Hacker News Reader

rodigeron AI is not a coworker, it's an exoskeleton

It's a proxy for generalized reasoning.

The point isn't that LLMs are the best AI architecture for chess.

rodigeron Rethinking how we measure AI intelligence

404

rodigeron In the Network of the Conclav: How we "guessed" the Pope using network science

Also the explicit survivorship bias... this would not be near the front page if their predictions were all wrong.

rodigeron Gemma 3 Technical Report [pdf]

> "System structure mirrors organization"

Conway's Law is the general term for this concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

rodigeron Android XR

I don't think most consumers are familiar with the iPhone XR. They know iPhone, and maybe iPhone X, but I don't think the naming will be an issue here.

rodigeron Starship's Sixth Flight Test

Not true! The ISS has functioned as an outpost for science- 3,000+ experiments and counting

https://www.nasa.gov/missions/station/five-space-station-res...

rodigeron Trump wins presidency for second time

This doesn't support your assertion- in fact it does the opposite. The definition(s) of inflation has changed over time. That does not make the current definition(s) less correct

rodigeron Oasis: A Universe in a Transformer

Surprisingly, Nintendo has a long history of copyright-striking videos of folks playing their games.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-co...

rodigeron Digging into PlantStudio, a bit late

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aesthetic

Definition 1-c:

> pleasing in appearance : attractive

rodigeron Cofounder Mode: My tactical guide to finding a cofounder

Or literally 90% of the YC class in any given year

rodigeron Ask HN: Why is Pave legal?

There's a difference between "doing an illegal thing as a product" and "lying to investors about your product"

rodigeron 80% of AI Projects Crash and Burn, Billions Wasted Says Rand Report

And in a hype cycle many many more projects get off the ground that normally, outside of a hype cycle, wouldn't have ever received the requisite funding.

rodigeron There aren't that many uses for blockchains (2022)

Ideal condition speed vs congestion speed is a different thing- I'm not suggesting they don't face the standard scaling bottlenecks, but it is also true that under similar congestion conditions, the network will run faster as hardware improves.

SQL databases also run slower under high load, which is totally independent of faster hardware allowing for faster databases vs the baseline

Re: independent verification, I agree with you. It's not a great tradeoff. I'm not here to shill Solana as a panacea or anything of the sort, just pointing out clear inaccuracies from the OOP.

rodigeron There aren't that many uses for blockchains (2022)

The "1-2%" number the author repeatedly cites is misleading at best. These fees do not scale with the amount transacted. BTC tranfers are currently ~$0.80 whether you're moving $1 or $100k, which is a unique feature.

> SQL databases will continue to get faster as hardware speeds up - but blockchains only tend to get slower, as the volume of transactions grows.

This is also misleading, as there are systems like Solana which prioritize speed of confirmation, and do indeed get faster as hardware speeds up. It also allows for sub-cent fees (again, not based on a percentage of the amount moved).

rodigeron Nvidia and Salesforce double down on AI startup Cohere in $450M round

"Your margin is my opportunity"

A ton of companies are dumping R&D into designing their own chips with seeming success. Nvidia will be in tough company quite soon, but for now demand greatly outstrips supply.

rodigeron Show HN: ChatGPT UI for rabbit holes

The token-by-token responses are probably API, while the "instant" loads seem to be cached.

Probably using groq based on speed of response

rodigeron Rabbit R1 source code [part 1]

Cash grab from their VCs is probably more accurate... I have zero doubt some incredible engineering has gone into the product.

However, from what I can tell they were searching for a problem to solve instead of coming with a distinct, compelling, articulable vision of what they wanted to build

rodigeron Rabbit R1 source code [part 1]

At least it'll look nice on a shelf thanks to Teenage Engineering's good work :)

rodigeron SETI scientists to devise plan for lunar listening station

What is a "full" Dyson Swarm?

rodigeron FTC seeks to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard

Nothing with as much pull as CoD though. By the numbers it's not even close

rodigeron Apple Music Sing

Total speculation, but maybe Apple focus grouped it and saw karaoke has some corny/cringy implicit associations so they wanted some distance

rodigeron The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns

I think it's more of a "China has been known to conduct mass espionage/monitoring of its citizens and abroad. Given that known fact, TikTok poses a concern." Don't think there's hard proof they are doing nefarious things via TikTok.

rodigeron Celsius Execs Cashed Out $40M in Crypto Before Halting Withdrawals for Customers

1. Celsius was a lending platform which allowed customers to earn yield on deposited crypto. It also had exchange features, but the blow-up is primarily due to the lending aspect.

2. The liquidity crisis happened because of off-chain financing which models current lender/borrower agreements.

rodigeron Launch HN: Azuki (YC W22) – All-you-can-read manga subscription

Looks awesome! Slight naming collision but pretty different industries. https://www.azuki.com/

rodigeron Building a no-code toxicity classifier by talking to GitHub Copilot

Falls apart when we get down to binary, but holds across most levels of abstraction

rodigeron Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

Those are great for larger companies but most smaller places won't have much listed there

rodigeron Google Creates Blockchain Unit, Hires New ‘Founding Leader’

You don't need much infra because of how difficulty adjustments work... consistently less hashpower -> it becomes easier to mine

rodigeron Our Take on NFTs

I don't think they're useful to most people right now (or maybe ever), but there are some cool things in DeFi that are normally reserved for large institutions/not possible in traditional finance:

1. Being a liquidity provider to get a cut of exchange fees (https://docs.uniswap.org/protocol/concepts/V3-overview/conce...)

2. Flashloans for arbitrage (https://aave.com/flash-loans/)

3. Autonomous governance for protocol updates (https://compound.finance/governance)

4. Decentralized perpetual contracts (https://www.perp.com/)

5. Decentralized mutual insurance (https://nexusmutual.io/)

Many/all of these depend on speculation to derive value, but there's added value nonetheless

rodigeron Our Take on NFTs

Individual companies/orgs can confer rights to holders through their T&Cs, but that's revocable and hard to prove. For example: https://boredapeyachtclub.com/#/terms BAYC gives full commercial rights to holders.

Would be really interesting to actually see that challenged in a court.

rodigeron Our Take on NFTs

Yeah I agree. Though seems pedantic to imply blockchains aren't useful because they're "just" composed of cryptographic primitives. Shared state under potentially-adversarial conditions isn't an easy thing to achieve, and has usecases for which other P2P networks aren't sufficient.