': The AI machine directing Israel's bombing in Gaza"

rindalir — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:24:07 +0000

okay ... sure: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/972-magazine/

New comment by rindalir in "The humble brilliance of Italy's moka coffee pot (2018)"

rindalir — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:10:21 +0000

My variation is that i heat the chamber until the water boils, alone. Then turn off the heat, plop in the portafilter, screw on the top, and turn the heat on low and watch it until the coffee coming out turns from brown to clear-ish and starts "strombolating". Then put the bottom chamber under cold water to stop the process.

New comment by rindalir in "A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest"

rindalir — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:26:21 +0000

I am really appreciating the IANAH and TINHA side effects of your post :)

New comment by rindalir in "The 'Georgists' Are Out and they want to tax your land"

rindalir — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 22:19:27 +0000

Oh my brain edited out the "unfair" part in the original question, I assumed it was just asking about higher value/tax. I think that an urban farm, baring some very extenuating circumstance, is an enormous waste of space. And I'm a part-time (non-urban) farmer.

New comment by rindalir in "Hyundai to Be First Automaker to Sell New Cars on Amazon"

rindalir — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 22:12:50 +0000

So in the article, it actually says "U.S. auto dealers will be able to sell vehicles on the tech company's platform". This implies dealers aren't out of the loop -- but the only thing I care about is : is pricing going to be transparent, or will there still be the "contact seller for price" crap? Will different Amazon customers see different prices based on some "algorithm"?

New comment by rindalir in "The 'Georgists' Are Out and they want to tax your land"

rindalir — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 15:20:01 +0000

If you own a farm in a city or area with high housing demand, yes, I think it would. (edit: and I'm not meaning this to be a sarcastic response -- there are urban farms).

New comment by rindalir in "Researchers identify 'switch' to activate cancer cell death"

rindalir — Mon, 13 Nov 2023 21:08:53 +0000

I know that these kind of write-ups by universities tend to overstate the importance of research. However, it's nice to see a write up that at least on the surface goes into some fairly interesting detail and actually does NOT seem to overstate the significance or imply this will result in a single cure for cancer in just a few easy steps.

New comment by rindalir in "Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans"

rindalir — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 22:04:43 +0000

Right, network effects -- benefits accrue as power of population size. That's a good point.

And the stagnation is a depressing thought. I naively hope that if we can survive this phase of our existence we will find a way to exist in large numbers but also allow all the other beings along for the ride with us to exist and thrive as well. But to survive that long and figure all this out, we actually need to increase our numbers and demographic trends look pretty pessimistic for that.

New comment by rindalir in "Forget About Overpopulation, Soon There Will Be Too Few Humans"

rindalir — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 20:49:33 +0000

I'm one of those people who often says "the problem is that there are just too many people." But I hadn't ever really thought about the hypothesis that the "good idea" yield was low enough that you needed a large number of brains to make technological (or other) progress. Certainly there are lots of problems in the near, medium-term, and distant future that will require creative solutions.