HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

smallerfish

3,850 karma · joined July 7, 2017

@dang approved 03/30/25 2:38 ET
submissionscomments
smallerfish··on Ask HN: Add flag for AI-generated articles
The voting system could be enough if downvoting was added.

AI writing is not the problem - low effort is the problem. Low effort AI articles are full of tics which are obvious, if you've done a lot of AI writing. To write well with AI you need to spend a good deal of time editing.

If you submit something that's low effort but has a clickbait headline that appeals to HN, you may well make the front page even if the article is lightweight (it does happen!) This is true both for AI and for human written articles.

On the flip side, somebody could spend an enormous amount of effort creating a masterpiece with AI. Penalizing that because of the tool that was used is arbitrary.

smallerfish··on Tropical forests facing increasing risks of exposure to critical temp thresholds
How exactly would you do this? And over what time span would you expect it to be effective?
smallerfish··on Tropical forests facing increasing risks of exposure to critical temp thresholds
Anybody have a non paywall link to the paper?
smallerfish··on SpaceX wants to launch 100k more Starlink satellites for 100x the bandwidth
Have you seen Real Engineering's analysis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qpdUNMt2yg
smallerfish··on The US Government Is Now a Shareholder in 26 Companies
Still perverse incentives. In this case the government is implicitly biased against startups competing against a giant.
smallerfish··on Amazon seller reveals glimpse of shadow bribery market
AliExpress is less shady. If only they had customer service and a decent UI.
smallerfish··on Claude Sonnet 5
Ah that's why Opus has been so slow for the last couple of days.
smallerfish··on Nano Banana 2 Lite
It seems to respond to edits much better than the current production image model, which often stubbornly locks on to prior iterations of the images.
smallerfish··on Words Are a Byproduct of Consciousness. For LLMs, It's Backwards
> When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.

In (at least once school of) Tibetan Buddhist meditation you observe the part of the mind that is producing ideas, and then suppress it in order to explore deeper layers of consciousness. The "lights on" "you" that is observing is _not_ the idea producing part of the mind, which to me at least seems to be more mechanical.

I do agree with the author of course that a concept isn't necessarily wrapped with language from the start, and can be a skin; but equally it is possible to think in a verbal mode.

smallerfish··on A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?
I'm OP in the thread and I don't agree with this.

AI writing is fine, but you can't just stop on the first draft, any more than you can while AI coding (in fact, even less so - your coding is read by computers and to an extent either works or doesn't; your writing is for humans, and not only needs to convey ideas but also needs to hold the reader.)

Shipping an unedited draft is lazy. Advertising and SEO filler that nobody will ever read can maybe get away with it, but if you're writing for humans, _READ_ the output critically and edit.

smallerfish··on A robot is sprinting towards you. Do you want it running on Claude or Grok?
> I dropped eleven LLMs into a 2D battle royale and made them play 30 games. One won 43% of the matches. Three never won a single game. The cheapest model in the lineup beat the most expensive one by 27x on cost per win.

Please learn how to write with AI without giving away that it was written by AI.

smallerfish··on Commodore Releases Flip Phone
I don't like the look of "retro camera". A great camera is a must-have also.

And yes $500 is too much.

smallerfish··on "Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?"
Google translate is primitive compared to Claude at translations.
smallerfish··on What is it like to be a bat? (1974) [pdf]
Relevant: What is it like to be a plant?

https://www.esalq.usp.br/lepse/imgs/paginas_thumb/Whats-Is-I...

smallerfish··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
I didn't say industrial processing led to unhealthier food. In fact I explicitly said that the health question is distinct from the definition, and can be studied.
smallerfish··on Ultra-processed foods in the global food system: The role of tobacco companies
It's not meaningless.

"Processed" means that ingredients had to be manipulated to produce the food (e.g. most recipes). Most of what you make at home is "processed".

"Ultra-processed" means food produced using industrial processing, using additives (perhaps not typically considered "food" in an of themselves) for emulsifying, flavor, shelf stability & preservation, color, etc. That's a clear distinction.

Whether or not that means anything for the nutritional value and health outcomes from consumption of the food is a different question, but it can clearly be studied.

smallerfish··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
I think the reasons for them going with API pricing will become abundantly clear when the S-1s become available. If they don't have a story covering how they can get revenue closer to expenses, then they're relying on the market to believe the pixie dust version of their profitability story, which I think people increasingly don't.
smallerfish··on I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit
> enterprise who cannot walk away from these $200/month plans

But that's the point of the article. Enterprise plans are starting to get API pricing, not the subsidized subscription pricing.

smallerfish··on The real cost of owning a home
It depends on a lot on your timing with the market. This guy (from TFA) sold in 2007; I bought my first house as a (fairly dire) fixer-upper in 2008. I sold it in 2016, after it had more than doubled in value (partly due to improvements we'd made, partly due to market improvements). I bought the next house as a (cosmetic) fixer-upper in 2016, and sold it in 2020, after the pandemic had multiplied its value by 1.5x. Now I own outright, pay no mortgage, and my property tax is less than 1% where I live. Yes I got lucky on timing on both ends of the 12 years, but not selling into a down market (if you can help it, of course), buying with an eye to potential increase in value, and being willing to take advantage of market conditions are all things that can work in your favor.
smallerfish··on What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard
There isn't resistance. It comes from development patterns.

A developer buys 10 hectares of land and wants to max out the returns, so they pack it full of houses. Another developer buys the adjacent 20 hectares and follows the same strategy. Rinse and repeat. Purely market driven housing development orients towards developer profit, not long term quality of life of the neighborhoods being constructed.

smallerfish··on DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent
They may be state backed, in which case the loss-leading could be a geopolitical move. It's a useful model regardless.

China sell lithium at a loss to make it unprofitable for Australian/US miners, for example (https://www.miningweekly.com/article/china-is-oversupplying-...).

smallerfish··on Linux security mailing list 'almost unmanageable'
So make it a closed issue tracker with a public email gateway. Get Anthropic to donate LLM time to classify and combine incoming reports.
smallerfish··on Incident with Actions
> Why are you still using Github?

Show me the VCs who are willing to fund the marketing effort that would be needed to conquer the network-effects moat, and I'm in.

smallerfish··on All Four Sentinel-1 Satellites Are Now Live
Better (more accurate) link and title: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...

We're exploring using the SAR data for conservation / deforestation monitoring. Anybody else working in this space who has blazed the trail?

smallerfish··on Google Flow Music
If it's anything like suno, it probably takes you 30 to 40 attempts to dial in what you were looking for. (And don't get me wrong, the results can be great with suno - there's just a lot of trial and error, and dice rolling.)
smallerfish··on AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
That's disingenuous. The point is that "human" isn't a particularly good dividing line if you want to distinguish music with value vs music without.
smallerfish··on AI singer now occupies eleven spots on iTunes singles chart
Is formulaic pop music produced by a corporate label that's designed to push all the right buttons more "human" than the average track you find published on Suno? I wouldn't say so. Pop music was already to some extent a commodity.
smallerfish··on Tell HN: Anthropic no longer allowing Claude Code subscriptions to use OpenClaw
> for third-party harnesses

What's the exact definition of third-party harnesses? They have an Agent SDK in Claude Code that can be used. Are they trying to say that only Anthropic products can use pro/max plans?

smallerfish··on Show HN: Zerobox – Sandbox any command with file, network, credential controls
Compare with and steal any ideas you like from mine if you like. I've got a semi-decent curl|bash pattern covered, and also add network filtering via pasta (which may be more robust than rolling your own). https://github.com/reubenfirmin/bubblewrap-tui
smallerfish··on Do your own writing
Bad AI writing is bad, and obvious once you know what you're looking for. Nobody wants to read it.

Good AI writing takes time, can be valuable, and can inspire readers to send in praise about how insightful or thorough a particular article was (speaking from experience). Why do it? The same reason we all use Claude all day to write code - it is faster / you can do more of it. But in the same way that a junior engineer vibing code is a lot more likely to produce slop than a grizzled senior who is doing the same thing, you have to know what you are doing to get good results out of it.

Pushing back against AI writing in 2026 is like the people pushing back against AI coding in 2024. It's not a question of if it will happen. It's a question of how to do it well. ;)

← PreviousPage 2 of 31Next →