Hacker News: ryankupyn

New comment by ryankupyn in "Growing number of Russians, Ukrainians seeking asylum at U.S.-Mexico border"

ryankupyn — Sat, 05 Mar 2022 21:19:44 +0000

And we should let them all in - the people who are leaving Russia now have an ardent desire to escape what is fast becoming a totalitarian state, while the Ukrainians are, of course, fleeing an invading army that has shown callous disregard for their lives.

New comment by ryankupyn in "How the weak can win – A primer on protracted war"

ryankupyn — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 02:07:49 +0000

It's worth replying specifically to highlight how wrong the original comment is, but the evidence that was cited by the Russian government to justify their invasion was clearly fabricated.

For instance, an alleged car bombing in Donetsk right before the invasion was staged using cadavers,[1] and a video used to claim that Ukrainian troops were moving aggressively into separatist territory was filmed far from its purported location.[2]

If Russia was so sure that Ukraine was committing these atrocities, they wouldn't need to rely on fake videos to justify attacking.

[1] https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2022/02/28/exploiting-cadave...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/22/europe/russia-videos-debunkin...

New comment by ryankupyn in "U.N. talks adjourn without deal to regulate 'killer robots'"

ryankupyn — Sat, 18 Dec 2021 18:47:59 +0000

I think the key distinction is that, for the most part, the current generation of cruise missiles are targeted and launched with a "human in the loop" - that is, a person actively makes the decision to fire the missile at a specific target. However, the autonomous weapons being debated have significantly less direct human control - they are potentially designed to simply patrol a certain area and attack anything that the weapon classifies as an enemy.

Of course, there are grey areas here - certainly there are existing missiles that can be launched without a defined target and programmed to aim for anything that, say, has radar emissions that match known enemy systems.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern"

ryankupyn — Fri, 26 Nov 2021 23:11:24 +0000

"Omicron" also has the advantage of being easier to hear and understand in english - "Nu" can cause confusion because it sounds so much like "New".

New comment by ryankupyn in "Unmanned submarine earmarked for Irish Sea freight crossings"

ryankupyn — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 18:53:27 +0000

This is an intriguing concept, but given that the submarine is small and suitable for mostly high-value cargo (whisky is the example cargo given in the article) I'm not sure how it'll offer significant advantages over other forms of transportation in practice.

Although submarines are more effective navigating through storms, one could simply wait for the storm to pass when shipping non-time-sensitive cargo, then use a regular surface cargo ship (which could be automated if desired just like the submarine). Surface ships also have the advantage of compatibility with our already-established shipbuilding and maintenance infrastructure, while a submarine would require the proliferation of new skills and tools to support it.

For time-critical cargo (where one can't wait for a hypothetical storm to pass), it's likely aircraft would be a better option for most shipments - certainly in severe storms aircraft can't operate either, but in that case the very act of loading and unloading the submarine would be hazardous as well.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust"

ryankupyn — Tue, 24 Aug 2021 21:01:11 +0000

I think that a lot of this makes sense from Google's legal perspective, where antitrust litigation is a constant consideration and any internal document mentioning market share or competitors could be used against them.

I'm sure that there is a great deal of discussion about potential anticompetitive issues within Google and with their outside counsel, but in a context where legal privilege protects against disclosure.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Carvana’s success rides on used-car loans"

ryankupyn — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 23:48:38 +0000

I think it'd be risky for Carvana if they tried "cornering the market" on used cars - unlike houses, used cars fall in price pretty quickly and new-car production has the potential to increase as car manufacturers respond in a way that housing production does not. If Carvana buys up all the inventory to drive up prices they'll need a plan to unload as well - while keeping prices high.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Algorithmic bias bounty challenge"

ryankupyn — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 20:46:02 +0000

I think the challenge is that if the rewards were high, Twitter employees (with the advantage of inside information) might be tempted to "tip off" an outsider in exchange for a cut of the reward, rather than just reporting the issue internally.

At the same time, there isn't much of an outside market for algorithmic bias info in the same way there for security vulnerabilities. Probably the biggest effect of this reward will be to pull some grad students who were going to study algorithmic bias anyways towards studying Twitter specifically - after all, there aren't any rewards for studying the algorithmic bias of other companies!

New comment by ryankupyn in "Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”"

ryankupyn — Sat, 17 Jul 2021 01:23:28 +0000

I think this is a really good point, and I think that if anyone is really committed to promoting free-speech-maximalist approach to the web they should be focused on building tools that make is easier for people to host and distribute their own content without relying on a centralized service.

Any business with the technical ability to censor what they host is going to be tempted (and likely pressured by other actors) to take down content that people find objectionable. Removing these "chokepoints" where a small number of people have the ability to engage in mass censorship is key if you want to promote more diverse speech on the web. (Not everyone has this goal!)

New comment by ryankupyn in "Ever-increasing home values are a Ponzi scheme"

ryankupyn — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 23:14:35 +0000

The critical thing is that this also requires a growing population - which is not guaranteed in all places/timeframes!

New comment by ryankupyn in "ProPublica's tax story"

ryankupyn — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 06:00:29 +0000

I think the most concerning element in the ProPublica piece is that there might be individuals inside the government who are willing to exfiltrate extremely sensitive private information and hand it over to outside parties without any public process/consent - this seems like a major privacy risk, and even more so than other entities/corporations one deals with it's very hard (for understandable reasons!) to prevent the IRS from collecting and retaining personal information, and tough to keep them accountable for the information they do collect.

New comment by ryankupyn in "San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses"

ryankupyn — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 21:21:39 +0000

Having the pay ratio be relative to the "Median San Francisco worker" might have some interesting effects - for financial/tech firms who want to avoid the tax they might just shift their ~25% lowest paid workers to an office in Oakland (though any corps with a mandatory physical presence like retail won't be able to do this).

New comment by ryankupyn in "Introduction to Statistical Learning"

ryankupyn — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 19:58:14 +0000

I'm a big fan of ISL - one of the best intro machine-learning oriented textbooks out there IMO. If you're looking for book that still offers a broad survey while going a bit deeper into the math, I recommend Elements of Statistical Learning as well (they share 2 authors):

https://web.stanford.edu/~hastie/Papers/ESLII.pdf

New comment by ryankupyn in "FCC approves Amazon’s internet-from-space constellation of 3,236 satellites"

ryankupyn — Fri, 31 Jul 2020 18:52:10 +0000

I'll add that my main hope is that the scale required for launching large satellite constellations will also make it cheaper to launch space-based telescopes, but it's far from clear that would be a major benefit (after all, launch costs will probably be on the order of 1% of the JWST's total ~$10B cost).

New comment by ryankupyn in "Companies made millions building unemployment websites that didn’t work"

ryankupyn — Fri, 17 Jul 2020 01:00:08 +0000

I'd note that while a broken unemployment system would affect statistics on the number of claims made, the official unemployment rate is calculated differently, using the Current Population Survey, and doesn't incorporate data on claims:

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

New comment by ryankupyn in "KH-11 spysat design revealed by NRO’s telescope gift to NASA (2012)"

ryankupyn — Tue, 12 May 2020 04:49:42 +0000

You can't extract any more information from the image than what the satellite originally acquired - you could make an "error correcting" model that creates an image that appears to have higher fidelity, but the additional detail is just a representation of what the model is filling in based on the other images it has been trained on, rather than an actual increase in resolution.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Tuna sells for $1.8M in first Tokyo auction of 2020"

ryankupyn — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 23:49:19 +0000

Possibly still a reasonable buy for him even at 3-6x what was expected if the higher price generates enough extra press coverage.

New comment by ryankupyn in "Uber and Lyft don't have a right to exist"

ryankupyn — Sat, 31 Aug 2019 15:39:35 +0000

I didn’t quite get that paragraph, because flexibility of schedule is an important criteria for determining if someone is an employee or a contractor in most of the the US! (In California this isn’t true as of fairly recently, but most of the rest of the country still uses a 20-point set of factors that includes schedule flexibility)

https://www.oregon.gov/ODA/shared/Documents/Publications/Nat...

New comment by ryankupyn in "The American Housing Crisis Might Be Our Next Big Political Issue"

ryankupyn — Thu, 17 May 2018 01:08:48 +0000

The real risk there is that it would incentivize landlords to select the highest-income tenants possible (more so than they currently do).

New comment by ryankupyn in "When banks abandoned American Samoa, the islands found a solution: public banks"

ryankupyn — Wed, 09 May 2018 22:12:36 +0000

It's worth noting that printing money and giving it to the banks is effectively the same as taxing cash - it causes inflation and reduces the value of Yuan-denominated assets (though there are ways to manage this).

By doing this, the Chinese government is subsidizing entities that borrow from the bank (which are often SOEs) without directly taxing its citizens.