Hacker News: snewman

New comment by snewman in "Waymo Safety Impact"

snewman — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 21:20:43 +0000

In essentially all cases where a Waymo and a human-driven car have collided, the human driver has clearly been at fault. This seems definitive and not susceptible to cherry picking.

New comment by snewman in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

snewman — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 00:25:59 +0000

Water on the moon is limited and difficult to collect, it wouldn't make sense to use it for industrial purposes. It's a very challenging thermal environment (baking during the day, freezing at night). But perhaps worst of all, every month there's a 14-day period with no solar power. Overall seems worse than low-earth orbit.

New comment by snewman in "enclose.horse"

snewman — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:01:39 +0000

+1 to this. It's also visually confusing, the gate looks like it's covering two cells.

Great game! Feature request: add a button that shows my submitted solution. I'd like to be able to compare it with the optimal solution (so it'd be nice if a single tap could toggle between my submission and the optimal).

New comment by snewman in "Open models by OpenAI"

snewman — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 17:07:42 +0000

No, because there are lots of things people can do that it still can't do.

New comment by snewman in "Study mode"

snewman — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 19:13:20 +0000

I presume you're referring to the recent METR study. One aspect of the study population, which seems like an important causal factor in the results, is that they were working in large, mature codebases with specific standards for code style, which libraries to use, etc. LLMs are much better at producing "generic" results than matching a very specific and idiosyncratic set of requirements. The study involved the latter (specific) situation; helping people learn mainstream material seems more like the former (generic) situation.

(Qualifications: I was a reviewer on the METR study.)

New comment by snewman in "Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine"

snewman — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:46:54 +0000

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/3106/

New comment by snewman in "OpenAI claims gold-medal performance at IMO 2025"

snewman — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 14:11:24 +0000

For people who prefer reading to watching videos, I wrote a detailed account of my process for solving one of last year's IMO problems, along with thoughts on how this relates to AI:

https://secondthoughts.ai/p/solving-math-olympiad-problems

New comment by snewman in "Autonomous drone defeats human champions in racing first"

snewman — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 21:55:55 +0000

A few questions / thoughts:

1. I didn't see it stated explicitly, but I presume the neural net is on the far end of a radio link somewhere, not running on hardware physically mounted on the drone?

2. After viewing the FPV video on the linked page: how the hell do human pilots even come close to this pace? Insane (even assuming that the video they're seeing is higher quality than what's shown on YouTube – is it?)

3. The control software has access to an IMU. This seems to represent some degree of unfair advantage? I presume the human pilots don't have that – unless the IMU data is somehow overlaid onto their FPV view (but even then, I can't imagine how much practice would be needed to learn to make use of that in realtime).

New comment by snewman in "Claude Integrations"

snewman — Fri, 02 May 2025 05:25:55 +0000

The numbering jump is because there was "Claude 3.5" and then "Claude 3.5 (new)" and they decided to retroactively stop the madness and rename the later to 3.6 (which is what everyone was calling it anyway).

AI 2027 Is a Bet Against Amdahl's Law

snewman — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 14:04:56 +0000

Article URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bfHDoWLnBH9xR3YAK/ai-2027-is-a-bet-against-amdahl-s-law

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43752158

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by snewman in "Show HN: Nash, I made a standalone note with single HTML file"

snewman — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 06:26:24 +0000

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "dynamic text box" but it was just a contenteditable div. There have been at least two complete rewrites since I was involved, nowadays I believe it's a canvas with all of the editing, formatting, layout, and rendering done "by hand" in JavaScript.

New comment by snewman in "Show HN: Nash, I made a standalone note with single HTML file"

snewman — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 14:56:37 +0000

This one line was like 90% of the original implementation of Writely (the startup that became Google Docs; source: I was one of the founders).

The other 90% was all the backend code we had to write to properly synchronize edits across different browsers, each with their own bizarre suite of bugs in their contenteditable implementations :-)

New comment by snewman in "Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was minus 280° F / 173° C"

snewman — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 06:15:27 +0000

The article clearly states that providing enough power to run the heaters was one of the challenges that led to the death of the probe. Satellites are rarely in the shade for an extended period.

What I Wish I Knew About FrontierMath

snewman — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 02:17:32 +0000

Article URL: https://lemmata.substack.com/p/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-frontiermath

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43123284

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by snewman in "Introducing deep research"

snewman — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:48:29 +0000

Two different people I know with pro subscriptions report not having access yet.

New comment by snewman in "OpenERV"

snewman — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 06:23:11 +0000

There isn't a uniform temperature across the entire exchanger. There's a smooth gradient extending from one end to the other. If the outside is hotter, then the inbound air gradually cools as it gives up heat to the outbound air which is gradually warming.

New comment by snewman in "An Update on Apple M1/M2 GPU Drivers"

snewman — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 14:12:28 +0000

NDAs don't generally have an expiration date. (As opposed to non-competes and non-solicitation agreements, which generally do.) An NDA typically ends only if the information in question becomes public, and then only for that particular information.

New comment by snewman in "Battleships Logic Puzzle"

snewman — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 15:06:02 +0000

Note that very often, the solution process for a more difficult puzzle involves going through nontrivial logic to prove that a particular square must be water. It's important to be able to record non-obvious "must be water" squares.

New comment by snewman in "Is Tor still safe to use?"

snewman — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 22:58:08 +0000

Often the connection between the load balancer and app backend also uses TLS. I've operated a large / complex service on AWS and all internal communications at each level were encrypted.

Of course, in principle, a cloud provider could tap in anywhere you're using their services – ELB (load balancer), S3, etc. I presume they could even provide backdoors into EC2 instances if they were willing to take the reputational risk. But even if you assume the NSA or whoever is able to tap into internal network links within a data center, that alone wouldn't necessarily accomplish much (depending on the target).

The Unreasonable Magic of Rolling a Tennis Ball Down a Sandcastle

snewman — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 16:06:42 +0000

Article URL: https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/tennis-ball-sandcastles

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41474645

Points: 2

# Comments: 0