HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

raz32dust

1,233 karma · joined April 16, 2012

submissionscomments
raz32dust··on What Meta got right with Muse
A lot of use cases for agents require long running sessions. And you're likely to have many agent sessions running in parallel. These aren't going to be running on your personal devices
raz32dust··on Plunging test scores are a slow-moving catastrophe
Why only GLP? Same logic can be applied to all preventive care
raz32dust··on Transit rewards
Nice idea. But too many ifs and buts, and it's too little to really change habits. Besides, waymo's main issue seems to be supply right now. I can never get one when I need it.

I wish the government would rather invest in better public last mile connectivity programs or higher frequency trains and buses.

raz32dust··on GPT-6 Sol and Luna
Interesting that factual error rates have not improved a lot since the last year. Models are getting smarter but not more trustworthy. At this point I would love to have a model that's maybe not as smart but has lower factual inaccuracies and works harder. I.e don't try to find shortcuts as much and does more rigorous self checks.
raz32dust··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
The question isn't about entitlement at all. It's about decency. I agree, better to not allow people to stay too long on temporary status. But it was and is allowed today. So there are people who have been on temporary status for 15, even 20 years. Fully legally. If your policies require them to just leave one fine day without any recourse, it is not decent.

An example might be someone who is renting your house. If you allowed them to live in your house for 10 years, would you ask them to leave without notice or with just the minimum 1 month notice? Yes they are not entitled to anything more than what was in the contract but would you do that? I wouldn't. Most people I know would work with the tenant and give them more time to figure things out. And if all of this was done with that decency, I am fine with it.

raz32dust··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
So you're claim of 4 countries isn't applicable to most people buying homes while on visa. Nobody on visa is buying a house in 1.5 years. People buy homes when they've been here for several years and have a permanent residency application in progress. So that's more like the last country where you've been.

Whole point of this thread is that it isn't unreasonable to have kids and family and a house and social life when you've lived somewhere for 10+ years. So any action on part of the government should at least give the space to get things in order or find alternatives. This is a fair and humane expectation.

raz32dust··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
Curious how long have you lived in 4 countries beyond college? No kids, marriage, social life?
raz32dust··on U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications
I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant" whereas for all practical purposes it is really an immigrant visa. Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency? People buy homes because it is a reasonable belief that they are going to be living here permanently and it has historically been true.

In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.

raz32dust··on Worst-case glacial lake flood scenarios in a transboundary Himalayan basin 2022
It almost certainly is. Just too early right now.
raz32dust··on Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?
Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?

As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.

raz32dust··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
I know but the point is that it worked too. You could argue one problem is harder than the other, I am not and expert so I wouldn't know. But at least it's clear the second result is also impressive, and didn't require much expertise. So it's wrong to say that you need expertise to get hard and impressive things done with AI.
raz32dust··on Terence Tao's ChatGPT conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample
The top comment has a counter example though https://x.com/DmitryRybin1/status/2079904005652893709

I think it's not even about the ability to steer the AI. Just the ability to ask the right questions

raz32dust··on Study suggests most Americans would be healthier without daylight saving time
If you present this as the alternative, I think there's a chance people might actually just get rid of it :)
raz32dust··on The just-say-no engineer was a ZIRP phenomenon
I agree with the author that engineers need to recalibrate and say yes more often but the zirp connection is a stretch and unnecessary.

Good engineers will say yes and no thoughtfully and will adjust to the new reality anyway. So it feels kind of pointless since no one is really a just say yes or just say no person, though it is well written.

raz32dust··on Waymo expands pause to four cities as robotaxis keep driving into floods
Does anyone have insight into how waymo is actually doing as a business? It seems to be unaffordable in the bay area. 2-3x the cost of Uber/lyft whenever I've checked. It is very cool, but I can't imagine they're doing well at that price point
raz32dust··on How diamonds are made
It's marketing plus perception of how expensive it is. Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.
raz32dust··on Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message
Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.
raz32dust··on TransUnion says hackers stole 4.4M customers' personal information
What can we do to keep these companies accountable? This is so frustrating.
raz32dust··on Break Up Big Tech: Civil Society Declaration
This is vastly oversimplifying things. US would put tremendous diplomatic and other means of pressure if EU does serious harm to tech companies. US-EU and US-China relation is very different.
raz32dust··on Americans are spending billions on stuff they forget to cancel
In the elderly neighbor and shovel example, I don't see what's wrong, as long as it was communicated. It depends on the agreement really - for example, if the shovel guy was charging a little less for subscription than what it would otherwise cost the elderly in a regular year of snow. The elderly is getting the benefit of always having a shoveler ready and available, and the shoveler is getting the benefit of more predictable income.

I am as frustrated about everything turning into a subscription as the next person, but the solution is not to put the onus of cancellation on businesses. It is to prevent monopolies (so that there is a true free market) and dark patterns (i.e, cancellation should be easy and terms should be very clear when subscribing).

raz32dust··on Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
No software product that has actual paying users can afford to stop development like that. It needs to constantly keep evolving with the environment, or someone else will fill their niche quickly or it will just atrophy. That may require fewer engineers though, so I agree with you partially.

With software, once you find PMF, it's not the building that's hard, but keeping the users paying and using your product. The entry barrier to building a copycat is very low. So you have to pile on resources to keep your software be the best available.

raz32dust··on Twitch to Cut 500 Employees, About 35% of Staff
I don't get it. From an outside perspective, it feels like they must be raking in the cash - they take a large cut from subscribers and the number of ads is crazy. Viewership growth seems good [1]. The product seems solid and well-built. The demand is clearly there. Serving live video is obviously expensive, but curious if that is really the biggest component (other than personnel). Would be cool if some industry insider could shed some light on what's wrong with this business.

[1] https://backlinko.com/twitch-users

raz32dust··on Duolingo Cuts 10% of Contractors as It Uses More AI to Create App Content
My experience was different. I was able to learn enough Spanish to survive in Peru for a month with just 6-7 hours in Duolingo. Different people may have different learning styles. When you're comparing to classroom, are you normalizing the number of hours spent? Of course live interaction will be several times more effective, but it's not something everyone can afford to do. It's also about goals. Duolingo isn't for you if you really want to become a proficient native speaker or be able to understand books. But it's great to learn a language casually enough to converse with locals.
raz32dust··on Cleaning up my 200GB iCloud with some JavaScript
I am so tired of these patterns. Google Photos also does not allow any easy or good way to clean up junk. Why would they? They want you to run out of space so you can pay for their cloud storage. They also have low incentive to keep photo/video storage space-efficient for the same reason.
raz32dust··on George Carlin's "Soft Language" (2019)
How is "firing people" more clear in intent than "Reduction in force"? Reduction in force/cutting costs is usually the intent. People getting fired is a side effect. "Firing people" is a more vivid picture, which is exactly why it is not the right term - it's too personal a term for something that usually is not personal. Performance-based layoffs = Firing. Cost/business-outlook-based layoffs = RIFs.
raz32dust··on Are any words the same in all languages?
illai in Dravidian languages
raz32dust··on Cosmological time dilation in the early Universe
"most accepted theory of physics is that the universe started from a single point": This is not true. The most accepted theory is that the universe was extremely dense, but it is not accepted that it was literally a "point" of zero volume. Our laws of physics are thought to break down beyond a certain density of matter, so we don't have any reliable predictions about it. The "dense" universe could still have been infinite even back then. Just super dense and infinite in all directions - and now all of it has expanded and it's still infinite (a bigger infinity?).
raz32dust··on The Secret Life of Deep Sea Vents
The article does not touch upon this, but there is a fascinating theory that life on earth originated in deep sea vents. Highly recommend reading the very accessible "The Vital Question" by Nick Lane for more on this.
raz32dust··on Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983
I was with you until "It is just customers in US are richer and are ok to pay more for the same service." How did you reach that conclusion? The other reason (which seems more likely to me) is that it is because the free market is not functioning because of monopoly/duopoly created by regulatory capture.
raz32dust··on Happiness is a reward from our ancestors
Interesting way to put it, but is it particularly insightful? You're happy when you're doing things you think you should be doing, and what you think you should be doing is of course determined by evolution, modulo random mutations. I don't see how this helps me in any constructive way though. It is an intriguing thought exercise though.
Page 1 of 12Next →