Hacker News Reader

jocaalon xAI has acquired X, xAI now valued at $80B

> Trump arrests the electors?

These types of speculative remarks insinuating trump is a dictatorial nazi is very lazy. If you disagree with his policies, debate the policies.

jocaalon It's the world's hottest car company. You can't buy one in America

The thing is, battery manufacturing and general automotive manufacturing skills are orthogonal to each other. There is very little skill overlap. I guess they have been doing it longer than tesla, tesla even outsourced the general automotive parts to lotus initially, but tesla isn't known for quality either

jocaalon It's the world's hottest car company. You can't buy one in America

BYD is not a very experienced company. According to [0], they produced 455,073 vehicles in 2019 and 4,304,073 in 2024. This growth rate is quite unheard of in the automotive industry and I would expect serious quality compromises to achieve that.

[0] https://tridenstechnology.com/byd-sales-statistics/

jocaalon Tesla backer says Musk must reduce Trump work, as 46,000 Cybertrucks recalled

I just want to add. Many people believe that Musk's involvement in politics what is hurting the share price, but the reality is that the company itself is in a tough spot. Tesla has long struggled with build quality issues and competition from chinese automakers is growing at an astonishing rate. On top of that, Tesla's stock has been trading at extremely high PE ratios for some time, signalling investors expect unrealistically high growth. Serious effort will be needed to get the company back on track, regardless of who is CEO.

jocaalon Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

They are super profitable because of the naivety of their customers and for that you can't blame the companies themselves.

jocaalon Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

I didn't say the products are trash because of who is at the helm of the companies. They are just bad compared to alternatives. Period.

jocaalon Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg

None of the people you mentioned's companies sell products your life depends on. If you don't like them, don't use or buy their products. I'm of the opinion that AWS, facebook and tesla cars are genuine trash. I don't know why people use that stuff.

jocaalon Life lessons from the first half-century of my career

People often prefer to see those who are similar to them in a positive light, since that’s their primary frame of reference. Some struggle to grasp that someone with a completely different perspective or set of social skills can have something valuable to offer. I see this most in hiring practices where hiring managers ask highly personal questions and claim it is to check your "cultural fit", but they are probing for people similar to them. I also see it in how people treat others they’ve just met that are from a completely different background, there is typically a faint form of aggression for literally no reason.

> At the opposite end of the personality spectrum are insecure people, who I’d also avoid, as they tend to see credit as a zero-sum game, needing to diminish you to bolster themselves.

Like many sweeping broad statements, it is entirely useless to base decisions on. The world isn't black and white, there are shades of gray all around.

jocaalon Hunyuan3D 2.0 – High-Resolution 3D Assets Generation

The second link I posted contains n flow from splats to meshes

jocaalon Hunyuan3D 2.0 – High-Resolution 3D Assets Generation

Recently, a lot of development in this area has been in gaussian splatting and from what I have seen, the new methods are super effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_splatting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dPBaV6M9u4

jocaalon I am (not) a failure: Lessons learned from six failed startup attempts

It's been a while since I read this article, but I remembered the title and it seems to imply that it is relevant

https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...

jocaalon Apple will soon receive 'made in America' chips from TSMC's Arizona fab

Imagine the insurance...

jocaalon Meta Wants More AI Bots on Facebook and Instagram

Yeah, when I listen to the videos my mother is watching on Facebook, 90% of the content is narrated by a bot. I'd imagine AI content is also super popular on TikTok. Folks on HN should keep in mind they are not representative of the average person when it comes to tech.

jocaalon More men are addicted to the 'crack cocaine' of the stock market

Norm Mcdonald also has a horrible joke about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3LMSflEN54

jocaalon Apple seeks to defend Google's billion-dollar payments in search case

The thing is, this payment from Google is billions in pure profit. If it were to stop, it would have a serious impact on Apple's valuation. Shareholders would want management to do anything they can to keep that cash flow coming.

jocaalon Microsoft is first to get HBM-juiced AMD CPUs

The free version of chatgpt is better than your 70b LLM, whats the point?

jocaalon Apple's M4 Max chip is the fastest single-core performer in consumer computing

The performance-per-watt isn’t necessarily the best. These scores are achieved when boosted and allowed to draw significantly more power. Apple CPUs may seem efficient because, most of the time, computers don’t require peak performance. Modern ARM microarchitectures have been optimized for standby and light usage, largely due to their extensive use in mobile devices. Some of MediaTek and Qualcomm's CPUs can offer better performance-per-watt, especially at lower than peak performance. The issue with these benchmarks is that they overlook these nuances in favor of a single number. Even worse, people just accept these numbers without thinking about what they mean.

jocaalon Arm is canceling Qualcomm's chip design license

Since Qualcomm is using these custom cores to launch into the pc market and directly competing with x86

jocaalon AI PCs Aren't Good at AI: The CPU Beats the NPU

Microsoft is slowly being squeezed from both sides of the market. Chromebooks have silently become wildly popular on the low end. The only advantage I see windows have is corporate and gaming. But valve is slowly chopping away at the gaming advantage as well.

jocaalon iPhone 16 is much easier to repair

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV4_mLw2BGM&t=270

TLDW Apple has slow response times. Not all parts are available. Parts are super expensive. Liability with heavy NDA's.

jocaalon iPhone 16 is much easier to repair

This would be a valid response if first party parts were easily available to be bought directly from manufacturers.

jocaalon Intel: New Core Ultra Processors Deliver Breakthrough Performance

No one is reaching peak performance on these AI accelerators. Its just stupid marketing.

jocaalon Calling All Hackers

Do you mind expanding on the meaning of blackpilled. I am struggling to make sense of your comment without that context. Google brings up stuff to do with misogyny.

jocaalon Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?

My intro economics course taught there are 4: land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship.

> Neither is more important than the other.

I would say capital is a more important factor than labor, because the tax responsibilities for earnings from different factors are different. Income tax is a lot more than capital gains tax. It is an undeniable fact that our system places more value on growth from capital, than growth due to increased labor efficiency.

jocaalon Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?

in capitalism, the most important factor of production is capital.

jocaalon Google Pixel 9 Pro

That phone isn't a squircle, it is a rounded square. Those rounded edges seem to be inspired by google material design. Also phones have converged to the metal band, glass back before the iphone did it. Mobile phones are a mature technology and their designs have converged to the designs people are buying.

jocaalon Google Pixel 9 Pro

Mobile phones are a mature technology. There aren't any opportunities to differentiate designs. For cars, they all look the same and differentiate brands with headlights and grills, phones only have the camera bump to differentiate brands.

jocaalon Apple's requirements are about to hit creators and fans on Patreon

> Walled gardens suck.

Let me fix that for you. uhuhm. Duopolies suck.

jocaalon SponsorBlock – skip sponsor segments on YouTube

The creator of this extension also makes DeArrow [1]. It replaces the clickbait thumbnails and titles with less annoying ones. I highly recommend it.

[1] https://dearrow.ajay.app/

jocaalon Apple is America's semiconductor problem

Correction, ARM chips tend to be designed for better performance per watt. The instruction set has nothing to do with it. For a long time intel and amd neglected the mobile markets. That is about to change.