Hacker News Reader

hsb3on Buffett drops Gates Foundation from his annual donations

Both of them are forgettable sophists.

hsb3on Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

You guys have to look up where the concept of Dignity came from.

hsb3on Meta used AI to target workers with medical conditions for layoffs

Meta and the type of people who work at Meta deserve each other.

hsb3on Indian scientists produce most detailed 3D atlas of the human brainstem

Doesnt matter how selective they are if the Budget of 1 MIT is $5 Billion while the budget of all 23 IIT is less than $1 Billion. There is a reason why so many Indian scientists move out of India.

hsb3on Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity

Grid power is already cheap. Making things free actually makes people use more power. Its called the rebound effect.

hsb3on OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says

They have to build out all the backend ad tech crap that google and fb have built over decades. As in the campaign tools, scheduling, targeting, analytics, auctions, exchanges etc. Advertisers and publishers have already deeply integtated into that eco system. Also the google and fb system has created a content generating army that is incentivized to fight tooth and nail for eyeballs. OpenAI doesnt reduce the activities of the eyeball capture army, it just freaks them out and pushes them into overdrive.

hsb3on Billionaire exodus? California drew 10x more venture capital than any state

Money is easy to move. Ecosystems are another matter entirely.

hsb3on Ask HN: What was the initial reaction to search engines?

I used to work in a CS research lab as an RA while doing my MS. There were mailing lists and chat rooms back then to ask people for help. But if I ran into issues that no one had any clue about, it meant heading to the library and searching for books. I remember spending 3 months at the library on a particular linux kernal module issue, that turned out to be about 5 lines of code. I had to spend a whole lot of time figuring out where to make the change. But that change was effecting all kinds of other modules. Crashes would happen for random reasons. So I tell my prof its probably going to take another 3-6 months before I map out all the issues its creating.

And then Google afrives. So I do a query with the main line of my code change, to see if anyone is talking about it and I find one guy in Israel working on the same thing. Crying about the same issue on his blog and how he had fixed it. Thanks to which my work was over in 3 days. My prof would have funded me for that 6 months if thats how long it took. So it was a big aha moment for everyone.

hsb3on Mechanistic interpretability researchers applying causality theory to LLMs

You dont have to understand chemistry to be a good cook tho.