Hacker News Reader

cavisneon U.S. already has the critical minerals it needs, according to new analysis

Right, just like how Bernie switched from targeting millionaires to billionaires once he became a billionaire himself.

cavisneon ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner

Doesn’t triton write its own intermediate language that then compiles to PTX?

Definitely not true for these workloads. TPUs are interconnected, one dying makes the whole cluster significantly less useful.

cavisneon We need a new theory of democracy – because this version has failed

There is a difference between supporting the stated aim of a policy (infrastructure, healthcare) and the implementation. Biden’s “infrastructure” bill was just an insane grift to all the Democrat special interests, see Ezra Klein talking about the broadband funding.

This is comparing push polling “are you in favor of a free money tree” with voting.

cavisneon AWS in 2025: Stuff you think you know that's now wrong

http://www.patentbuddy.com/Patent/20140047261

Is tape even cost competitive anymore? The market would be tiny.

cavisneon Good system design

The interviewer is just another engineer trying to understand if you are someone who they can have a design discussion with.

Dismissive answers that assume they are needlessly over complicating things tells them exactly what they need to know

cavisneon LLMs aren't world models

The author would still be wrong in the tool-calling scenario. There is already perfect (or at least superhuman) chess engines. There is no perfect "coding engine". LLM's + tools being able to reliably work on large codebases would be a new thing.

cavisneon Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment

I think their complaint was it was falling back to resistive heating for most of winter (so basically a space heater)

cavisneon Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?

Is this true? I don't agree with the point of view of Seattle politicians but I've never seen even a hint of them acknowledging problems with their approach to anything. If anything the politics seems to be moving further left, after a very brief shift due to the truly disgusting state of the city during COVID.

cavisneon Installing a mini-split AC in a Brooklyn apartment

I have a similar experience with a heat pump saving a lot less money than I expected.

Poor insulation does not explain it, a heat pump should still be heating that poorly insulated space at much higher efficiency that space heaters.

The physics makes sense but I wonder how strictly these units are tested. The control loops for things like deicing the outdoor coils are complex.

cavisneon Nine households control 15% of wealth in Silicon Valley as inequality widens

They have actually become less politically activist with their money. Of the 9 families in previous election cycles

Zuck - wanted to run for President as a Democrat

Laurene Powell - huge left wing donor

Google Founders - huge left wing donors

Eric Schmidt - led digital for Clinton, huge Obama backer

Ellison is the only right wing one of the group, the rest have just stepped back from politics, spending less (except Laurene)

Not to mention those just below the cutoff like Dustin Moskovitz.

cavisneon Claude for Financial Services

A lot of cross pollination between employees. Smart people who like maths and getting paid a lot of money used to go to HFT firms. Now they go to AI labs.

cavisneon OpenICE: Open-Source US Immigration Detention Dashboard

Thats always the claim, but they have stolen SSN's to get those jobs in the first place (those without SSN's aren't paying income tax).

Not to mention states like California which explicitly spend federal money on illegal immigrants through Medicaid.

cavisneon OpenICE: Open-Source US Immigration Detention Dashboard

In every country there is a $ income level where you move from a net drain on the government to a source of tax revenue. The sort of job that looks the other way to employee illegal immigrants would not be the sort of job that pays enough money to be a net benefit in tax revenue.

cavisneon Context Engineering Guide

Vibecoding is an excellent term, its communicates that the output and process is not entirely serious. I think without this term we would have even more PM types announcing that programming is dead and you just need a business person with some prompts copied off linkedin.

I think this gives room for non technical people to vibecode prototypes, knowing that the output will eventually go off the rails without technical understanding.

cavisneon Ask HN: How do free (illegitimate) streaming apps cover running costs?

A lot of these apps are peer to peer so they aren’t paying for storage or bandwidth.

cavisneon I Messed Up My Google PM Vibe Coding Interview

Seems a bit off. Big tech interviews are very structured, the recruiter should tell you exactly what will be assessed. Might be a fake post.

cavisneon OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

Instead they are paying 2.4B to "license" windsurfs IP. Still a loss vs OpenAI but at least the employees will get cash not openai stock.

cavisneon In a First, Solar Was Europe's Biggest Source of Power Last Month

Campaigning for renewables is a literal Russian priority.

https://www.dw.com/en/former-chancellor-schr%C3%B6der-sworn-...

Solar & wind need to be backed by dispatchable power. Nuclear & Coal are not a good fit as they need to run at the same output always. Batteries are good for predictable outages (night time) but not for long periods of cloudy days with no wind. Gas (which in europe comes from Russia) is the only real option.

cavisneon OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

Just like with Character I'm assuming the employees get something. Whatever nonsense "licensing" fee Google is paying to not cause an antitrust investigation should be paid out straight to employees

cavisneon Mercury: Ultra-fast language models based on diffusion

Are there any rules for what can be uploaded to arxiv?

This is a marketing page turned into a PDF, I guess who cares but could someone upload like a facebook marketplace listing screenshotted into a PDF?

cavisneon The Prime Reasons to Avoid Amazon

"Do you think police have too much funding?" No.

"For context, the US federal government spent $53 million on public education in 2022" Hilarious, the federal government probably spent more on photocopiers for the department of education in 2022 than that.

cavisneon China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

Doesn't seem that confusing, they import most of their hydrocarbons so its a domestic security risk if/when they invade Taiwan. The US navy can blockade oil tankers but they arent going to be chasing fishing vessels around the ocean trying to stop fishing.

cavisneon Meta Spends $14B to Hire a Single Guy

Right, Microsoft did this, Google did this for character AI.

I don’t really understand the purpose of all this, Scale is not an ai research lab, it’s basically Fiverr.

Why would bringing people over from there make Meta more compelling to AI researchers?

cavisneon Requiem for a Solar Plant

Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed on that windfall.

Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?

Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project.

EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play

cavisneon Google is using YouTube videos to train its AI video generator

Hilariously there was a story how Google could not train on Youtube data due to their TOS, so they changed it for new videos. Meanwhile everyone else was scraping Youtube as much as they liked and training on it.

cavisneon I Read All of Cloudflare's Claude-Generated Commits

Some API's (Gemini at least) run a search on their outputs to see if the model is reciting data from training.

So for direct copies like what you are talking about that would be picked up.

For copying concepts from other libraries, seems like a problem with or without LLM's.

cavisneon Unfit for Work – The startling rise of disability in America

Nothing compared to the NDIS rort in Australia. There is literal gang warfare over providing "services" to people with high payouts.

cavisneon Doge Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts

Anyone who thinks the VA is well run should watch a few episodes of the “financial audit” YouTube channel. The most financially irresponsible people in the world (and generally bad people in general). Almost all are cashing a “disability” payment from the VA.

cavisneon The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.

These types all go to the same schools and do really well, interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a great career path and take them off the market.

Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.