andy_xor_andrew (u/andy_xor_andrew)

andy_xor_andrew commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

the__alchemist · 17 hours ago

Don't read the article; read the report.

andy_xor_andrew · 17 hours ago

Sure, of course I will trust the report as the source of truth.

But I'm interested in the reporting. There are, you know, journalistic standards, which are considered kinda "journalism 101"! For instance, getting the basic facts of a story correct - especially the facts stated in the headline.

So I'm curious, did the reporter do their due diligence, and write the article in a way that is factually correct, but highly misleading? Or did they simply not follow basic reporting protocol?

andy_xor_andrew commented on F-35 pilot held 50-minute airborne conference call with engineers before crash cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/ala... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

dfox · 18 hours ago

The article is somewhat sensationalistic. If you read the actual report you will find out that:

The pilot was not part of the conference call!

What froze was not hydraulic fluid for actuators (in some hydraulic line), but hydraulic fluid in the shock absorbers.

The last paragraph of the article and seems to be missing a few words and reads as the investigators blaming the people directly involved, which is essentially a complete opposite of what conclusions of the report say.

andy_xor_andrew · 17 hours ago

I read the article (twice) and I still have the impression the pilot was in fact the one in the conference call

Opening line:

> A US Air Force F-35 pilot spent 50 minutes on an airborne conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers trying to solve a problem with his fighter jet before he ejected

Am I illiterate or misreading it?

> After going through system checklists in an attempt to remedy the problem, the pilot got on a conference call with engineers from the plane’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, *as the plane flew near the air base. *

Is this actually some insane weasel-wording by CNN? "We never said the pilot (he is in fact a pilot) was the one flying the jet, we just said 'as the plane flew', not 'as he flew the plane', using passive voice, so we're not wrong - but it was another pilot flying the plane"

andy_xor_andrew commented on It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) hsivonen.fi/string-length... · Posted by u/program

dang · 6 days ago

Related. Others? (Also, anybody know the answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987514?)

It’s not wrong that " ".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)

String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)

andy_xor_andrew · 6 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27529697

andy_xor_andrew commented on Home Depot sued for 'secretly' using facial recognition at self-checkouts petapixel.com/2025/08/20/... · Posted by u/mikece

delichon · 8 days ago

The green box around his face in the image is evidence that it detected a face, but not that it had collected or stored identifying biometrics. It would be legal for a POS device to detect any face, e.g. to help decide when to reset for the next customer. But as I understand it, this would usually be enough to trigger discovery, where he could learn the necessary technical details.

Even if this suit fails, the store is vulnerable to continuous repeats by other parties. Written consent from each customer is the only viable protection. So the BIPA law may mean that face detection, not just recognition, is not practical in Illinois.

andy_xor_andrew · 7 days ago

I was wondering this as well. The green box could simply indicate it detected a face, using something like YOLO, or even a simpler technique like some point-and-shoot cameras use to decide where to focus (on faces, obviously).

andy_xor_andrew commented on Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion xfinity.com/support/artic... · Posted by u/bearsyankees

yborg · 2 months ago

I remember reading this paper when it came out, didn't think it would be commercializable, and here we are.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2486001.2486039

andy_xor_andrew · 2 months ago

Yeah, it's bizarre.

Normally the pathway for this kind of thing would be:

1. theorized

2. proven in a research lab

3. not feasible in real-world use (fizzles and dies)

if you're lucky the path is like

1. theorized

2. proven in a research lab

3. actually somewhat feasible in real-world use!

4. startups / researchers split off to attempt to market it (fizzles and dies)

the fact that this ended up going from research paper to "Comcast can tell if I'm home based on my body's physical interaction with wifi waves" is absolutely wild

andy_xor_andrew commented on Q-learning is not yet scalable seohong.me/blog/q-learnin... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

andy_xor_andrew · 2 months ago

The article mentions AlphaGo/Mu/Zero was not based on Q-Learning - I'm no expert but I thought AlphaGo was based on DeepMind's "Deep Q-Learning"? Is that not right?

andy_xor_andrew commented on Q-learning is not yet scalable seohong.me/blog/q-learnin... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

andy_xor_andrew · 2 months ago

the magic thing about off-policy techniques such as Q-Learning is that they will converge on an optimal result even if they only ever see sub-optimal training data.

For example, you can use a dataset of chess games from agents that move totally randomly (with no strategy at all) and use that as an input for Q-Learning, and it will still converge on an optimal policy (albeit more slowly than if you had more high-quality inputs)