ballooney

Born on March 19, 2012•1341 Karma

15 days ago

•on: Ask HN: How do you get into a flow state when usin...

Do something better with your life. Honestly, not /s. Your brain is trying to tell you something.

15 days ago

When I'm running for exercise, my brain is telling me to stop running, would it be better for me long-term to stop running or continue, regardless of what that pesky voice is telling me?

ballooney•

15 days ago

I don't know, I get runner's high and want to go running again a couple of days later.

ballooney•

20 days ago

•on: There's still no point in gigabit broadband

For a proper distributed internet it seemed like a good idea, but silicon valley has rather scorched the earth, and so it’s not that useful for passively consuming slop and adverts.

ballooney•

52 days ago

•on: YouTube, your RSS feeds are broken

The chinese colonies love opium, engagement is through the roof.

charcircuit•

51 days ago

You can say the engagement is through the roof about any activity that is popular.

ballooney•

80 days ago

•on: Cambodia unveils statue to honour famous landmine-...

I don’t like this site’s obsession with reducing everything to market opportunities, but… it’s extremely well documented that land mines, white truffles, cancer, diabetes, chemical weapons, etc can all be ‘sniffed’ by animals and it’s a mechanism that is almost always ‘better’ (cheaper, quicker, more deployable in the field) than human-engineered solutions. Surely there’s some vebture capital opportunity here for better sensors that would unarguably improve our lot more than AI, at least per dollar invested?

ks2048•

80 days ago

There has certainly been work on it, but not sure what the status is. Of course, it could be very useful.

From Google, 2019,

https://research.google/blog/learning-to-smell-using-deep-le...

lapetitejort•

80 days ago

Sounds like the obsession of reinventing trains and trees. Surely training a rat is cheaper than a portable real-time NMR device, right?

sonofhans•

80 days ago

Rats are sentient beings. If we have a choice, it’s not ethical to risk their lives to meet our own goals.

lapetitejort•

80 days ago

Before focusing on rats, who are too light to set off mines and live long pampered lives, I would focus on the 73 million pigs and 87 million cows in factory farms [0].

[0]: https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estima...

ballooney•

85 days ago

•on: Artemis II Launch Day Updates

What he means and you're interpreting a bit too literally is that this [heatshield] is one subsystem where the risks are not well understood or quantified as, say, the propulsion system, for which we have a lot more experience and flight heritage.

smsm42•

85 days ago

Yes, of course there are risky systems in there, and calling attention to one of them is fine. What I object to is framing it as a "safe/not safe" issue - as if without the tests the author proposed it were "not safe" and with them, by implication, it would become "safe". That's not like replacing old tires on your car with new tires - there are a lot of things that can go wrong, and many of them are "unsafe", and it's always a complex equation which can not be (at least at current level of technology) solved with doing more tests or anything else to make it "safe". The "safe" framing is the one I object to.

ballooney•

87 days ago

•on: Artemis II is not safe to fly

Bayes rule has existed for nearly 300 years, there is no excuse for ‘only look[ing] at this data’ and that is NEVER a reasonable thing to do.

ballooney•

87 days ago

•on: Artemis II is not safe to fly

You’d need a load of additional propellant to insert yourself into the same orbit as the ISS on your return, which would have an exponential effect on the amount of propellant needed in the first place to get all this lot out to the moon. It would be a different vehicle.

ballooney•

3 months ago

•on: Garry Tan's Claude Code Setup

In the last 60 days I have written over 600,000 lines of production code

No you haven't.

the_af•

3 months ago

Not only he hasn't, writing over 600,000 lines of production code is not something to be proud of. At least not without explaining their purpose and why they were needed.

This is a major software engineering lesson that Garry's LLM-addled brain has apparently forgotten: measuring progress in LoC is not something that is done anymore because it's a bad metric!

ballooney•

3 months ago

•on: Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget...

About the same as Bezos invested in the Melania documentary, watched by about six people.

rwmj•

3 months ago

The Melania documentary is an important artifact that historians will be talking about for decades, although not in the way those involved anticipated.

emchammer•

3 months ago

Leni Riefenstahl taught me everything I know about lighting and camera angles!

nearbuy•

3 months ago

Wikipedia says it "had the highest opening for a non-concert documentary since the $10.7 million opening for Chimpanzee (2012)".

It did well by documentary standards, poorly compared to its budget, and the stories about empty theaters are mostly in areas with very weak Trump support. Those stories spread mainly because they makes us feel good.

ballooney•

4 months ago

•on: First Website (1992)

Everyone in silicon valley would do well to remember why the web was built (by other people, elsewhere).