Hacker News: xvedejas

New comment by xvedejas in "Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods"

xvedejas — Thu, 21 May 2026 18:03:06 +0000

Safety margins still will require some level of delay between cars that aren't mechanically linked. Even with perfect reaction times, the physics of driving (maximum acceleration rates, possible loss of traction) dictate this, it's a non-trivial control theory problem. Besides, it doesn't seem to be a goal of Waymo; I've seen lines of their vehicles before and they all behave the same way as in mixed traffic.

New comment by xvedejas in "Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study"

xvedejas — Mon, 04 May 2026 16:19:18 +0000

What do you mean by detrimental?

New comment by xvedejas in "Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study"

xvedejas — Sun, 03 May 2026 17:39:59 +0000

My initial charitable reading -- as someone who sometimes dabbles in decaf -- is that decaffeination has the bad side effect of stripping flavors, and likely many of the other biologically active chemicals. I can see from their further posts that they were more interested in unscientific fear mongering instead.

That said, I do think there is some truth that decaf is lacking (including via supercritical CO2) and I wonder how long until we could have a product like genetically engineered coffee plants that produce everything except caffeine. I'd like that, though I can immediately see an issue with growing a plant without its natural pesticide.

New comment by xvedejas in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

xvedejas — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:18:46 +0000

It's quite regulated in the western US, but usually in the direction of guaranteeing water to incumbent landowners. Some people end up with really strong water rights, and they can be wasteful if the law helps them do so.

New comment by xvedejas in "Zed 1.0"

xvedejas — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 16:49:58 +0000

Maybe this wasn't true an hour ago, but all the top 3 comments right now look supportive (if I am to count yours), and the next few are just mildly critical.

New comment by xvedejas in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

xvedejas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 21:42:17 +0000

Yes, you're correct about that

New comment by xvedejas in "Claude.ai unavailable and elevated errors on the API"

xvedejas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:57:06 +0000

If 90% is one nine and 99% is two nines, we can use the logarithm to compute how many fractional nines we have at 98.59%: about 1.9788 nines (almost two!)

New comment by xvedejas in "Waymo in Portland"

xvedejas — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 20:51:39 +0000

> you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those

If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.

New comment by xvedejas in "Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign"

xvedejas — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:44:50 +0000

Does this take into account feature flags when summing LOC? It's common practice in Rust to really only use a subset of a dependency, controlled by compile-time flags.

New comment by xvedejas in "Škoda DuoBell: A bicycle bell that penetrates noise-cancelling headphones"

xvedejas — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 09:40:58 +0000

Over-engineering? It's a fully mechanical bike bell that's made slightly differently. It's a very established and straightforward technology.

New comment by xvedejas in "France pulls last gold held in US"

xvedejas — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:55:09 +0000

> the price of gold continued to rise as they did this

This would mean they sold low and bought high, right?

New comment by xvedejas in "Midnight train from GA: A view of America from the tracks as airports struggle"

xvedejas — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:02:34 +0000

A couple of the lines I ride in California have decent on-time rates (mostly I ride the line formerly known as the San Joaquins)

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:34:56 +0000

Yes, to be clear I was intentionally not responding to the GP directly.

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:11:42 +0000

I was not talking about tract housing. Where I live there is no tract housing construction.

New comment by xvedejas in "An industrial piping contractor on Claude Code [video]"

xvedejas — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:53:13 +0000

New multifamily construction in the US that has to undergo design review is arguably fairly custom in that each site will have different requirements. I think it's fair to say that commoditization is a spectrum?

New comment by xvedejas in "Our commitment to Windows quality"

xvedejas — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 21:39:14 +0000

I've been using Linux for a long time, which might sound like I'm comfortable with all its rough edges, but it's honestly the opposite. Early on it was a new toy and I would accept issues as part of messing around with it. The past 10~15 years on the other hand, I've needed to get serious work done on it, and also use it for PC gaming, so I've gone the other way and focused on getting the most no-nonsense easy setup where I don't have to be tinkering with things all the time.

Based on that, I'd say: go for a popular distro with KDE. I'm sure there are other very polished options out there, but my recommendation is Kubuntu, even though it's not the one I use today (I use Arch mostly), as it's very simple to set up and well supported.

New comment by xvedejas in "Kotlin creator's new language: a formal way to talk to LLMs instead of English"

xvedejas — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:19:15 +0000

We already have a language for talking to LLMs: Polish

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/polish-effec...

New comment by xvedejas in "U+237C ⍼ Is Azimuth"

xvedejas — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:42:11 +0000

Shouldn't it be the same symbol but turned 90 degrees? Seems to mimic the sextant operation if so. I've always used some set of greek symbols (theta, phi, maybe psi) for these kinds of angles.

New comment by xvedejas in "Billion-Parameter Theories"

xvedejas — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 23:17:28 +0000

The empty land is not very valuable. Suburban homeowners are sitting on relatively valuable land, and it's valuable because of access to jobs and services.

In my personal experience, adding density to established neighborhoods improves those neighborhoods' character. Sometimes it gets those afraid of change to move out, improving it even more.

New comment by xvedejas in "We installed a single turnstile to feel secure"

xvedejas — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:09:08 +0000

> they locked all the side doors

And this didn't get them in trouble with the fire marshal?