Hacker News Reader

atherton33on Asian AI startups launch Mythos-like models

"Mythos-like" just means "hyped via hearsay". It's being used correctly here.

atherton33on A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

Yes, the strategy depends on lack of effort from other senders, even trivial effort

atherton33on A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

The latter. Using chatgpt to write their chat messages usually. Emoji, arbitrary bold and italics, bullets, etc.

atherton33on A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw

Tangent to the tangent!

I've started using it professionally because it signals "I wrote this by hand, not AI, so you can safely pay attention to it."

Even though in the past I never would have done it.

In work chats full of AI generated slop, it stands out.

atherton33on Mobile carriers can get your GPS location

E911 would get bssid of the access point.

atherton33on Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Tutorial (2024)

I agree with you about what's described here.

There is engineering when this is done seriously, though.

Build a test set and design metrics for it. Do rigorous measurement on any change of the system, including the model, inference parameters, context, prompt text, etc. Use real statistical tests and adjust for multiple comparisons as appropriate. Have monitoring that your assumptions during initial prompt design continue to be valid in the future, and alert on unexpected changes.

I'm surprised to see none of that advice in the article.

atherton33on Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD

My first job we had office rooms shared by 2-4 that were usually pretty quiet with a generally closed door policy.

The VP Eng would always say "I always try to remember it costs the company over a hundred dollars for me open one of these doors."

I learned so much from that boss.

atherton33on What happens when housing prices go down?

Cambridge MA just had a major shift on zoning towards "build more" in Q1. It will be an interesting natural experiment to watch.

https://www.boston.com/news/politics/2025/02/11/cambridge-el...

atherton33on We investigated Amsterdam's attempt to build a 'fair' fraud detection model

I think they're saying something more subtle.

In your basketball analogy, it's more like they have a model that predicts basketball performance, and they're saying that model should predict performance equally well across groups, not that the groups should themselves perform equally well.

atherton33on Forum with 2.6M posts being deleted due to UK Online Safety Act

I don't know the detail here, but in many of the discussions I've seen the operators themselves are based in the UK, and that changes the calculus.

atherton33on Bird flu kills more than half the big cats at a Washington sanctuary

From AP, RFK said:

> "COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese,” he added. “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted at that or not but there are papers out there that show the racial or ethnic differential of impact for that."

The article notes he claims that this quote "twisted" his words.

https://apnews.com/article/robert-f-kennedy-jr-covid-comment...

atherton33on Amazon ordered a return to the office – but research says they'll backtrack

> This move absolutely will drive out some of their best talent

IMHO, from my personal insider experience, this is actually the goal in some places.

Best talent is often not the most cost effective talent, especially in parts of the business where the company has switched from innovating to maintaining.

atherton33on Benchmarks show even an old Nvidia RTX 3090 is enough to serve LLMs to thousands

From the article, it's not 12 total, but 12 per user for 100 concurrent generations.

atherton33on The workers have spoken: They're staying home

> Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.

But act fast, the next available slot is in two weeks, assuming an exec doesn't claim the room for that full day that morning.

atherton33on Spending 3 months investigating a 7-year old bug and fixing it in 1 line of code

Thank you for your service

atherton33on Spending 3 months investigating a 7-year old bug and fixing it in 1 line of code

This totally happened on my first team.

We had a guy who would argue about everything that knew the CTO so we had to tolerate him.

Then we hired a second one and they just argued with each other all the time and the rest of the team could finally make progress.

It was awesome.

atherton33on The shape of information

I think you need to take into account how long the wine lasts after you uncork it and how long it takes you to drink the bottle. If you're drinking all 100 bottles in one night this works, but if you drink a bottle a week you're going to spoil all of it using this strategy.

atherton33on Proposed ballot measure to raise corporate taxes, give every Oregonian $750/year

I think you mean spending more than 25000 (on things subject to sales tax), not earning 25000.

atherton33on Ask HN: How to handle a senior hire turning out to be junior?

Do also consider that if this was your mistake (which you say), and they quit their previous job or declined other offers because of your erroneous offer, then you might have done them harm by your error, at least ethically if not legally. Be sure to talk to your lawyer, and consider what obligations you have to them in parting ways, both legally and ethically.

atherton33on Ask HN: Is Stripe the new PayPal, cancelling user accounts without explanation?

Practically/realistically, there's also some content in the podcast that's going to make payment processors nervous. Even if made with best intentions, legal departments will worry eventually someone is going to end up sued or worse, and the company will be named. Even algorithmic filters are likely to class this as fringe/conspiracy. So regardless of what rule they're pointing at to cut the account, they may really just want to cut the risk regardless.

https://www.barnhardt.biz/category/barnhardt-podcast/

For context, some random excerpts from barely a skim that jump out and are going to raise eyebrows:

203: "we attack the topic of In Vitro Fertilization and break down how this grotesque process" 195: "part of what made the fires in Hawaii worse than they needed to be: the deeply-seated paganism of the natives who worship the volcanoes" 191: "it’s possible that “they/them” pronouns are favored among trans because of the demonic they/them legion possessing such poor souls" 187: suggests extracting and storing your own blood and taking methylene blue?

I don't have all the context, and generally I do support the author's right to expression, so I'm trying to be objective and kind here. But candidly, I'd have difficult to overcome personal reservations about partnering in business with (and in Stripe's case, since they take fees: profiting from) the content here.

I don't mean to offend anyone, just seems like an elephant in the room worth noting.

atherton33on FTX bankruptcy examiner's report [pdf]

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.

atherton33on OpenAI pulls Johansson soundalike Sky’s voice from ChatGPT

> I didn't think her voice was part of her celebrity status

She did the voice for Her, a movie about an AI voice. If you check IMDB she's literally credited as "(voice)". Specifically in the realm of AI, her voice is her entire celebrity status.

atherton33on LoRA Learns Less and Forgets Less

I think you mean LoRa®, a registered trademark of Semtech® Corporation, for use only with permission and within specific guidelines. https://www.semtech.com/uploads/company/FAQ-for-Use-of-LoRa-...

atherton33on They thought they were joining an accelerator – instead they lost their startups

Of note from the article: she complained and was refunded the money after being stood up for the meeting, but they never cancelled the contract she paid to sign that gave them the right to buy her out of her own company for pennies, so once it passed to bankruptcy the creditors still took her company.

atherton33on They thought they were joining an accelerator – instead they lost their startups

Yup. The bankruptcy just transferred the right to exploit it from the mildly incompetent to expertly ruthless.

atherton33on They thought they were joining an accelerator – instead they lost their startups

"Startups also granted Newchip the right to buy $250,000 worth of shares in the company at a later date, but at their current valuation"

atherton33on Dune 3D 1.1.0 Released

"Snake 3d" would be more analogous here. Sure snake means something outside of computing, but it's also a famous piece of computing history (like Dune II) for which "3d" also makes sense as a suffix.

atherton33on Don't waste your time recycling plastic

https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/newyorkcity/latest/NYC...

It's... not concise.

atherton33on Don't waste your time recycling plastic

Title 16, chapter 1, section 8 outlines materials that are required to be recycled and that they must be separated.

atherton33on Bitcoin Block 840000

Does that mean Bitcoin has just doubled its energy waste?