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raducu

2,253 karma · joined July 8, 2015

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raducu··on Can AI Shopping Agents Be Trusted?
> suggests it will just come back again in some other form.

They can pay the model provider, not amazon, but it would be less feasible because for now we have real competition among them.

History often rhimes but it doesn't always repeat itself.

I think there is genuinely a need for shopping agents and they could transform shopping in very good ways for the consumers.

Good thing for shoppers, bad for marketers, bad for people who relied on smarts, bad for margins, good for people who have capital and assets.

raducu··on The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
> the brine pond.

Then why not store the oil there directly instead of going all the trouble of pumping it in and out of the caverns? Is it so it doesn't rain on it?

raducu··on Autism mutations drive neurodevelopmental pathology
Nobody said they were, but broken in terms of neurotypical circuitry, yes
raducu··on Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
On one hand I love your joke, on the other, this is HN not reddit and I usually downvote such responses, not sure what is the HN etiquette for such humor?
raducu··on Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things
But the Turing test involves a conversation you can steer and I think that's where indeed it's a lot easier to smell LLMs.
raducu··on AI isn’t outthinking mathematicians, it’s out-remembering them
> out-remembering people around us.

Doing an angular -> react refactor with Opus 5 at work.

Amazed at how good it is but also amazed at how dumb it is after I told it I want a very basic and specific code review:do the file names match the contents? is one functionality/concern split in multiple files? do the variable names match what they do? does a method read nicely?

Anyway, I was very surprised at how bad it can be at this.

I suspect it's because the LLM simply does not focus well enough on a single method.

My gut modelling is that the critical files are quite small, some 4k LOC and the LLM tries to read them all in one go and my requirement is surprisingly difficult but the LLM does not realize it, loads all the input into context and simply cannot find a good signal per token/group of tokens.

I guess I can do it because I literally cannot fit 4k LOC in my head and I actually read only tens of lines but I can reeealy dig deep in those lines.

The LLM can remember lots, it has 1M context window, was trained with needle in the haystack problems, but it can severely underestimate how much computation is required with TASTE/universal computation type tasks.

Yes, LLMs are incredible when it comes to delivering well defined outcomes, it's evident they were RL trained very well. But they are incredibly bad at understanding nuance in a text.

It's incredible how agentic coding benchmaxing seems to correlate with writing good poetry but at the same time finding good names for files and variables and wiring beautiful code does not.

Same with getting basic details of who said what in an "adversarial" conversation between 2 humans -- LLMs are incredibly bad at it, with all their "almost discovering new maths" skills

raducu··on Is AI reasoning right for the wrong reasons?
> I don't see a clear demarcation of the things that only "reasoning" can accomplish.

Producing beautiful, coherent, maintainable code. RL trained the models to produce correct code but boy oh boy is it ugly if it's 10k+ LOC

raducu··on Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs
> Stand up a router.

it has to be some amazing router and while the models are open-weights, the knowhow to run them efficiently surely is not?

raducu··on Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber
> So the price is rising and you have no choice but to keep paying more and more.

I presume you can't use deepseek?

raducu··on Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research
> where are the 500 meter trees in the rainforests.

There could be structural reason as to why it's not possible, not pumping water *

raducu··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
> 30 seconds of surprise is plenty for a coordinated decapitation strike.

Some guys in a mediterranean country are drooling right now...

raducu··on Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries
How about sensory feedback loops?
raducu··on xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
> AND magically gets 4x cheaper energy they are in a much weaker stance for the long haul.

By energy you mean electricity,the nuclear, solar and hydro-- the kind China has installed new 2TW capacity over the last decade while US installed 0.2TW capacity in the same time?

raducu··on xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab
> A lot of people are emotionally unprepared for a world where the music doesn't stop.

I've been wrong before. However, when was the last time this business model made sense -- that facebook, SpaceX and others, all just pivot from their market niche to general purpose AI datacenter providers.

How on Earth does this make sense?

What happens in a few years when DeepSeek runs on the chinese chips like the Huawei Ascend at a fraction of the cost ?

These are all very high value added companies going into comodity AI hosting and they're all going to make a killing?

raducu··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
> If the scales are only checked after the heat death of the universe, does it even matter?

This is the kind of thinking that points to that reckoning moment being close.

This and people buying stock with borrowed money*

raducu··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
> can stay alive and well a lot longer than you can survive an open short position.

I mean let's look at bitcoin/crypto.

raducu··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
> he people I found worst at this were IT.

My experience as IT in modern banks was the opposite. The legal department were absolute assholes when it came to software features. And I'm talking absolutely 100% ok features, like paying your bills from the banking application.

The least fun, trigger happy, cover their buts people I've ever seen.

Like all they could ever say was NO. I guess they were heavily incentivized to just say NO to everything.

raducu··on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do
> is regularly wrong, frequently myopic, and just outright dumb constantly.

I give LLMs snippets of text messages exchanges with my wife and I can't believe how dumb the LLMs are of getting basic facts right let alone nuance.

I'm 100% not one those "LLMs are just stochastic parrots" people, but coding and coding-like activities are extraordinarily well fit for LLMs, but for things that there's less training data, LLMs probably do a lot worse

raducu··on Show HN: Streambed – Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3, Supports Postgres Wire
> queryable from psql via an embedded DuckDB.

noob question here from someone who ony played a bit with iceberg and trino: what's the reason to do the analytics stil inside the postgres -- is it so that you don't eat up the IOPS/bandwidth of the main postgresql disks?

raducu··on Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study
> Most nicotine users today?

I did use pure nicotine and it was very bad for my health, probably due to high dosage, but still.

I've used heavy stimulants, benzos, opioids, dissociatives without an issue, but nicotine is in a class of its own in terms of how insidiously addictive it is.

But just from a health point of view: extreme arm and hand joint issues, forearm vascular issues that made my hands numb at night, palpitations/arrithmia like I was about to die when I used nicotine before sleep and I was drifting to sleep -- it really felt like I was about to die, like my heart was mangled up.

raducu··on Uber Torches 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months
> notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month

I've said it before: if you allow people to see how much others spent, they will try to climb up the "leaderboard".

It takes just ONE little praise for using tokens or one perk gained, and the GAME IS ON among the developers!

raducu··on Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
> dependent on a few minor lifestyle adjustments

Only if you don't have psychological issues, then none of that really works.

I've done all the sleep hygiene and it does help a bit, but sleep polysomnogram shows my sleep architecture is toast + loads of microawakenings (and no sleep apneea).

raducu··on Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
Thanks, that's inspiring, I know I'm at the point that I should do these changes like yesterday!
raducu··on Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
No, I don't. I know I should.
raducu··on Good sleep, good learning, good life (2012)
>The older I get the more sensitive to a single poor night's sleep I become.

Back when I was 20 I had a drinking problem. One time I drank so much that I passed out sitting at a table. Woke up with friends having stripped my clothes and washed them. I woke up at 9AM, feeling 100% sober, just anxious about my 20 missed calls from my mom. I got a bit drunk at about 33 and next day I thought I was dying.

That's how I learnt what hangovers were.

Again, at around 25, I helped my brother in-law move bee hives all night, including some 8 hours of driving.

Went straight to work and in the evening I had dinner with my wife at a restaurant.

Now I crash in bed at 9PM and if I'm lucky, I also sleep (but quite often I wake up at 2AM).

Getting old(er) sucks, and I'm only 42 and I miss so much how nice being in my 20 something body felt all the time.

raducu··on Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone
I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to) -- it was clear he was actively trying to climb that leaderboard.

Meanehile our average PR loc balooned to ~2000loc -- generated with Claude, reviewed with copilot but colleagues also review it with Claude because it gives valid nitpicks that bump up your github stats, while missing glaring functional/architectural issues, overenginerring issues.

No way this doesn't blow up down the road with the massive bloat we're creating while getting high on the "good progress" we're making.

Yes, your 3 minutes prompt got merged. So was my friends(ex-programmer now manager) non-ai generated PR that a technical TL got stuckstuck on for 2 weeks. Different perspective? Survivor bias? High authority?

raducu··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
>high level of motivation and self discipline to go 3 times a week.

I don't really have the time for gym but going feels so good so I can see why someone who does have the time might go 7 days a week.

raducu··on What our DNA reveals about the sex life of Neanderthals
> Without weighing on the validity of their hypothesis that one or both sides found the other“especially attractive”

I get that it's survivor bias and all, but modern racial preference also paints a clear picture, I don't understand why we are so against this hypothesis that male homo sapiens did not particularly like the female neanderthal (I can clearly see why as any modern male would).

We found neanderthal fossils with sapiens DNA (afir it was something like 7% so not sterile hybrids, but a few generations after the hybridisation). I don't think we have ANY evidence for non viability of male sapiens + female neanderthal non-viability, we just don't like the fact that this viability proves the asymetri.

Perhaps because modern psyche loves to picture males as sexual brutes and women as these higher wonderful rosy elves and this "shocking" neanderthal(i.e. "beastly") preference goes strongly against this meme?

Why would it be so inconcievable that the male part of homo sapiens drove the sexual selection for the more "refined" features of the species and the preference for intelligence of women was not intrinsic but partially "forced" -- i.e. warbrides and all -- so it would make perfect sense that some homo sapiens women would be attracted to the physical strength cues of male neanderthals, just like... gasp... modern women are?

raducu··on IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report
I have conflated those two, but my main point is the monstrous, one-sided destruction Israel has caused in Gaza is a clear proof Israel has gone way, way, way into the genocide territory and not just into the "hamas fighters were hiding among the civilians and after considering the international laws for such cases SOME civilians were killed".

Israel demonstrated complete disregard for human life for the sake of expediency to say in a gentle way, but in a harsher way, you could say the aftermath and details that are emerging point to malicious collective punishment.

raducu··on IDF killed Gaza aid workers at point blank range in 2025 massacre: Report
> All other things being equal, if your opponent engages actively in hiding among medical and press workers as a type of guerrilla warfare, then the reality does become this.

So let me check this reasoning: if there was a single US soldier in the WTC towers, the 9/11 attacks were justified because the soldiers were hiding among the civilians?

Or if Hamas killed a single israelian soldier in their horrendous attacks in private homes, then it's justified because there were soldiers in those houses?

Or if the israelian reservists have their weapons at home and can be called upon directly from home to action, does that mean Iran or Hamas are justified at flattening residential buildings in Israel because those could host soldiers?

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