Hacker News Reader

Everyone knows the phrase

“Correlation does not imply causation”.

But it’s so easy to forget.

ViktorRayon Sam Altman's sister amends lawsuit accusing OpenAI CEO of sexual abuse

Hey dang honest question.

I know a while back you said that one of the central rules of HN is that you moderate less not more when the discussion is about Y Combinator or a Y Combinator startup.

Does this rule apply to OpenAI? After all OpenAI is probably Y Combinator’s most successful startup. And does this rule apply to Sam Altman? After all he was once the CEO of Y Combinator. And he’s currently a CEO of a Y Combinator startup.

I know you’ve also said that moderating less isn’t the same as not moderating at all. So this comment isn’t necessarily about this specific exchange. Just asking in general…

ViktorRayon Amazon introduces a redesigned Kindle family

I read this story and feel a sense of sadness. Because I think about how Sony is planning on ending physical game sales for the PlayStation.

I have many fond memories of sharing games as a kid with my friends. Of renting them from Blockbuster. But nowadays it with everything digital…that’s all gone..

ViktorRayon Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots

I’m sure the tiny niche subs are fine.

But all the big subs and even the moderately sized subs and even the smaller subs have become crap. I’ve (sadly for me) wasted much time on Reddit over the years. The type of comments I mentioned have become the default on every subreddit that isnt tiny and niche. It’s impossible to have a genuine thoughtful discussion on any non-niche hobby or subject without it being flooded by the kind of negative comments I mentioned in my previous comment.

ViktorRayon Reddit is killing RSS feeds and ending public API access because of AI bots

I feel like Reddit nowadays is pretty much the same kind of content as all the other platforms.

The difference is that Reddit is even worse. It’s like a distillation of all the most angry indignant rage inducing crap from the other sites all into one.

ViktorRayon We’re forgetting what darkness feels like

For almost all of human history we lived with that true night sky.

I wonder if the psychological impact is really the absence of the true night sky that we have. Maybe the awe we feel at seeing the true night is what we’re supposed to feel? Something to think about.

ViktorRayon Driver Ticketed for No Insurance Just Because Flock (YC 2017) Said She Didn't

Here’s an interesting quote from Paul Graham about Flock. Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator and created Hacker News. Since Flock was at a Y Combinator batch, Paul Graham provided valuable advice to them and makes money from them.

Quote in the link below:

https://x.com/paulg/status/1493719302725197825

ViktorRayon Intellectuals Are Fucking Idiots

Isn't your second point essentially an ad hominem?

If an idea is good then the idea is good regardless of the person who came up with the idea. Same principle if the idea is bad.

ViktorRayon Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi

https://youtu.be/YjRbmtrDJI4

For those of you who don’t know…John Coltrane is a legend in jazz music. Posted a YouTube link to an excellent work of his above.

ViktorRayon The Surprising Reasons China Is Skeptical of A.I. Safety Calls

This article makes a good point.

If you make the company itself have culpability for what it’s “rogue” agents do then you solve a lot of the problems. Tech executives might not care about humanity but they probably care about themselves. If the CEO of OpenAI is as legally responsible for what OpenAI’s software does in the same manner that Sam Bankman-Fried was responsible…I suspect many AI companies would not be so cavalier about letting their models do dangerous things.

ViktorRayon The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris

The widespread protest movements that led to the fall of the Iron Curtain didn’t happen through some vague “spread of capitalism” or through copyright. The spread of Western culture was a major part of what sparked those widespread protests.

ViktorRayon I am done with this shit

That whole thread feels like something out of Black Mirror. Especially the comment from Claude AI right under the OP’s post summarizing the thread. The dark humor of the juxtaposition of Claude AI’s harsh summarization of all the users’ pain….pure Black Mirror.

ViktorRayon How do traffic signals work? (2019)

I think this would depend on the intersection.

If the lights are at an intersection where a very busy road crosses with a less busy road then turning it into a four way stop just turns it into a traffic jam on the very busy road. I’ve seen this happen during rush hour in the United States multiple times.

When it’s not rush hour though maybe the situation is different? Not sure.

ViktorRayon Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program

PG is still involved in Y combinator batches and all that right? He regularly posts about giving advice to founders on his twitter account.

ViktorRayon Flock is rolling out a voluntary severance program

Flock was a startup that was funded by Y Combinator. Paul Graham and the other Y Combinator people provided expertise and advice to them throughout their whole journey.

I wonder what Paul Graham says to the Flock executives now?

ViktorRayon Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?

Here is a link to the original article:

https://poshenloh.com/posts/20260919-math-ai

The original posted link from OP is from Terry Tao’s website where the article was posted as a guest blog post.

ViktorRayon New evidence for hidden chambers beyond Tutankhamun's tomb

I have fond memories of reading National Geographic magazine growing up. I remember they had memorable issues with King Tut. And Ancient Egypt in general. Made me fall in love with learning about Ancient Egypt.

Anyone else here have fond memories of reading those old National Geographic issues?

ViktorRayon Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

Are you sure about this? If you look at the ancient stories in India you can similar phenomena

ViktorRayon Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data

This seems like a pretty catastrophic failure on Amazon’s part. It seems pretty incompetent actually. You should have multiple copies of your customer’s data across multiple locations.

And these multiple locations should be in different parts of the world. Not concentrated in one highly volatile region.

All this seems like common sense to me honestly. Anyone with more knowledge than me know why Amazon didn’t do this?

ViktorRayon Tech Workers Can Afford San Francisco. Low-Income Renters Can't

Something about this article seems suspicious to me. It’s this part:

”It’s difficult to sympathize with people making a combined income of $365k, which places them comfortably in the top 20% of San Francisco households.”

If someone without household income in the top 20 percent cannot find a place to live in that city…isn’t that a catastrophic situation? I mean these people were looking for a simple apartment and couldn’t find one. That’s…highly concerning. Their story shouldn’t be dismissed.

ViktorRayon Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

The only restriction currently[1] in place on newspapers in the United States is that you cannot write libel i.e you cannot knowingly falsely write something that hurts another’s reputation. This is the same restriction as in verbal speech where you cannot say slander which is like libel but spoken.

[1] There have been other restrictions placed at various times but these other restrictions have over time been found to be contrary to the First Amendment.

ViktorRayon Making Startups Powerful

Are you sure the attitude changed generally or did it change more specifically here on Hacker News? Perhaps the kinds of people who use Hacker News changed.

https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38

Go to the 2:00 mark of this interview. Sam Altman says “Paul Graham is the most important force in startups of the past few decades” and the whole auditorium starts cheering. So Paul Graham is akin to a god in some places.

ViktorRayon Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38

Garry Tan and Sam Altman recently did this interview together. They seemed pretty friendly with each other during it. Wonder what Sam Altman would say about Tan advocating for OpenAI’s models to be distilled.

Then again this is the same OpenAI that has gotten into legal trouble recently regarding Apple’s IP so who knows

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

But it’s not an approximation right? In our reference frame it is the truth.

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

Ah yes that’s indeed true.

But from the Earth’s reference frame wasn’t the Pluto activity I mentioned earlier simultaneous with what happened 5 hours ago on Earth?

So couldn’t you say from Earth’s reference frame this black hole’s activity happened simultaneously with events 20 million years ago?

ViktorRayon A wandering black hole caught feeding on the run

Wait then what about events that happen on Pluto?

Pluto is around five light hours away from us.

If an astronaut goes to Pluto and films herself doing activity A and then broadcasts that back to Earth, it would take around five hours for the broadcast to reach us.

So you’re saying that it is not correct to say her recorded activity happened five hours ago?

ViktorRayon A succession crisis that tore England apart (2023)

Is is true that they believed women couldn’t rule? England was not the first European country to have a female monarch. By the time all this was going on there had been a female monarch elsewhere in Europe a few decades earlier.

Would be interesting if there were any texts at the time discussing this.

I’m asking out of genuine curiosity not to start an argument.

ViktorRayon Tech's New Rich Are Suffering from 'Sudden Wealth Syndrome'

Wonder if it is similar to the frustrations some people feel when they retire. Some people have these very driven personalities and this can cause quite a bit of angst for them when they get a lot of free time.

I remember when I was a teenager I used to volunteer at a hospital. There was this one old lady there who had that kind of personality. I think she had been some kind of executive earlier in life but now she was retired and volunteering. I remember she was really harsh and strict and kind of dictatorial towards the other volunteers.

It was kind of strange to see. Here we are volunteering at a hospital. Shouldn’t we not have those kinds of interactions? But I guess that was just the kind of person she was. And she was volunteering because she couldn’t act like her old business executive self at home so she did it during volunteering.

ViktorRayon GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

Wonder if someone might use an LLM to specifically vibe code a program that takes LLM code and makes it appear like non-LLM code.

ViktorRayon GPT-6 built this earth exploration site in 5 prompts

I thought this was super cool…

And then I clicked the “Explore” button on the top right and there are even more things that you can see! Pretty neat.