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consumer451on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years

Sorry for misspeaking. What I should have said is that "If you want anything approaching a balanced budget in modern times..."

The facts are that surpluses were routine before the 1960s, under both parties. Since then, not so much.

1998 was the first year the United States government recorded a budget surplus since 1969 [0] (Clinton with a GOP Congress).

Since 1981, the deficit deepened under Republican administrations and shrank under Democratic ones [1]

That aligned with the creation of a right-specific media system where "Republicans don't fight Republicans" - so there can never be any internal accountability.

[0] https://clintonwhitehouse3.archives.gov/WH/New/html/19981028...

[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-us-deficit-gr...

consumer451on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years

Sorry, I was not aiming that directly at you, more like an old man yelling at clouds. I kinda give up on all of this. Nobody wants to hear or debate actual policies in the public. Politics is now just an exercise in campism. Nobody plays that game better than the current party.

consumer451on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years

There is an easy solution to make Social Security solvent. Uncap the contribution. Problem solved.

consumer451on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years

Stocks keep marching higher, to stable yet irrational levels, because the .1% need to put their money somewhere. That level of wealth grows so quickly that it's impossible to know what to do with it. A literal embarrassment of riches.

Don't get me wrong, I want to be in that category, but still.. this is our reality. It's an interesting experiment we are running. Without external factors like global wars and climate catastrophe, could the market even crash in our current environment?

consumer451on 10-year Treasury yield climbs above 5.3% to a level not seen in 24 years

I am getting way too old for this. No more "both sides." Look at the data. If you want a balanced budget, there is one party to avoid.

consumer451on Ask HN: If a few labs keep the frontier models internal, is that the end of YC?

Well, if a handful of labs keep the frontier internal-only, they will naturally eat all knowledge work. Nearly everything YC invests in is based on knowledge work.

consumer451on The Ethernet spec was first drafted on this day in 1980

Any other old heads in here with Token Ring experience?

I only had to spend one year dealing with it, then the next one running Ethernet everywhere and getting acoustic tile dandruff.

Ethernet was such a great change. Three cheers for open standards, standards bodies, and the people in those groups. Truly the unsung heroes of progress.

It's interesting that IEEE 802.3 was adopted in 1983, and only started to become widely deployed a decade later.

consumer451on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

Please note that we are also spending money on getting F-14s flight worthy again, for no other reason than movie-brain and nostalgia.

It's literally called "The Maverick Act."

consumer451on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?

u/bcherny does sound a bit like Bob Ross now that you mention it.

consumer451on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart

A-12 (Oxcart) pilots say that the SR-71 was the station wagon version :)

consumer451on Livenerf: Has Opus 5.5 been nerfed yet?

I asked a historian:

Two postmortems, neither quite "admitted to nerfing":

Sept 2025, infra bugs: "A small percentage of Claude Sonnet 4 requests experienced degraded output quality" [0], alongside "We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load." [1]

April 2026, Claude Code: default reasoning effort was lowered from high to medium, plus a caching bug and a verbosity prompt. Per Anthropic, "The models themselves didn't regress, and the Claude API was not affected." [2]

So users were right that quality dropped, but the confirmed causes were bugs and a product default, not deliberate model degradation.

[0] https://status.claude.com/incidents/72f99lh1cj2c

[1] https://anthropic.com/engineering/a-postmortem-of-three-rece...

[2] https://texxr.com/handle/claudedevs

source: https://claude.ai/share/4435bbcf-d6df-44a0-b1db-f08a11858bc2

consumer451on America.gov

Politics aside, this is a very interesting point.

Contrarian opinion: We are not "intelligence constrained" as a society/economy.

Intelligence gives you factually correct answers. Factually correct answers are not the desired outcome much of the time. I don't just mean in politics, where the scientists and central intelligence agency are often ignored, but in the private sector: look at McKinsey, etc. Most often the desired outcome is what the stakeholders wanted to hear.

I cannot overstate how big a realization this was for me.

Part of the reason that we are not ready for AI, is that we don't want to hear about inconvenient facts.

consumer451on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

If I was not evolved to not do so, probably would do exactly that.

consumer451on Claude Opus 5.5

Thinking about this more, I realized that I really don't understand how the modern pipelines work at all.

consumer451on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

<rant>

So you (and most everyone else apparently) are upset with one lab that stood up against domestic surveillance, and automated kill chains, even though they knew that would be bad for business?

I suppose if you don't take a stand for safety at all, then you don't take the risk of being called a hypocrite.

</rant>

consumer451on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

This is not a surprise, is it? Frontier labs will keep very useful models with high risk, aka unrestricted models, for internal use only. That's the only way to reduce risk and liability.

Yes, this sucks for anyone who is not working at the labs.

consumer451on Elevated errors for multiple models – Resolved

Thanks for being the only person to raise this point.

We are cooked, aren't we.

consumer451on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

Linus Torvalds:

~"Predicting the next token is not an insult. It's pretty much what we all do."

consumer451on DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why

Josh Johnson has a great bit about Mamdani:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SCKj7gwbYrc

consumer451on Claude Opus 5.5

I figured that the reason it was an interesting test is that "make a 3d animation" on one particular HN comment would have been surprising to spend compute and RL on.

consumer451on Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats

> I’m confused why AI companies are using agents in-house for this type of research instead of partnering externally.

As an outsider, here is how I explain that behavior:

1. Truly risky models are very useful.

2. Truly risky models should not be released, according to AI safety standards. I think Antrhopic genuinely believes in AI safety. (see: standing up against automated kill chains, no matter the impacts to the company)

3. Truly risky models face regulatory pressures, if released to the public.

This all leads to "let's just do this in-house." I believe that might end up being the answer to every application of AI eventually. It seems unavoidable, and very depressing.

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

I just reviewed this thread, and thanks for an opening to say something I had realized I missed.

> I hate to sound pretentious, but I wonder if it’s a difference in complexity of work and problems being solved.

It is about complexity, at least for me. I am working on b2b SaaS.

There are times where even using LLM assistance, I spend weeks or months working on a tough problem.

However, the <show product get feedback> loop is now nearly entire automated, when it does not involve some actually complex problem, which are most of the meetings.

consumer451on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

This feels like a lifetime ago, but IIRC evidence of on-going exfil was apparently presented to users who were no longer working.

consumer451on Claude Opus 5.5

In a previous thread on Mythos 5.1, simonw posted an animated version of his pelican. [0]

Using claude.ai and Opus, I asked "create a 3d animation from this" and pasted the animation SIML.[1] I just did that test again. There is significant improvement.

Opus 5.5 (high): https://claude.ai/artifact/5EgqfWcyVtLwJDQq6fsPUm

Opus 5 (high): https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/b37a9ee2-f5bc-4ff9-ae90-a...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526704

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532609

Disclaimer: the skills and system prompt on claude.ai could have also improved, this is not a raw API call.

consumer451on 'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees

Was that the one where due to political grand-standing, we had a government shutdown that led to furloughing the contractors who worked on security, so no one was watching the dashboard? Or was that a different one?

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

> A Product Marketing Manager (PMM) in tech is a strategic bridge between the product, sales, and marketing teams who defines who a product is for and why it matters.

A PMM with a tech background must be worth their weight in unobtainium at this point.

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

> I believe the same will happen with software. Sales, product design, customer service and operational aspects like uptime will matter more than the software itself. Ironically, this is the kind of stuff the HN type highly dislikes.

Agreed. It's not even a new thing. They tried to teach me/us long ago, starting by putting it into words we might more easily understand, such as "Customer Development" lol.

When I realized that it was the sales guys that will have the power in the mid-term new world, I got genuinely upset. However, maybe they always had the power and I just didn't want to accept reality.

Now, I believe the most desired hire in the near future will be the PMM.

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

Well, my life is currently both, as I am on the smallest possible tech and product team. To me, extrapolating on having done this since Sonnet 3.5 to now, there will be no tech aspect to the job soon enough. There are many hundreds of billions invested in making that a reality, and they are succeeding.

Until ~9 months ago, I spent most of my time being a "prompt engineer." Today I join a meeting, ten minutes later I receive the transcript. Then, I run a custom skill in my project, and I get Jira epics and stories to triage that are nearly perfect. Then, I run the second skill orchestration skill... some babysitting... and ~85% of the time that is all I need to do. Docs, code, unit and e2e, great UX... all there after every meeting, and basically two commands on my part.

I see two to three to maybe five years before anything I have to offer, in any capacity, is completely cut out of the picture.

I honestly don't understand how everyone is not on this same page. The labs are going to eat it all. The only reason I see for them to talk about "pausing," is because they finally realized that they are going to collapse the entire service economy around themselves at this rate: aka, the USA.

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

Yeah, at Corp, that makes sense. I was thinking more along the lines of scrappy startup silliness. "I am one person and I deal with any and all code to get my product built."

From that POV, has it ever been better, assuming you can rise to the top of an ever more crowded market?

consumer451on AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

I want to add to this, because it's certainly not all doom and gloom for me, yet.

If you are product-driven, life is pretty good, and maybe has never been better? (For the moment)