Hacker News Reader

Jimmc414on Radiation Map of the World

I wonder if this explains why many of the higher radioactivity sites in my state are hotels.

Jimmc414on Gemini 4 Argon

Generating pelicans on bicycles most likely

Jimmc414on Codex CLI installs a persistent, self-updating background daemon by default

I think it’s a new spin on Brook’s Law. Adding tokens to a project makes it less efficient not more.

Jimmc414on Gemini 4 Argon

I wish we had started pacing the frontier back in 2025. There’s no telling how far we would be now.

Jimmc414on Plan mode is dead

I think with Claude Code plan mode has value even if Fable “gets it” off the bat. It’s a chance to explicitly disambiguate intent through AskUserQuestion tool as well as utilizing the option to clear content when plan is approved. The automatic disambiguation step is RLHF’d out of the model even when it’s needed.

Jimmc414on NASA-Funded Research Finds Complex Life Defying Record Heat

Article:

This 'fire amoeba' pushes the limit of what's possible for complex life

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/22/nx-s1-5977044/fire-amoeba-ext...

Jimmc414on Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)

On the Message Batches API, Opus 5.5 supports up to 300k output tokens with the output-300k-2026-03-24 beta header.

https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/models/opus-5-5/overview

Jimmc414on What happened to the drums of radioactive waste dumped in the Atlantic Ocean?

"Between 1971 and 1982, more than 200,000 drums of radioactive waste were dumped by several European countries in the Northeast Atlantic, at depths reaching over 4,700 meters . The exact location of these drums and, above all, their potential impacts on the deep-sea environment remained largely unknown until studies conducted in the 1980s"

Inventory:

https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/TE-1776_web.p...

Articles:

https://www.ens.psl.eu/en/node/9080

https://www.sciencealert.com/150000-tons-of-radioactive-wast...

Jimmc414on Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged: Study

Original paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02433-7 (paywall)

New Scientist Article:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2589739-our-brain-evolv...

https://archive.is/1CFX9

Jimmc414on Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude

They are all valid front page submissions by the looks of them and they appear to be the first ones submitted. It wouldn’t be hard to do if you cared enough to configure notifications for frontier announcements. If someone were using technology to influence submissions or misuse HN, that would be a concern but I don’t see any evidence of that.

Jimmc414on More Money Than They Ever Imagined–and No Clue How to Spend It

https://archive.is/GA5IF

Jimmc414on Former CIA official found with $40M in gold bars reaches tentative plea deal

>The FBI affidavit said Rush had obtained the gold bars from the U.S. government for “work-related expenses.” Rush’s attorney has said the charge against him isn’t related to the gold bars, which she described as “a sensational tidbit.”

$40 million in work related expenses paid in gold bars? Sounds completely legitimate.

Jimmc414on Due to concerns about malicious applications, GPT2 will not be released (2019)

But why are Dario, Sam and Elon who represent "the frontier" more than any other 3 people pretending like they need government permission or intervention to pause? It seems more likely that they see open source distillation as an existential threat to their IPO plans and are playing for regulatory capture of the market.

Jimmc414on Claude is only available to people over 18 years

Airplane (1980) was PG.

Jimmc414on The Association Between ADHD and GI Symptoms: A Meta-Analysis

"ADHD is linked to an almost 50% increase in overall gastrointestinal symptoms compared with people without ADHD The association was even stronger for specific problems: nearly double the odds of constipation, a 58% increase in irritable bowel syndrome, and more than four times the odds of encopresis (loss of bowel control)"

Jimmc414on The Pentagon Asked OpenAI for Artificial Intelligence Designed to Rarely Say No

https://archive.is/iKdbn

Jimmc414on Dutch central bank moves 86 tonnes of gold from US citing 'geopolitical unrest'

10 characters had to be removed to fit under the title length limit. “and Canada” was the only real option that maintained coherence. There were no editorial motives behind that selection.

Jimmc414on 2D Gaussian Splatting for Bézier Spline Line Art Vectorization

Video discussion:

https://x.com/andrew_n_carr/status/2087937511171690592

Jimmc414on 'Not acceptable': Judge orders Google to make rival app store installs easier

https://archive.is/1G6uQ

Jimmc414on Zap Rocks. Add Water. Get Clean Hydrogen

Not the best title, but an interesting article.

Jimmc414on Analytic Treatment of Tipping Points for Social Consensus in Large Networks-2013

Paper funded by the Office of Naval Research showing that 10% of committed believers flips the majority. Essentially describes the mechanism behind most bot campaigns and why they work.

Jimmc414on I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

I'm asking mostly from an AI safety perspective

Jimmc414on I am retiring from fulltime writing (& pseudonymity) to launch Guardian Angel

What happens when the person the AI is designed to be aligned with is a psychopath? Real question.

Jimmc414on Yen leaps after intervention, leaving the dollar bruised

Bessent ‘to-do’ list shows proposal for US to buy $5bn-$10bn of Japanese yen

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/31/scott-bessen...

Jimmc414on Bacteria and the Inverse Association Between Farm Exposure and Childhood Asthma

article:

https://www.sciencealert.com/natural-protection-from-asthma-...

Jimmc414on Report 08/2026: Collision between two passenger trains near Talerddig

"even though the brakes on train 1J25 remained applied, the train did not decelerate as it approached train 1S71."

Jimmc414on AI Kill Switch Act: Official Bill Text by Reps. Lieu and Moran (2026)

I don't think a law is inappropriate, and cutting power to a data center is a fair example. But that isn't what this bill does. It requires companies to be able to stop inference, cut off user access and throttle compute allocation. Those are all things they already do to run their own services. Nothing in it touches the grid, and nothing in it reaches open weight models at all.

My concern is with what the government gets, not with what the companies have to build.

There is a provision requiring companies to be able to suspend an account or a user that the Secretary identifies as a risk, and that includes a risk of violating the company's own terms of service. Once an incident has happened somewhere, DHS can order it. The order takes effect immediately, asking them to reconsider does not pause it, they get five days to answer, and after that you are filing in the DC Circuit. What gets reported along the way is exempt from FOIA and from state open records law.

To be frank I worry about mankind and its lust for power more than I worry about the AI. History has not been kind to people who assumed emergency powers would stay narrow or get handed back.

Jimmc414on AI Kill Switch Act: Official Bill Text by Reps. Lieu and Moran (2026)

This strikes me as very naive at best. Like a super intelligent AI that was somehow intent on going rogue couldn’t figure out how to circumvent a kill switch?

Jimmc414on US House Narrowly Passes Controversial National Defense Authorization Act

Some of the more controversial provisions:

Section 219 directs the defense secretary to designate a Pentagon “executive agent” to run a US–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative covering AI, quantum, cyber-defense, weapons research and supply chains.

SAVE America Act attached. The rule merges the voter ID/proof of citizenship bill with the NDAA before it goes to the Senate.

No Iran war powers vote. The Rules Committee killed the Ryan amendment barring FY27 funds for military action against Iran absent congressional authorization.

Jimmc414on ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir

The government's stated remediation for the Palantir transfer was that the data had been shared over a Microsoft Teams chat and was deleted from the chat. That is not a deletion.

According to CMS's security program documentation, Medicare and Medicaid are a covered entities under HIPAA, subject to 60 day notice to affected individuals, reporting to HHS OCR, and notice to media outlets when a breach affects more than 500 residents of a state.

Not to mention this violated a standing court order.

https://security.cms.gov/learn/cms-breach-response-handbook