Hacker News Reader

DonsDiscountGason U.S. economy lost 23,000 jobs in July, a sudden reversal

True, but is there any reason to think this dishonesty varies over time? The trend could be informative even if the raw numbers are nonsense

DonsDiscountGason Artificial Intelligence used to design new viruses

Bacteriophages present zero threat to humans and could be very valuable as antibiotics.

DonsDiscountGason Waymo in Dallas

Carpooling?

DonsDiscountGason Don't be a meat proxy

Unless they're a professional stack exchange responder (not a real job afaik) they probably do a lot besides answer random questions

DonsDiscountGason Don't be a meat proxy

I understand your point but it's funny to use AI as an example since a big benefit is it's generality. It's mediocre at many things but the fact that you can just use one tool and get passable results across many domains makes it so useful.

DonsDiscountGason The Rise of Million-Dollar Companies with Just One Employee

Exactly zero civilizations large enough to deserve the name had exactly one ideology

DonsDiscountGason AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions

Lol. You don't even need AI for that 99% boiler plate. Save 6-12 months of expenses in cash, DCA the rest into total market stock index funds. But people still pay expensive advisors to get worse results.

DonsDiscountGason Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

Yeah, kinda. Waymos have been on the road since 2023.

DonsDiscountGason Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

Any suggestions on hardware for using this? Just for simple experimentation

DonsDiscountGason Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

Seems like production ready is 2-5 years out though. Not a very long time

DonsDiscountGason AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

In biotech sometimes. It's a form of advertising.

DonsDiscountGason AI's top startups are barely publishing their research

Also the reason we fund science publicly is because we can't count on the incentives from the free market. I mean why would they share information with competitors?

DonsDiscountGason Handbook.md shows that long policy documents do not reliably govern agents

I'd be very interested to see a comparison with actual humans on the same benchmark.

DonsDiscountGason A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review

Not to mention the labor cost.

DonsDiscountGason Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

And the s stands for secure

DonsDiscountGason Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise

I agree with you, and also the company shouldn't be encouraging people to bring their whole self to a mandatory work retreat and then firing people who do.

DonsDiscountGason Elevated errors on Claude Opus 5

I don't know why people keep posting these

DonsDiscountGason AI companies are shredding rare books

It's not copying (and hence not stealing) if you destroy the original book. That is where copyright law has brought us

DonsDiscountGason Em dashes are amazing

I hated em dashes before it was cool. Pretentious and pointless. I use parentheses, semi colons, commas, and shorter sentences.

DonsDiscountGason Claude Opus 5

I think a signature Claude style of writing is good since it makes it that much harder to pass off Claude written text as human.

DonsDiscountGason Where Are All the Solar-Powered Cars?

https://aptera.us/vehicle/

If you have a short commute it might be worthwhile.

DonsDiscountGason Judge approves $1.5B Anthropic settlement for pirated books used to train Claude

Many of the most valuable paintings in the world are out of copyright. It has not diminished their value, because people still value originality even if it's not enforced by the law.

> And worse than them being recognized, they might even get accused of copying their own art if someone else became famous due to a copy.

This happens now all the time, and the winner is determined by who can afford the best lawyers.

DonsDiscountGason Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls

Okay I know this is gonna sound rude but who in the world would want form controls that behave this way?

DonsDiscountGason Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max plans

Neat. I work in life science. Will the classifiers actually allow me to use it?

DonsDiscountGason $65K to work at Anthropic? Debate ensues amid IPO wave

People will just do anything to avoid building more housing

DonsDiscountGason Berkshire's $397B Bet Against an Overheated Market

I rather doubt the folks at Berkshire are sitting on their thumbs or playing golf all day and just forgot to buy anything. It's a measure of discipline, they won't invest in something without a good margin of safety. They'd rather miss out on a lot of good opportunities than pile money into bad (or even mediocre) ones.

DonsDiscountGason Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

Also if they do subsidize it it should be in the form of public goods (libraries, publicly available research). There's some overlap there with loans to individuals but it's weak.

DonsDiscountGason Remote Attestation

> open explainer article

> Uses a lot of acronyms without even saying what they stand for let alone an explanation

> Article entirely unhelpful

Many such cases