mountain_peak (u/mountain_peak)

mountain_peak commented on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk research.google/blog/hard... · Posted by u/aleyan

duped · 18 hours ago

Why does this require "hard" braking? If another car cuts in front of you just decelerate gently. You don't brake and wait until the gap is big enough (also if this is stop-and-go traffic, you should be trying to avoid braking at all)

mountain_peak · 17 hours ago

My original observation wasn't worded as well as it could have been. I meant in situations where hard braking could be required on a moment's notice for no particular reason (e.g. Chicago freeways where everyone is doing 70 mph bumper-to-bumper and decreases to 10 mph all of a sudden).

Indeed, when someone changes lanes in front of me, I gently let off the accelerator, but as someone else noticed, that can enrage drivers behind me (I don't take it personally), and I'm definitely traveling fast enough to remain in the middle lanes.

mountain_peak commented on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk research.google/blog/hard... · Posted by u/aleyan

amanaplanacanal · 19 hours ago

Does it really matter though? Is the end result just a couple of minutes later in a 30 minute commute? Or does it actually make a large difference in travel time?

mountain_peak · 19 hours ago

It used to be more of an issue when I was younger. Now that I'm older and more 'seasoned' (plus reflexes do slow down), I'm far more patient and have no issue maintaining a healthy following distance. I think the statistics reflect this in age vs. accident rate as well.

Unfortunately, sometimes over a 45 minute freeway commute, dropping back repeatedly means arriving 15 minutes or more later. Again, no big deal now, but it was somehow unacceptable when I was younger.

mountain_peak commented on Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk research.google/blog/hard... · Posted by u/aleyan

presidentender · 19 hours ago

I got one of those dongles from my insurance company that plugged into the ODB2 port and reported my driving habits.

I was a bad driver. It would frequently beep at me to let me know that I had braked too hard. I was mystified. "What should I have done differently," I'd think, as I raged at the objective machine that judged me so.

The next time my brother came to visit, he called mom. "Oh, and presidentender is a good driver now." I didn't put the pieces together right away, but it turned out that the dongle had actually trained me, like a dog's shock collar.

The reason for my too-frequent hard-braking events wasn't speed, although that would be a contributing factor. It was a lack of appropriate following distance. Because I'd follow the drivers in front of me too closely I'd have to brake hard if they did... Or if they drive normally and happened to have a turn coming up.

Over the period I had the insurance spy box in my truck I learned without thinking about it to increase my following distance, which meant that riding with me as a passenger was more comfortable and it beeped less often. Of course since I'd been so naughty early during the evaluation they didn't decrease my rates, but I think the training probably did make me statistically less likely to crash.

mountain_peak · 19 hours ago

Maintaining a safe following distance is incredibly challenging on busy freeways where hard braking is often 'required'. Most people have likely found themselves in this situation: vehicle changes lanes in front of you; you slow down to maintain a safe following distance, another car sees a gap and changes lanes in front of you. Repeat for your entire commute.

Incredibly frustrating, and I've driven all over North America - there's practically no major city where this doesn't happen. If you're not maintaining a safe following distance on city/residential streets, that's a different matter.

mountain_peak commented on Wirth's Revenge jmoiron.net/blog/wirths-r... · Posted by u/signa11

elliotec · 5 days ago

Yeah, I think a lot of this can be attributed to institutional and infrastructural inertia, abstraction debt, second+-order ignorance, and narrowing of specialty. People now building these things are probably good enough at React etc. to do stuff that needs to be done with it almost anywhere, but their focus needs to be ML.

The people that could make terminal stuff super fast at low level are retired on an island, dead, or don't have the other specialties required by companies like this, and users don't care as much about 16.7ms on a terminal when the thing is building their app 10x faster so the trade off is obvious.

mountain_peak · 5 days ago

Interestingly (or possibly not), since my very first computers had ~4K of RAM, I became adept at optimizations of all kinds, which came in handy for my first job - coding 360 mainframe assembly. There, we wouldn't be able to implement our changes if our terminal applications (accessing DB2/IMS) responded in anything greater than 1s. Then, the entire system was replaced with a cloud solution where ~30s of delay was acceptable.

I think the Internet made 'waiting' for a response completely normalized for many applications. Before then, users flew through screens using muscle memory. Now, when I see how much mouse clicking goes on at service counters, I always think back to those ultra-fast response time standards. I still see a few AS/400 or mainframe terminal windows running 'in the wild' and wonder what new employees think about those systems.

mountain_peak commented on Ask HN: How are you automating your coding work? · Posted by u/manthangupta109

mjr00 · 20 days ago

If I know what I want to code and it's a purely mechanical exercise to code it, I'll just tell Claude what to do and it does it. Pretty neat.

When I don't know what I want to do, I read existing code, think about it, and figure it out. Sometimes I'll sketch out ideas by writing code, then when I have something I like I'll get Claude to take my sketch as an example and having it go forward.

The big mistake I see people make is not knowing when to quit. Even with Opus 4.5 it still does weird things, and I've seen people end up arguing with Claude or trying to prompt engineer their way out of things when it would have been maybe 30 seconds of work to fix things manually. It's like people at shopping malls who spend 15 minutes driving in the parking lot to find a spot close to the door when they could have parked in the first spot they saw and walked to the door in less than a minute.

And as always, every line of code was written by me even if it wasn't written by me. I'm responsible for it, so I review all of it. If I wouldn't have written it on my own without AI assistance I don't commit it.

mountain_peak · 20 days ago

> The big mistake I see people make is not knowing when to quit.

This is sage advice. I spent the better part of a day trying to steer Gemini into correcting an inconsistency when I likely could have solved it in under an hour. I think persevering with Gemini was due to a number of factors, including novelty, stubbornness, and (unfortunately) not knowing in detail what Gemini had written up to that point.

I eventually studied the resulting code, which ended up having a number of nested 'hacks' and required refactoring - more time wasted, but still much faster overall.

mountain_peak commented on Web development is fun again ma.ttias.be/web-developme... · Posted by u/Mojah

codr7 · a month ago

Learning means friction, it's not going to happen any other way.

mountain_peak · a month ago

"What an LLM is to me is the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a e-bike for our minds"

mountain_peak commented on Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints cell.com/current-biology/... · Posted by u/srameshc

lazyeye · 8 months ago

Recommend reading "Breath" by James Nestor. A surprisingly readable book on the topic

https://www.amazon.com/Breath-New-Science-Lost-Art/dp/B082FP...

mountain_peak · 8 months ago

Did not know this existed; thanks very much for posting that - even the comments are insightful. Added to my next order!

mountain_peak commented on Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints cell.com/current-biology/... · Posted by u/srameshc

tough · 8 months ago

is there any sensor data from stuff like apple health care that could be put into an ML to detect such changes on breathing fingerprint?

mountain_peak · 8 months ago

Your thoughtful question is definitely along the lines where the research could change health outcomes. Apple Health currently tracks trends over time and can alert if any disconcerting trends are identified. If Apple were able to capture a breathing signature at rest, say once a month, trends could be identified (via training data, as you mention) and data optionally provided to healthcare providers.

Some people who are alone (including my father) have no idea that they have sleep apnea or 'odd' breathing - for apnea, they're obviously asleep, and for other breathing factors, it's usually a slow and unnoticeable progression.

mountain_peak commented on Humans have nasal respiratory fingerprints cell.com/current-biology/... · Posted by u/srameshc

mountain_peak · 8 months ago

Kind of a silly personal anecdote, but growing up, my father had a unique "strained" nostril breathing pattern and bad sleep apnea + COPD. I became 'hyper aware' of people's breathing patterns - to the point where people at work had fun with it - standing behind me breathing normally. I could identify who it was > 90% of the time (they were not trying to breathe quietly or differently). I often thought of people's breathing signature as sort of factor to identify them by. I certainly didn't think I was the first person to note this.

More interestingly, I'm also able to pick out people who have early signs of "decreased health" based on their breathing pattern at rest - I don't think it's overly difficult.

This study appears to cover both aspects - creating a breathing fingerprint and estimating BMI. I certainly wasn't aware of breathing differences associated with cognitive state. Bravo to the researchers for formalizing all of this - hope some positive interventional techniques are driven by these findings.

mountain_peak commented on Reverse engineering my #1 Hacker News article danielwirtz.com/blog/succ... · Posted by u/wirtzdan

mountain_peak · a year ago

Interestingly (or possibly not), I made this [0] comment here (on HN) some time ago and was quickly informed that my technique was used in the 1960s to identify moving celestial objects in successive astronomical photographs. [2] I kind of assumed is was a fairly well-known technique, but didn't realize it also had practical use!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37981314 [1] https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/microscope-ast...