Hacker News: samdcbu

New comment by samdcbu in "Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died"

samdcbu — Thu, 02 May 2024 16:57:07 +0000

Antibiotic resistant MRSA kills thousands of people a year in the US. The idea that he went to the hospital with pneumonia and then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.

New comment by samdcbu in "$200M gift propels scientific research in the search for life beyond Earth"

samdcbu — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 21:37:58 +0000

SETI received ~$28m in donations and contributions in 2022, according to their tax filings [1]

As mentioned in the press release, contribution will be used at least in part as an endowment, providing perpetual funding for ongoing programs.

Also, it is my understanding that large philanthropic gifts, particularly from estates, often come in the form of non-cash assets such as stocks or other financial instruments. So probably not a $200m check, but a very nice nest egg to fund SETI projects for decades to come.

[1] https://www.seti.org/about-us/financials

New comment by samdcbu in "SoftBank paid $1.5B to WeWork lenders days before bankruptcy"

samdcbu — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 17:15:37 +0000

https://archive.li/oI1A1

New comment by samdcbu in "Comcast squeezing 2Gbps internet speeds through decades-old coaxial cables"

samdcbu — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 01:53:08 +0000

Most of Comcast’s internet is exchanged through transit-free peering agreements, so only about 1% of Comcast’s outbound traffic requires them to pay for IP transit. And that traffic is mainly overseas, so Comcast is effectively a Tier 1 network in the US. Which means their customers’ outbound traffic doesn’t cost them anything.

For most last-mile ISPs, peering isn’t a revenue source. Small ISPs have to pay for peering and IP transit, and large ISPs have transit-free peering agreements with most, if not all, of the internet.

However, large ISPs that enjoy regional monopolies can refuse to upgrade connections with peered networks in an attempt to force the content providers sending traffic over the peered network to instead peer directly with the ISP.

This tactic is really only feasible for ISPs who have captive customers that are unable to switch to another ISP, as the negotiation process requires the ISP to allow the service it is providing to its actual customers to degrade to such an extent that the content provider is forced to peer directly with the ISP.

New comment by samdcbu in "Comcast squeezing 2Gbps internet speeds through decades-old coaxial cables"

samdcbu — Sat, 14 Oct 2023 23:40:31 +0000

US Internet (private fiber ISP in the Twin Cities) is an anomaly, not the norm. Minneapolis is incredibly lucky to have a local, private ISP that offers fiber to the home at up to 10 gigabit/s. The only other ISPs in the US that I know offer similar services are either municipal ISPs, co-ops, or Google Fiber.

New comment by samdcbu in "Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption"

samdcbu — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 05:53:35 +0000

> that blog post for the past week

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-countcorrectly.html

New comment by samdcbu in "MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: A randomized, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial"

samdcbu — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:08:02 +0000

MDMA was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck. Merck and US Army did several animal trials in the 1950s, but by the end of the decade MDMA was shelved and thought to have no therapeutic benefit. It wasn’t until Sasha Shulgin rediscovered it in 1976 that its therapeutic benefits were discovered, at which point therapists and psychiatrists began quietly using it for psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. In July 1984 the DEA proposed making MDMA a Schedule I controlled substances, which led to outcry from practitioners who requested the DEA hold hearings to provide testimony on MDMA’s therapeutic benefits. While these hearings were ongoing, the DEA used its emergency scheduling authority in May of 1985 to place MDMA in Schedule I.

Animal efficacy and human safety trials of MDMA began in the late 1980s, and the first FDA-approved, placebo controlled, double blind phase I study was published in 1996.

New comment by samdcbu in "The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you"

samdcbu — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:06:52 +0000

The American version of the BBC: PBS

New comment by samdcbu in "The FCC responds to my ATSC 3 encryption complaint – they want to hear from you"

samdcbu — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 23:57:19 +0000

If someone is already in the middle of no where, 2.4 GHz congestion isn’t a problem for them.

I’m always for more unlicensed spectrum.

But I strongly disagree with your distaste for the FCC’s reverse auctions of spectrum. Wireless Spectrum is a limited public resource and an auction is a much better way to allocate it than to have those same companies instead hire lobbyists to try to convince the FCC to allocate that spectrum to them.

New comment by samdcbu in "OpenAI came after our domain because we use GPT in it"

samdcbu — Wed, 17 May 2023 12:55:55 +0000

Finally, somewhere that is covering the issues I care about but that the mainstream media refuses to cover.

New comment by samdcbu in "Incident with Actions, API Requests, Codespaces and Pages"

samdcbu — Wed, 10 May 2023 13:39:29 +0000

From an SLA uptime perspective, it’s also worth considering that you don’t have a whole team working to fix your self-hosted Gitlab server when it goes down. So one outage overnight of your self-hosted server could be more downtime than more frequent, shorter GitHub outages.

New comment by samdcbu in "Making a Linux home server sleep on idle and wake on demand – the simple way"

samdcbu — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 15:25:03 +0000

The increasing prices of IPv4 address blocks will probably drive adoption of IPv6. The increased complexity will be outweighed by the elimination of scarcity that IPv6 brings. If we are still using IPv4 in 2100 that would be tragic. IPv4 block pricing: https://ipv4marketgroup.com/ipv4-pricing/

New comment by samdcbu in "Hexagony: A two-dimensional, hexagonal programming language"

samdcbu — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 16:41:48 +0000

“Hexagons are the bestagons”

https://youtu.be/thOifuHs6eY

New comment by samdcbu in "Ask HN: Why call it an AI company if all it does is call open AI API?"

samdcbu — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 16:08:14 +0000

> “It’s just like building on top of AWS or GCP.”

If you applied your logic to the use of cloud services then companies like Vercel shouldn’t call themselves a hosting provider because they use AWS. “It’s just a UI that calls the AWS API”

New comment by samdcbu in "Sorting waste and recyclables with a fleet of robots"

samdcbu — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 04:36:36 +0000

This is AI research, not product development. The project’s goal was to apply deep reinforcement learning to a complex and varied real world task. Google has no desire to sell trash sorting robots.

New comment by samdcbu in "The least impactful way to spend $300M?"

samdcbu — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 03:09:23 +0000

and then in 2017 Friedman’s former department was renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics after he donated 150m

New comment by samdcbu in "The least impactful way to spend $300M?"

samdcbu — Fri, 14 Apr 2023 02:56:39 +0000

He previously donated $150m to Harvard College so his children are already all but guaranteed admission. He already has all the benefits Harvard gives mega donors, there isn’t any marginal benefit to this donation other than a department renaming. The only possible thing left for them to give him would be a seat on the Harvard Board of Overseers but that’s unlikely because he is now a politically controversial figure.

He also has a history of mega donations to universities in exchange for department renaming, like his $150m donation to UChicago which renamed their economics department after him (the most prestigious part of the university)

Build a secure code mindset with the GitHub Secure Code Game

samdcbu — Fri, 24 Mar 2023 12:40:59 +0000

Article URL: https://github.blog/2023-03-23-build-a-secure-code-mindset-with-the-github-secure-code-game/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35288248

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

ChatGPT for Semantic Database Management

samdcbu — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:56:14 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.07351

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35267605

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by samdcbu in "How to participate in Monday’s oral arguments re: Internet Archive"

samdcbu — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 13:55:17 +0000

If it was shut down due to a civil injunction for copyright violation, I don’t think the Internet Archive would be able to transfer the Wayback Machine’s data to anyone else without defying that injunction and risk being held in contempt.

Someone would need to immediately begin trying to mirror the entire Wayback Machine’s archive, ideally hosting the mirror in Luxembourg or the Netherlands.