Hacker News Reader

cavisneon Germany’s RobCo hits $1B valuation

The manufacturing is more important than the automation, that’s how Midea was able to buy KUKA.

Being in the loop of using the tools gives you the power.

Best to have both, but if we can keep the toolmaking in Europe and Japan instead of China and move manufacturing back in to the US we are in a much better position.

cavisneon Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

Oh 100%, you can see specific buildings (mostly marked as schools) that are still standing.

cavisneon Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

https://cloud.google.com/storage/pricing-announce

cavisneon Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

The challenge is not the functionality, it’s doing it cheaply at scale. Google Cloud storage has raised prices a few times, and added various quotas and limits when they realized they couldn’t sustain the service as is.

cavisneon Build Wide, Ship Narrow

It reads as heavily written by AI

cavisneon Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

You can switch models mid conversation so it makes sense that it is allowed. Otherwise you would lose all the reasoning traces.

cavisneon Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake

How do you think googles stocks are set up?

cavisneon Australian energy retailers must offer three hours of free daytime electricity

Australia has a fake residential electricity market, until this year they had to directly offset electricity bills.

This year is the only year that prices have gone down.

cavisneon CarPlay Is Additive

For me it’s about the waste. Engineers have taken the time to build a screen into the car with a good viewing angle, that works well with glare, doesn’t obstruct the drivers view.

Then the software side just makes the whole thing useless with a terrible UX that will never be updated.

CarPlay is a great solution because the non safety critical stuff (music, navigation) gets offloaded to a competent software company.

cavisneon The curious case of low-protein diets

When you include the thermic effect of food protein is closer to 3 calories per gram. Ie it burns about a calorie to digest a gram of protein

cavisneon Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

Probably the best source https://jax-ml.github.io/scaling-book/

cavisneon Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX

Definitely not going to be leasing it at a loss. GPU's are sold out, Anthropic will be paying a significant premium.

cavisneon Agent Skills

The problem with all these skill frameworks is when you are deep enough into AI coding to write one - your brain just cannot handle actually putting effort into it. These are all written by AI, and the authors skim read them.

It’s better to do the maybe 2 hours of human effort the authors put into them yourself for your own workflow.

cavisneon Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

Does not seem that complicated. OpenAI basically had to do a lock-in deal with Microsoft/Azure at the time, and they pioneered this circular funding hyperscaler deal structure so there were some rough edges.

Anthropic (all ex Open AI) knew the negatives of the deal, so they made a slightly better deal with AWS, not a full lock in. They also grounded it in hardware from the start, ie. being the flagship customer for Trainium, the flagship customer for external usage of TPU's.

cavisneon OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle

This feels a bit overdone. OpenAI has had problems with every compute partner they've ever had. It's just not a solvable problem, who would they go to to allegedly get next-gen chips quicker?

cavisneon OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle

Definitely not true. Meta is building tents for GPU's

cavisneon Overdose deaths are falling in America because of a 'supply shock': study

Channel 5 did a good piece on "Tranq" which lets China skip the Mexican part of the supply chain as they can mail the finish product straight to the US.

Since the article suggests there must have been a change in china to cause this it seems likely they just moved from fentanyl to tranq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=925wmb-4Yr4&t=1623s&pp=ygUPY...

cavisneon Nvidia to buy assets from Groq for $20B cash

I would assume this is a very well paid position, and with basically nothing to do.

cavisneon At least $9B billed across 14 Medicaid services in Minnesota may be fraudulent

The state government already failed with Feeding our Future and nothing has changed. The judge who "suggested" the payment of 250m is still serving his term, Jacob Frey (who's aide was indicted as part of it) is still in office, despite a literal vote rigging attempt to primary him.

This should be handled at the federal level, even just to reduce the chances of another jury bribe attempt!

cavisneon At least $9B billed across 14 Medicaid services in Minnesota may be fraudulent

There is plenty of fraud to go around but most of it is sophisticated and distributed (ie. lots of individual fraudulent PPP loans from somewhat real businesses exaggerating their expenses). The difference in MN is the fraud is jaw-droppingly stupid. Just read the Feeding our Future wikipedia page [1].

The fraudsters knew they were under suspicion, still got money from the state ,sued the state to force them to pay more - claiming racism, won, a judge forced the state to pay them 250m, blatantly spent the money on sports cars (again - knowing they were being investigated), got caught, tried to pay off the jury, the person who tried to pay of the jury stole the bribe money.

The investigation was wrapped up some time ago, but it did not get a lot of attention for obvious political reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeding_Our_Future

cavisneon At least $9B billed across 14 Medicaid services in Minnesota may be fraudulent

It’s not 50% of all Medicaid spending. Minnesota spends about 18B a year (federal + state) on Medicaid). This is an alleged 9b of fraud over 7 years in specific services, so about a billion a year. An organization Minnesota knew was likely fraudulent at the time was still able to steal 250m in a year during COVID so a billion a year doesn’t seem too far fetched.

cavisneon A quarter of US-trained scientists eventually leave

“40% move to China”

This is the plan not a coincidence. China pays huge “grants” to their citizens to come to the US, get educated, work in big tech/science, then bring it all home.

cavisneon Gemini CLI tips and tricks for agentic coding

I think this guide is mostly AI slop. The Google docs section is full of "they might have support for this" "you could do this", "maybe they will add this MCP". How is that a guide?

cavisneon LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

Down from a massive peak in 2020/2021 when cities tried the "lets not enforce crime" approach. Still elevated from pre 2020 levels.

cavisneon Gemini 3

After ChatGPT accidentally indexed everyones shared chats (and had a cache collision in their chat history early on) and Meta build a UI flow that filled a public feed full of super private chats... seems like a good move to use a battle tested permission system.

cavisneon Study identifies weaknesses in how AI systems are evaluated

https://wuu73.org/blog/aiguide1.html

You can get a lot of free usage out of the models.

cavisneon The traffickers are winning the war on drugs

Heavily cut with cheaper substances, with no alternatives

cavisneon $912 energy independence without red tape

Balcony solar kits are popular in Germany which are a more legit version of this.

The main thing I would be nervous about is the panels are claimed to be "rated for 120km/h winds". Presumably thats if they are bolted down? Just laying them down loose on the roof seems like a bad idea.

cavisneon YouTube says it'll bring back creators banned for Covid and election content

They should bring back the content too. When history books are written the current state of things is misleading.

cavisneon OpenAI and Nvidia announce partnership to deploy 10GW of Nvidia systems

Utilities always need to justify rate increases with the regulator.

The bulk of cost increases come from the transition to renewable energy. You can check your local utility and see.

It’s very easy to make a huge customer like a data center directly pay the cost needed to serve them from the grid.

Generation of electricity is more complicated, the data centers pulling cheap power from Colombia river hydro are starting to compete with residential users.

Generation is a tiny fraction of electricity charges though.