HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

Hasz

2,241 karma · joined October 4, 2016

https://ethan.id ethan@ethanmyers.rs

My personal views, not that of my employer or any other affiliations.

submissionscomments
Hasz··on Ask HN: Is it just me, or is software buggier across the board?
Holy smokes is the browser versions of PPT, OneNote, word etc buggy, I could not believe that was an actual released product. Random page crashes, refresh loops, etc, all for the crime of using firefox on a mac. The bottom of their test matrix sure, but not exactly netscape on windows XP.
Hasz··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)
Here's an idea for you -- property evaluation. It's not hyper-specific to your monitoring system, but it would be very interesting to understand before buying a house:

1. How loud the neighbhorhood is over time periods, eg sat night vs tues morning 2. air quality, enviromental factors, etc. 3. What percentage of vehicles/people/devices are net-new (over a time period) versus recoccuring, as identified by MAC.

I would personally pay in the low hundreds to understand overall loudness levels for a house I am about to buy, although I am fairly sensitive to sound. My wife would probably pay for the new-new people metrics.

IMO, you could charge a per-device report and deploy a unit for a week, much like a home inspector report. It would give you a revenue stream on the buy or sell side, and let you own your devices as you iterate on the sensor package.

Anyways, just my 2c, gl with your PoC.

Hasz··on Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees
found this showing the grooming process, apparently actually getting the mite is tricky!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpdmDr7da6U

Hasz··on 30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format
> anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity

close enough imo

any apparently 400 voters too.

Hasz··on GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
Agentic loops are being promoted by the same people selling tokens, abstracting away the cost per token, and doing everything in their power to obfuscate costs.

I think a senior dev/architect + some good models is still the goated combination.

Generating code and building features, even before AI, was never the issue. Stability, knowing what to build when, and boring business problems (licensing, distribution, sales, etc) were the limits.

Hasz··on Should DayQuil Be Legal?
> So the only ingredient that’s doing anything in that bottle of DayQuil makes up just 2% of the bottle: the roughly 8 grams of acetaminophen

this argument makes very little sense. Plenty of very potent drugs are in the single digit mg range in a tablet that weights hundreds of mg.

More importantly, as always, it is a problem of incentives. There is no strong, commercial entity focused on removing ineffective drugs from the market, but plenty of commercial pressure to keep them. The FDA has zero incentive to clean house. The magic hand of the market is supposed to be consumers choosing not to buy these drugs because they are ineffective, but for many reasons (choice, placebo effect, basic scientific literacy) this does not happen.

I don't know what the most effective entity is. I cannot personally imagine a commercial structure to support this, but perhaps one could be built.

Hasz··on Great Salt Lake Tracker
Disappointing to see you downvoted on hacker news of all places. Cmon, have some ambition.

A bunch of people here have no idea how bad the water crunch is. The oogala has been overdrawn for decades, and is a major source of agriculture water for much of the west and Midwest.

CO, UT, AZ, CA, NV etc all dramatically overdraw the Colorado river snopack and will have a reckoning soon enough. The west is also prone to mega droughts, making the problem much worse

Building a $100bn pipeline to irrigate the west absolutely should happen. We can pump it with miles of solar power, build enormous desalination plants, dramatically increase agricultural productivity and provide water to fight the heating effects of global warming.

Hasz··on Why I Stopped Arguing with People
bah, bait.

> You Can Only Change Yourself

This is a good reason to argue with people! Forcing yourself to look critically at your own positions via debate is a key self-improvement method. Simply not engaging and never having a back-n-forth is no way to improve. Feedback, critical self-evaluation, and more feedback.

Ofc, that's not encouragement to flame people on the internet or in-person.

Hasz··on Never Give Them Your Face
An unpopular opinion for this site probably, but all the same arguments apply to gun control and civil liberties in general.

In the united states, the first amendment (what this post is primarily concerned about) and the second amendment are equally important rights, and we should be just as judicious about applying restrictions to the second as the first.

Instead, you see attacks on the 2nd in the name of "safety, verification, age assurance. A small step to protect children". The exact same playbook used against civilian gun ownership will be rolled out against the first amendment, the 4th amendment, etc.

Civil rights and protections should be expanding, not contracting, and the primary focus point for the last 30 years (and the playbooks that will be used elsewhere) are being tested on the second amendment.

Hasz··on Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
Mitchell Hashimoto, talk about putting your money where your mouth is. What a cool dude. Much respect!
Hasz··on 10Gb/s Ethernet: switching to a Broadcom SFP+ module
you should be putting in conduit -- either smurf tube, emt, sch40, or similar. can pull whatever, and more importantly, if a cable is damaged by an overly zealous gorilla during installation, it can easily be fixed and replaced.
Hasz··on Launch HN: Intuned (YC S22) – Build and run reliable browser automations as code
In terms of ICP, there is a wonderful underbelly of scraper/drop/deliberate automation evasion resellers for basically every consumer product niche -- think shoes, watches, anything limited-edition, etc. These people mostly are building bots and constantly in a coy cat and mouse game with the sites they buy from to avoid blocks.

Not only could this help them keep up with the new security features and redesigns, but they are more than willing to pay for a product that meaningfully improves overall success rate. You should look on twitter/discord for these kinds of groups, they are "reseller"-type communities.

Hasz··on Cleaning up after AI rockstar developers
I think this is fine? Code used to be very expensive to generate, now it is cheap. Building glue logic between well-defined, well-documented APIs has never been easier or faster. There is a time and place for throwaway code that quickly automates a task. It is fast food to fine dining -- not everything needs to be a Michelin star experience.

However, as always, AI usage is a matter of taste. Including your style rules in the prompt matters. Introduce new paradigms/tools/code into the main codebase because they solve a business problem, not because they are technically interesting. Careful development does not break 7 things to introduce one new feature, etc.

Hasz··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
new session. It's easy to lead a model into getting the response you want, deliberately or accidently.

The point is not to literally win an argument (it doesn't matter), it is to use the model like a partner to poke holes in your own understanding. Once it's poked a hole, it has served its purpose. Plus, you eventually run out of context or the model trails off into babbble.

Hasz··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
Advertising is fine (not great), especially when highly targeted and relevant. Spam, misleading, or predatory advertising is not.
Hasz··on Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes
Counterpoint, I think this is true for some archetypes of people, but certainly not everyone. I personally use it like the socratic method. I am an intermediate user, I spend a ton of time with LLMs at work and personally, both prompting and letting some crappy agents try to automate boring work. I primarily use Gemini and ChatGPT models, along with some Chinese smaller weight models (eg qwen) locally.

If you treat the model like an excellent bluffer, it has never been more fun to challenge a model. To me, there is something deeply intellectually satisfying about "proving" it incorrect, and I like being deeply critical of what the model spits back out. I find that refinement process (with the constant sycophancy turned down in the system prompt) creates a really good loop of critical evaluation that would be hard to get in anywhere else. You can treat it just like the Socratic method, but instead of a benevolent teacher, you get a probabilistic bullshit artist. Lots of fun, highly recommend.

Hasz··on Meta workers can opt out of being tracked at work up to 30 min
save 70% of net and (try to) reject the hedonistic treadmill
Hasz··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Mentioned in the article, but it cracks me up that both openai and anthropic are utilizing fairly traditional enterprise GTM plans segmented by verticals.

So many startups trying to automate sales, but somehow the two biggest frontier labs have decided that the best GTM strategy is firmly human-in-the-loop.

Hasz··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
Cadence and Ansys have entered the chat. A bunch of other highly-specialized engineering software has entered the chat. Licenses are on the order of 10-100k/seat.

For a pretty funny comment about pricing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/chipdesign/comments/1ajrli2/cadence...

Hasz··on Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?
I have UC and will get colonoscopies to confirm it is well-controlled for the foreseeable future. It also increases risk of colorectal cancer, something I am actively thinking about. Rates of UC, IBD, and similar digestive issues are up across the board, also for a mixed and seemingly inscrutable set of reasons.

IMO, the fundamental issue for preventative screening is there is basically no amount of money I would not part with (of my money, the insurer's money, or private debt) to not die. I expect this is true for most people, and it makes preventative screening a tricky topic. In recommending screening for those >x age, you will miss some detectable, preventable and treatable cancer risk for those <x age, purely for cost. No one wants to be explicit about that though!

I think the only way out of that uncomfortable conversation is making screening so cheap via automation that you can basically run it for very low incremental cost as often as individual risk tolerance permits. This would be paid for on the back of earlier interventions vs late-stage, expensive interventions.

Hasz··on A sentimental tour of late 1990s and early 2000s hacking tools
Aw man, what about hashcat or LOIC? Maybe a bit too new for this article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Orbit_Ion_Cannon

Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
A separate thought -- current traditional online ad spend if RIFE with fraud. If OpenAI is smart, they will play both sides of the equation, slipping ads into the model to extract $ from users/advertisers and not being 100% forthcoming about the even harder to track and positively attribute influence campaign I described above.
Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
Agree, there does not have to be a smoking gun. Current and previous attempts are just ham-fisted.

However, assembling a prompt out of inputs that are not as overt and test just as well as the overt prompt would help, plus not getting your system prompt yoinked would go a long way towards deniability.

Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
Lol I am sure OpenAI has a crack GTM team that's already in deep with the 3 letter agencies.

DARPA has probably been going after this since Attention is all you need.

Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
How do you say if an LLM is biased? I don't think there is any way to explain (in a way comprehend-able by humans) how the various weights shake out.

So you test it like a black box, but IMO that suffers from the same pollution any of the other tests (coding ability, math ability, w/e) that currently suffer from, except it's even harder to evaluate objectively.

Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
> huge numbers of users will switch to a competitor

I don't think so. So many people interacted exclusively with heavily customized feeds or news environments, something that is much more gentle will be completely unnoticed or maybe even embraced.

> most people aren't really using LLMs for the subject areas that concern government propaganda

See all the people unironically using "@grok is this true?" It doesn't have to just be government propaganda (eg did Nixon break into Watergate?), it is more about shaping the boundaries of a conversation, framing, etc.

> You seem to be envisioning some kind of a world where people don't access the news or social media directly, but it is somehow passed through some kind of LLM transformation filter.

I envision a world where most people take the path of least resistance. They will not explicitly sign up for it, but will gradually shift to reading the easily digested stuff first. Look how popular tiktok is, the popularity of summarized info, etc. In that summarization and aggregation, there is plenty of room to steer a conversation or influence thought, especially over a large audience.

There is nothing here that will be an overt smoking gun, just a systematic bias towards a particular idea, thought, etc. Hard to prove and even harder to know it's happening.

Hasz··on How ChatGPT serves ads
Ads is v1 of how-do-I-make-money. I wrote about this a while ago privately, but IMO LLMs are about to be on par with the printed word for distributing low-cost, high-impact propaganda.

It has never been cheaper or easier to influence millions of people, either deniably-subtly (though omission, selective results, "hallucinations" etc) or via sock puppetting.

If I am a government, there is nothing more valuable to me than being able to control the discussion, the overton window, and the prevailing narratives. LLMs are a very low cost way to do that, can be tailored at the individual level (unlike most current TV news, personal "feeds" etc) and have the benefit of a huge volume of context.

The models are effectively black-box weights and are resistant to bias-tests. IMO, a key development will be having an "overlay" of weights to apply on top of a "clean" world model that is tailored to whatever interests can pay for it. Being able to serve that overlay dynamically, or atleast per-user is the killer app.

Hasz··on I am building a cloud
You know your app better than me, but here are some practical reasons for the typical B2C app:

split deployments -- perhaps you want to see how an update impacts something: if error rates change, if conversion rates change, w/e. K8s makes this pretty easy to do via something like a canary or blue green deployment. Likewise, if you need to rollback, you can do this easily as well from a known good image.

Perhaps you need multiple servers -- not for scale -- but to be closer to your users geographically. 1 server in each of -5-10 AZs makes the updates a bit more complicated, especially if you need to do something like a db schema update.

Perhaps your traffic is lumpy and peaks during specific times of the year. Instead of provisioning a bigger VM during these times, your would prefer to scale horizontally automatically. Likewise, depending on the predictable-ness of the distribution of traffic, running a larger machine all the time might be very expensive for only the occasional burst of traffic.

To be very clear, you can do all of this without k8s. The question is, is it easier to do it with or without? IMO, it is a personal decision, and k8s makes a lot of sense to me. If it doesn't make a ton of sense for your app, don't use it.

Hasz··on I am building a cloud
Took a while to find this. K8s is great, IMO most of the people with alternative setups are just rebuilding (usually worse) or compressing (specific to their use case) k8s features that have been GA for a long time.

Spend some time learning it, using it to deploy simple apps, and you won't go back to deploying in a VM again imo.

This only gets better with ai-assisted development, any model is going to produce much better results for k8s given the huge training set vs someone's bespoke build rube-goldberg machine.

Hasz··on Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price
I think this is a reaction to the incredibly locked down ecosystem that most of these mfgs are pushing.

However, the tech exists for a reason and is not inherently bad, the issue is the lock-in, the lack of choice and interoperability.

IMO, there is plenty of space for an OEM who can play nice with others, offer an open (and vibrant ecosystem), and keep users coming back by choice, not by lock-in.

← PreviousPage 3 of 17Next →