Hacker News: zippyman55

New comment by zippyman55 in "Uber is betting that people don't realize 70 * 0.25 = 17.5"

zippyman55 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:53:55 +0000

I do not know if this bad math was AI generated or the person was just not thinking. But this stuff scares me as people lean more and more on AI to generate quick and dirty products.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Why do people keep stealing the small sauce bottle?"

zippyman55 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:48:36 +0000

people will steal everything. I read a story a few years ago about the popular tiny little libraries located on the street fronts. Someone liked that people were taking their books, then they decided to put unless books in there and they also disappeared.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Attention Decay"

zippyman55 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 14:07:14 +0000

Whoah! This is great! I'm sure it has applications to investor behavior.

New comment by zippyman55 in "NeoBaby Phoebe Gates wants her $185M AI startup Phia to succeed"

zippyman55 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 05:36:38 +0000

And the circular funding goes round and round….

New comment by zippyman55 in "Ask HN: Any interesting niche hobbies?"

zippyman55 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 22:05:34 +0000

Artisan pizzas! Local food bank Clothing give—a-way for homeless (organized) Toastmaster public speaking Organized a youth chess club (great) Lock picking Teaching calculus, physics Exercise at the gym Helping a homeless guy get organized Nature hikes in groups Dancing Spanish lessons Chess puzzles Chess lessons Cooking Making past Home improvement Detail your messy car Take an auto class

New comment by zippyman55 in "Tell HN: I think my colleagues are just piping my replies into an LLM"

zippyman55 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 12:06:07 +0000

Perhaps call a short impromptu meeting next time with the caveat that previous responses were all LLM generated. It’s that’s going to be the way forward less employees are going to be needed. Do the brainstorming and disband and wait for better input. I’d follow up on suspicious contributions w 1:1 discussions. Drill down and see what they know.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Quantum computer researchers: Bitcoin encryption breakable in a few years"

zippyman55 — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 03:32:25 +0000

No, it will come five years after commercial fusion.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Inside Nepal's Fake Rescue Racket"

zippyman55 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:33:36 +0000

Ahhhh! Mystery solved. About 40 yrs ago I came to work to taste the most foul cookie (pretty cookie at that!). This is what they must have done. Nobody admitted to making the cookies. I always thought it was a gag. LOL

New comment by zippyman55 in "Hershey says it will shift back to classic recipe for all Reese's products"

zippyman55 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:26:05 +0000

As a kid, I loved these Reese's cups and into the 1990's I think I enjoyed them. But they have been off many years in terms of a poor quality waxy flavored chocolate. The Trader Joes ones (and I am sure other products) blow them away. Lucky for me, I have moved on to healthier items.

New comment by zippyman55 in "AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is more worrying"

zippyman55 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:34:54 +0000

It seems these targets get reviewed and excluded if they are no longer targets. To me, it looks like someone was not paying attention for ten yrs.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Trump signature to appear on US currency, ending 165-year tradition"

zippyman55 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 05:57:14 +0000

I guess there will be lots of graffiti on the bills going forward

New comment by zippyman55 in "Regular army and reserve components enlistment program: Summary of change"

zippyman55 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 04:05:18 +0000

They are having problems meeting the fitness standard right now. It seems these tests just get harder as you age.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

zippyman55 — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:25:22 +0000

You know the story about how the frogs, thrown into a hot pot will jump out. But, if you turn up the heat slowly, they just eventually die? Well, the other day, at work, we were called into a room to watch a mandatory video of frogs in this environment. I actually noticed that management had turned the thermostat up really high. I hopped out of that meeting very quickly.

New comment by zippyman55 in "A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas"

zippyman55 — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 02:33:57 +0000

I have always wondered when I used the pair of chopsticks to push food on my fork, if there was a name for my type.

New comment by zippyman55 in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

zippyman55 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:40:51 +0000

Ranking, Celsius, Centigrade have the degrees. Kelvin is a base unit, absolute and no degree!

New comment by zippyman55 in "US Mint can begin producing Trump commemorative gold coin"

zippyman55 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 22:14:32 +0000

Are you suggesting that melting them will increase the value?

New comment by zippyman55 in "Hello"

zippyman55 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 12:24:29 +0000

Morning Fred! Morning Sam.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Pimp My LLM: Leveraging Variability Modeling to Tune Inference Hyperparameters"

zippyman55 — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:59:15 +0000

Pimp is a bad word and its use should be avoided. Dont glamorize the word.

New comment by zippyman55 in "S&P 500 Concentration Approaching 50%"

zippyman55 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 05:02:38 +0000

Yep! Maybe some money could be put in a s&p500 equal weight index?

This is not my first rodeo.

New comment by zippyman55 in "Do monitoring tools still miss early signals before incidents?"

zippyman55 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 05:17:25 +0000

For the mean time to failure, I based it on a section out of Mastering Statistical Process Control, By Tim Stapenhurst. Specifically, The section on using SPC to measure earthquakes, etc. The system worked pretty well, ran for years, and using R, I built a free system to monitor all the job schedule information for our HPC systems. I’d present the most egregious information in the form of a daily Pareto chart. I’d attempt to shame the code owners when they would appear at the top of the Pareto chart. But, mostly, I just did not want people having their go-to excuse of blaming the system administrators, when it was really their recent code update. There were other SPC charts, which one could drill down and look at job run times, or which nodes the jobs ran on, etc. But working the culture to get people to be responsible for their applications was a little out of my wheelhouse, and always a challenge. For those few people who really embraced their application ownership and wanted to make sure things ran well, it that was always nice. It was always nice to say something like, “your job used to crash 3 times a year and now it seems to be crashing 6 times a year.” At least, we would have a good point to discuss potential causes. I know some of the developers got sucked into tools like Splunk, but to me, that was always cost prohibitive for our budget and our volume of data. Answering your question about “early signals in metrics before job failures increased” the mean time to failure SPC chart would show a job failure signature and if there were problem nodes, or problems with a software update, that would become apparent to allow further investigation. The other SPC charts, like job run time would show things like increased job run time, etc. But, that was pretty basic stuff (and lots of tools can do that stuff), such as a user was generating a daily tar-file, which was growing over time and eventually filling up a file system, etc. But getting people to take action always seemed so hard.