Hacker News: suchire

New comment by suchire in "The US Secretary of Education referred to AI as 'A1,' like the steak sauce"

suchire — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 19:19:39 +0000

Reminds me of a quiz tournament that I participated in once, where the answer was “Apollo 11” (eleven), but the host thought the answer read “Apollo Two” and told us we were incorrect.

New comment by suchire in "Jargonic: Industry-Tunable ASR Model"

suchire — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 15:58:31 +0000

Is their WER graph just completely made up? It’s comically bad

New comment by suchire in "Brendan Carr Makes It Clear That He's Eager to Be America's Top Censor"

suchire — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 04:07:11 +0000

Given how little the US invests in public education, probably never

New comment by suchire in "Character amnesia in China"

suchire — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 17:18:03 +0000

At one point, apparently it was fashionable amongst teens to type characters by using pinyin and always selecting the first character in the list of options, regardless of the intended actual character. That was essentially phonetic writing, but as a result, texts were incomprehensible to parents (the desired outcome).

New comment by suchire in "Qantas apologizes after R-rated film plays on every screen during flight"

suchire — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 06:22:32 +0000

I once rode a bus from Boston to NYC in the middle of a winter storm at night. The bus got lost and the trip ended up taking close to 7 hours. These buses had TVs for showing video tapes, and so partway through, the driver decided to show “The Ring”. Let me tell you, an involuntary horror movie screening in the middle of a blizzard is quite a memorable experience.

New comment by suchire in "Prevention of HIV"

suchire — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 10:47:37 +0000

This is a paper describing the pharmacokinetics (the rates of various phases of entering the blood and clearing out of the body) for various formulations of the drug, and their hypotheses for why this might be the case:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.3c00626

tl;dr: the molecule is poorly soluble in water, so by suspending a bunch of microparticles and injecting them subcutaneously, the drug very slowly dissolves over time, and it’s very potent, so only a little bit is necessary to do its job.

New comment by suchire in "Audapolis: Edit audio files by transcript, not waveform"

suchire — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:49:35 +0000

This workflow is exactly what Descript does. Transcript-based editing, filler word removal, noise reduction, volume normalization, Overdub spoken word correction using the speaker’s voice, eye gaze correction for video, etc.

Disclaimer: I work at Descript

New comment by suchire in "The American West is figuring out how to keep cool"

suchire — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 01:48:13 +0000

San Francisco has Golden Gate Park, Mt Sutro, Lands End, and the Presidio as forests. I think park maintenance in those places is less to ensure trees thrive and more to keep up trails, remove hazards, etc.

New comment by suchire in "Empty Frames and Other Oddities from the Unsolved Gardner Museum Heist"

suchire — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 16:30:55 +0000

Vermeer made only low dozens of paintings as opposed to, say, Monet, who made thousands, so likely they just mean something like “including one of Vermeer’s paintings, which are rare”

New comment by suchire in "OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions"

suchire — Sun, 14 Jan 2024 06:25:47 +0000

Jenkins was a fork of Hudson. No one talks about Hudson anymore

New comment by suchire in "Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions"

suchire — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:23:47 +0000

My expectations for people to take ethical responsibility generally scales with rank/level. It’s hard to fault a junior engineer for doing what they’re told; they might not even know about any harms they are doing, or maybe they’re economically vulnerable and can’t speak up for fear of losing their job.

On the other hand, a Director or Staff Engineer has my full blame for anything unethical that happens under their purview.

New comment by suchire in "Ex Post Office CEO hands back award after IT failures lead to false convictions"

suchire — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 21:21:00 +0000

> But if we don’t do our job right, people don’t get paid right, and while that may not have the same immediate impact as a doctor mistake, it’s... very much a real human impact.

As someone whose spouse is a teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District (where they had a disastrous rollout of new payroll and HR software), the effects are very, very real and concrete to me. Luckily, I work in tech and our could handle the problems, but many teachers live paycheck-to-paycheck. We know of teachers who have donated blood to get rent money because they weren’t paid, and one teacher died from cancer while being denied healthcare as a result of the HR software being borked. Total disaster with real, negative human consequences, unfortunately.

New comment by suchire in "The curse of the goitre in Switzerland"

suchire — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 18:12:41 +0000

Maybe they should just RTFA

New comment by suchire in "An unexpected uptick in cigarette smoking in Germany"

suchire — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 15:33:23 +0000

It’s still a habit OF dying, just not a habit that IS dying

New comment by suchire in "Texas governor signs law shutting diversity offices at public universities"

suchire — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 21:13:18 +0000

Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

New comment by suchire in "Tell HN: It's 2023 and you still can't import .ics files into iOS Calendar app"

suchire — Mon, 29 May 2023 20:00:04 +0000

Hilariously, you can set multiple timers on the Apple Watch, where screen real estate and battery are even more constrained.

New comment by suchire in "The Staff Engineer's Path – Book Review"

suchire — Wed, 17 May 2023 23:14:19 +0000

Because most questions are not bad questions. In isolation, if you have good teammates, ideas and questions are good. It’s just that you have to say “No” in the broader context, because you always have a limited budget of time and money

New comment by suchire in "'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco"

suchire — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:20:20 +0000

From second-hand knowledge, the Stanford GSE is really bad at understanding equity and minorities, and routinely, minorities in STEP (the teacher training program) get less support and empathy

New comment by suchire in "'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco"

suchire — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:12:13 +0000

Honestly, it doesn’t really work without the parents. The issue is that the biggest problems with schooling discrepancies are poverty. Kids can’t eat, need to take care of siblings or their own kids or go work two jobs, have no homes, don’t get medical care, have no internet, etc.

There is no way to really fix those problems by changing the school system. You can have bandaids, like providing free food at school, but that’s fixing the problem at the wrong level.

New comment by suchire in "There’s no such thing as a tree phylogenetically (2021)"

suchire — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 16:40:06 +0000

Except phylogeny generally was used to categorize how hereditarily related things were. Whether sequence alignment or physical taxonomy are better determinants is perhaps an open question in some cases, although I’m firmly on the side of sequence alignment, since DNA is an important component of inheritance