Hacker News: wnissen

New comment by wnissen in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"

wnissen — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:02:02 +0000

Is it really not UL approved? Hard to call it a premium product in that case.

New comment by wnissen in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"

wnissen — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:04:18 +0000

This was not what I was expecting. The doctors I know are mostly miserable; stuck between the independence but also the burden of running their own practice, or or else working for a giant health system and having no control over their own days. You can see how an LLM might be preferable, especially when managing a chronic, degenerative condition. I have a family member with stage 3 kidney disease who sees a nephrologist, and there's nothing you can actually do. No one in their right mind would recommend a kidney transplant, let alone dialysis for someone with moderately impaired kidneys. All you can do is treat the symptoms as they come up and monitor for significant drops in function.

New comment by wnissen in "Doubting U.S. resolve, Europe looks to bolster its own nuclear arsenal"

wnissen — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 20:18:39 +0000

Perhaps we didn't realize how much stability the "two powers" model generated. It caused inevitable arms races as the two powers vied to stay competitive, but there were only two. And the USSR was able to de-escalate on its own. If you have three powers, each of them wants the ability to eliminate not one, but both of the others. Could lead to not just incremental, but polynomial expansion of forces. And de-escalation involves multiple parties coordinating, not just one great power.

New comment by wnissen in "Ioannis Yannas, who invented artificial skin for treatment of burns, has died"

wnissen — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:57:28 +0000

If you have a weird phoneme / meaning mapping brain like mine, I would note that he is not the doctor who is known for the "replication crisis". Even though Ioannis means John in Greek. Took me a second to tease that out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ioannidis

New comment by wnissen in "S&P affirms 'AA+' credit rating for US, cites impact of tariff revenue"

wnissen — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 20:08:50 +0000

It does make you wonder what would cause a downgrade. The debates over the debt ceiling have certainly brought the U.S. closer to default than I would ever have thought. It's true that the U.S. can never run out of dollars, so in once sense it's not possible for a bondholder not to get paid back. But the political environment, the potential unreliability of previously iron-clad data, economic disruption from tariffs, and behavior from the Federal Reserve, these all seem to make an unlikely event much more likely.

New comment by wnissen in "Amazon sends brick in lieu of 5080 – latest cautionary tale in commingling scams"

wnissen — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 18:12:25 +0000

Oh, I have a long list of vendors that I'll buy from over Amazon. I buy almost nothing from them. On the rare occasion that I simply can't find something locally or from a reputable vendor, or need it on very short time scale, well, OK. But we dropped Prime, where we were ordering 100+ times a year, and now I pay out of pocket for shipping on a half-dozen orders a year.

New comment by wnissen in "Amazon sends brick in lieu of 5080 – latest cautionary tale in commingling scams"

wnissen — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:18:36 +0000

Well, they wouldn't be able to pretend that they are selling from the official store for that inventory. Which I, personally, would be OK with. I've been on eBay for a couple decades, I don't mind ordering from Jack and Jill's Computer Parts as long as they have a reputation I can check. But the current situation where you can order from what looks like the the official storefront but the fulfillment is from a seething mass of "stickerless commingled inventory", with no way to even determine which merchant introduced the counterfeit product? This has been a problem for over 10 years. It's not just the obvious fraud, it's the subtler fakes. I won't buy anything from Amazon where the failure could kill or injure someone. A sun hat? Sure. A charger or food? Not a chance.

New comment by wnissen in "Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens"

wnissen — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 20:57:09 +0000

It's not clear what LLMs are good at, and there's great interest in finding out. This is made harder by the frenetic pace of development (GPT 2 came out in 2019). Not surprising at all that there's research into how LLMs fail and why.

Even for someone who kinda understands how the models are trained, it's surprising to me that they struggle when the symbols change. One thing computers are traditionally very good at is symbolic logic. Graph bijection. Stuff like that. So it's worrisome when they fail at it. Even in this research model which is much, much smaller than current or even older models.

New comment by wnissen in "Nearly 3 out of 4 Oracle Java users say they've been audited in the past 3 years"

wnissen — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 18:05:00 +0000

It was the same thing for us with Qt Commercial licensing. We use only the LGPL version, dynamically link, don't modify the source, and give credit, so we're fully in compliance. To get support we chose to purchase commercial licenses for our small team of developers. Cue a regular series of calls about whether we were sure we were in compliance, etc. To add insult to injury they couldn't even navigate our purchasing process so it was a pain to pay them.

I'll take my chances in the open source world. It's a shame that the companies that created the software aren't getting paid, truly. But don't make it so obnoxious to reward you.

New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"

wnissen — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:18:00 +0000

Ooh, looks like they added that in late 2023. Man. In August 2023 I actually migrated all of my email to Proton and was ready to go when I realized they didn't support forwarding. Thanks for letting me know.

New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"

wnissen — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:13:36 +0000

Inbox. They claim that the inbox is special in IMAP and it's hard to have a lot of messages there. 150K messages in the whole mailbox, I think. 25 years of email.

New comment by wnissen in "Ask HN: Who Is the Best Paid Email Provider? Why?"

wnissen — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:32:26 +0000

I chose Migadu because they seem to be genuinely helpful and are very affordable. I probably would have gone Proton but they don't support forwarding.

The downside is that downloading messages is fairly slow when you have 10-20k messages in your inbox. And the webmail is fairly primitive.

I never tried Fastmail.

New comment by wnissen in "I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students"

wnissen — Tue, 27 May 2025 17:10:39 +0000

Apple's Airpods Max headphones appear to be the official uniform of University of California students. We've been visiting and I swear they outnumber normal headphones.

New comment by wnissen in "Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles"

wnissen — Wed, 30 Apr 2025 23:45:31 +0000

Since less water would increase the detergent concentration, I was wondering if the opposite was the case. My family's old washer filled up the entire tub with water, so any detergent (and any pathogen, to be fair) would be quite diluted.

Short cycle length certainly makes sense to be correlated with pathogens. The lousy LG "TurboWash" only takes 28 minutes to do a full load of laundry but certainly doesn't get very much clean in that time.

I have to admit it was surprising that textiles have been identified as the source of hospital acquired infections. You'd think that even if the laundering didn't eliminate pathogens, it would greatly reduce them and make any clusters more diffuse.

New comment by wnissen in "The Decline of the U.S. Machine-Tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery (1994)"

wnissen — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 23:11:45 +0000

If I had to guess, it has more to do with the type of person who is willing to save diligently for decades. Government work (at least until the last few months) tended to be lower paying but steadier. The type of risk-averse person who takes a government job is also more likely to save over time, taking advantage of compounding. Just correlated, in other words.

New comment by wnissen in ""Final Usonian Home" by Frank Lloyd Wright Completed in Ohio"

wnissen — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 22:52:31 +0000

I'm curious what, specifically, the foundation claims is contrary to the plans. It's not like Wright himself built the houses (or did the drawings, for that matter). There's always been a process of modification when the contractor gets onsite and builds something. When Wright was alive he (or his secretary) would review pictures of the the resulting home and award a glazed red tile with Wright's signature engraved. That was the official recognition that you had a Frank Lloyd Wright home. Perhaps with all the litigation (such as with the Jean-Michel Basquiat authentication committee) the foundation is scared to get involved.

I saw Riverrock over Christmas when it was 95% complete, and it does look really cool. Similar in a lot of ways, especially the living room, but quite a different floor plan. I hope the doors are a bit wider than the Louis Penfield house on the same site; even folks of normal width have to rotate sideways. Toilet in a narrow alcove, narrow cushions on the furniture, etc. Absolute commitment to design integrity, not always comfortable. Still a fascinating place to stay.

New comment by wnissen in "The average college student today"

wnissen — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 23:24:40 +0000

If you look at how most professors and adjuncts are rewarded and paid, it makes sense. You can't get quality instruction from a adjunct who is only a half-step away from sleeping in their car, especially when they know they might be gone mid-semester due to a budget cut. Even the full professors are trying to bring in enough grants, oversee enough RAs and TAs to do the work for the grants, get some of their own research done, and barely have time to teach. Teachers in high school have a high teaching load relative to colleges and universities, but they are doing a job and generally are paid at least middle class wages.

New comment by wnissen in "Waymos crash less than human drivers"

wnissen — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 21:37:42 +0000

Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already.

Honestly, at this point I am more interested in whether they can operate their service profitably and affordably, because they are clearly nailing the technical side.

For example data from a 100 driver study, see table 2.11, p. 29. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37370 Roughly the same number of drivers had 0 or 1 near-crashes as had 13-50+. One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! So the average isn't that helpful here.

New comment by wnissen in "Why is C the symbol for the speed of light? (2004)"

wnissen — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:47:41 +0000

My immediate guess based on no specific knowledge was “arbitrary constant while they were figuring things out” and it sounds like that’s not far from the truth. The process of discovery is often far more protracted than it seems when one is reading about it decades after the fact.

New comment by wnissen in "Contrary to Popular Belief, CPR Is Not as Successful as Many Think"

wnissen — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 17:18:19 +0000

And merely taking the training will help you deal with other aspects of emergency first aid. The Red Cross's training really pounds in the "check if the scene is safe", etc. sequence that you need to be effective under extreme stress.