Hacker News Reader

aleccoon The White House Is Using the Wrong Oil Price for the Iran War

US President Donald Trump has seemingly turned the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil into a referendum on his war against Iran. Thumbs up if WTI stays below $100 a barrel. Thumbs down if it rises above. Even if he succeeds in keeping that particular gauge below the triple digits, it would be a pyrrhic victory.

What matters for the American economy isn’t the price of WTI, but the cost of refined petroleum products — and they’re rising rapidly. While the price of Texas crude is up 60% since January, the cost of key everyday fuels has risen by between 85% and 120%

aleccoon Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents

Sure, but it's not that easy. The swaths of new people need infrastructure and support: schools, hospitals, police, fire stations, roads, water, sewage, flood prevention, etc. That's a lot of money upfront. This is why most cities in the EU block many projects like these.

Also those people will saturate downtown making it lose its culture.

I'm always amazed at the American way of "just throw money at the problem".

aleccoon Hundreds of Millions of iPhones Can Be Hacked With a New Tool Found in the Wild

This should be the post, not Wired's blogspam.

aleccoon Aliens.gov ~ domain registered 17MAR2026

I think it's just normal taxes.

aleccoon Iran conflict turns shipping market into 'Wild West'

https://archive.ph/pzsme

The conflict in the Middle East has turned the container shipping sector into a “wild west”, with carriers adding thousands of dollars in extra charges and dumping containers at far-flung ports, according to shipping groups and removal companies.

aleccoon Microsoft is threatening to sue OpenAI over its $50B Amazon deal

Dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47423094

aleccoon A tale about fixing eBPF spinlock issues in the Linux kernel

Good writeup.

It is very confusing how Linux source code has macros with names that make them look like functions. At first view it looks like "flags" is passed uninitialized, but it's a temporary save variable used by a macro. Sigh.

aleccoon Nvidia Launches Vera CPU, Purpose-Built for Agentic AI

Even Apple hardware looks inexpensive compared to Nvidia's huge premium. And never mind the order backlog.

x86 and Apple already sell CPUs with integrated memory and high bandwidth interconnects. And I bet eventually Intel's beancounter board will wake up and allow engineering to make one, too.

But competition is good for the market.

aleccoon Nasdaq's Shame

I don't see him even bothering to link to the original research (AFAIK Reuters and expanded by this thread's substack post who links to Reuters). His video description is all about self-promotion. And from the bits I've seen he posts it like he made the finding. That's not neighborly.

I mean, it seems he is a decent content producer and presenter, but if we incentivize ripping off original research things will go bad.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/elon-musks-spacex-w...

aleccoon The Biggest Oil Risk Is at the Bottom of the Barrel

https://archive.ph/Frr5T

- Fuel oil is now an ultra-expensive commodity due to the Iran war, which is bad news for the global economy.

- The shipping industry is sounding the alarm as some key ports may run dry, forcing ships to halt, with fuel-oil supply very low in locations such as Singapore and Fujairah.

- The traditional relationship between crude and fuel oil is broken, with fuel oil prices significantly higher than expected, trading at $140 a barrel in Singapore and nearly $160 in Fujairah.

aleccoon Harold and George Destroy the World

I call BS. From my extensive anecdata:

No amount of education, experience, and grit can turn a 100 IQ person into Einstein. IQ is a massive multiplier.

aleccoon Harold and George Destroy the World

I think you are reflecting on survivor bias for successful people.

Almost all rich families I met saw entrepreneurship as lower-status. They chase arts and such. They are posturing they don't need to care about money. [of course it's a lie, but they do it anyway]

Only a fraction of the new rich get their kids into entrepreneurship while the rest are just spoiled. I heard many times "I want my kids to have all the things I din't have growing up" and then the kids turn into horrible entitled brats who hate their parents. Then the inevitable "How could they do this to me! I gave them everything!". It's not easy raising kids, even with enough money.

aleccoon Harold and George Destroy the World

Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data.

Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).

aleccoon Harold and George Destroy the World

The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects.

I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.

aleccoon 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

I didn't complain about length per se. I pointed out Google's contradiction. As my previous comment clarified. Jesus.

aleccoon 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

I didn't say that.

aleccoon 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

Actually, it's not just the domain:

https://youtu.be/X

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

aleccoon 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

My point is Google engineers go to the trouble of setting up a URL shortener service on one hand, but on the other hand it seems ad the business anti-privacy executives can override anything. This points out it's a dysfunctional company.

aleccoon 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

Offtopic: I find it remarkable the shortened YT url has a tracking cost of 57% extra length. We live in stupid times.

aleccoon FT: US intervention in oil futures would be 'Biblical disaster', CME warns

https://archive.ph/gYBq6

aleccoon Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act

You are missing the point. The real purpose is to control the Internet and free speech. They've been trying this for ages. Now the excuse is protecting children. Soon terrorism will be back. And don't forget aոtisеmіtism, too.

Not exactly a good moment for this particular caste of politicians/elites to pretend they care about children's well-being!

aleccoon [dead]

Related podcast episode https://corecursive.com/red-queen-coding/

aleccoon US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says

And who buys those troubled assets at deep discount? Where do they get the cash to pay for them?

aleccoon US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says

The problem is all these over-leveraged sectors will drag everybody else. And guess who will be bailed out? Heads they win, tails everybody but them loses.

aleccoon Oil hits $100 a barrel despite deal to release record amount of reserves

And they are all garbage.

aleccoon President Trump's Head-Spinning Pivot on an Emergency Oil Release

https://archive.ph/FP5JU

> President Trump’s Head-Spinning Pivot on an Emergency Oil Release

> In a matter of hours, the White House changed its position and pushed allies to move forward with a massive oil market intervention

> Still, skepticism abounds about whether the 400 million barrel release will be enough to keep prices below $100 a barrel. The size of the release accounts for only about 20 days of shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, officials say.

https://x.com/bopanc/status/2032022506740015162 (author)

> The unprecedented oil release is mostly due to concerns within the Trump administration that the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow Persian Gulf waterway that supplies a fifth of the world’s oil, could be closed for weeks or longer, according to U.S. officials.

aleccoon I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Holy rabbit hole.

SBF was in Patel's previous podcast in July 2022 and FTX unraveled in November 2022. Hmm.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sbf

> I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.

And that was right in the middle of FTX being accused by many prominent people .

April 29, 2022 https://x.com/AlderLaneEggs/status/1520023221294145536

June 20, 2022 https://x.com/MartyBent/status/1538645746655936519

aleccoon I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

Would you like to know MORE?

aleccoon I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now

I might be old, but he strikes me as a shallow valley Bro. His CV has nothing of significance. But he had a lot of Big Tech guests and even that Navy intelligence woman. He got a boost by being endorsed by Bezos. It smells of BS to me. Again, maybe I'm just a grumpy greybeard and this is a Gen Z thing.