Hacker News Reader

derivagralon Trump administration is suspending Microsoft from a green card program

Regulated industries often have business language mandating onshore, citizens-only employment. If it isn't required by immigration, the businesses buying the product are requiring assurances (likely due to their own compliance).

As for non-protected roles, global market participation has ups and downs.

derivagralon Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model

Looks like general reasoning is their target. As for who:

> The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system that famously beat the world champion in the board game Go in 2016.

with the obligatory:

> Investors in Reflection AI’s latest round include Nvidia, Disruptive, DST, 1789, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Eric Yuan, Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, CRV, and others.

derivagralon 25 years of mass surveillance is enough

History sure does rhyme

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_Nothing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare

derivagralon Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems

Nothing human engineers haven't done to each other! Seriously, I've skipped companies because my inside referral talked about cultures like this.

derivagralon If you are asking for human attention, demonstrate human effort

Did you use some stuff like https://github.com/CouncilDataProject or roll your own? Been curious about how to integrate local knowledge like this since local news seems to have lost the niche.

derivagralon You are not supposed to install OpenClaw on your personal computer

> Company policy doesn't apply to their personal computing.

Sure, it'll come over as "oh I'm just running an experiment" after your infra/security teams notice. Seen @ public company before current ai hype.

derivagralon Claws are now a new layer on top of LLM agents

Nontechnical people I know are buying hardware to run claws on. As I understand it, the innovation here isn't the tech but in availability/ease of access.

derivagralon Why Single-Payer Health Insurance Fails

I had always thought the primary focus on single-payer was risk pool economics, not administrative efficiency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_pool

derivagralon Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

> buyers think they’re buying domestic

This is hard to tell from the discussion, but are you defending this practice?

derivagralon An engineer's perspective on hiring

> this also loses you taste

I won't forget the in-person interview round where I coded a frontend visualization for a data graph (tracking global shipping), then fielded a post-work general interview round from the whole company (~10 ppl) about specifics and "choices" made during a rush to finish. I ended up not going due to comp, but they were acquired months later. Life is funny.

derivagralon Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process

Late thought, but you could set up "beacon" locations for each client to pull a local grid derived from coordinates?

Wouldn't solve that 1s latency thing, but might be interesting in other applications.

derivagralon Microsoft extends free Windows 10 security updates into 2026

That free upgrade refuses to work with my hardware. I am glad they are continuing security, but they are literally forcing me to install another OS (as I understand the security difference).

derivagralon Alpha Centauri

This project improves the AI, but might not be quite what you want?

https://github.com/induktio/thinker

derivagralon Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)

> "feel" systems

I used to play a tcg a bit too seriously, and sometimes seeing incorrect game states would trigger something. Part of tracking game states and derivations I guess. Only sometimes helpful in software.

derivagralon The U.S. Housing Market Has Nearly 500k More Sellers Than Buyers

Even the article points out this analysis includes both condos and single-family homes, despite their wildly different demand situations.

derivagralon US vs. Google amicus curiae brief of Y Combinator in support of plaintiffs [pdf]

The average consumer now sees mostly ads above the fold. Also, lots of internal stuff like this coming out. Not sure how this is meant to benefit the consumer aside from "they have to love what we deign to give them."

https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-search-and-chrome-bo...

derivagralon Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4

Some time ago, this was important to decipher the marketing behind MongoDB. Their benchmarks ran with a loose isolation (read_uncommitted iirc) that didn't guarantee a durable flush, and they'd benchmark against defaults from postgres, etc, which didn't use this isolation.

Clearly it worked for them, but I spent a few different stints cleaning up after developers who didn't know this sort of thing.

derivagralon Era of U.S. dollar may be winding down

Thanks for the link. My memory from that time had it as "merely" excel issues, but as described it is a fair bit worse than that.

derivagralon Buffett to step down following six-decade run atop Berkshire

Generally the latter. The very short version is that he focused on cash flow, and liked (re) insurance due to success managing float and risk. From there, he'd buy/invest stable businesses and brands. Insurance wasn't his first go, he started bookie work as a kid.

As for saving, he was the guy with a big pile of money in '08 (and other times). Someone you call when your business is dying or you want to retire; he gets the deal, not you. His Bank of America warrant play was a big one from that time.

I didn't finish snowball, but the first half goes over a lot of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snowball%3A_Warren_Buffett...

derivagralon Can China fight America alone?

Did archive strip the author, or is this an unattributed piece? I became curious due to some of the non-neutral adjectives used.

derivagralon OpenAI asks White House for relief from state AI rules

I agree this would be a positive direction, but something that gives me pause is the forced upgrades and hardware cycle of both mac and windows now. They both scan files in your system constantly for various reasons, so for this purpose you're really stuck on *nix variants, right?

derivagralon Ex-SAP CTO walks away with €7.1M payout after scandal

> which is accounted for in GAAP

This isn't the accounting definition of goodwill; to an accountant, its just "hey you overpaid according to book value." I don't think the HR "goodwill" is formally accounted for.

https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/business/gaap-treatment-of...

derivagralon Show HN: Filter out engagement bait and politics on your X/Twitter feed

Cool idea! I had something similar for using LLMs as an intermediary not for spam but for "boring" local news matching to your profile. Court stuff, town meetings on youtube, that kind of thing.

derivagralon Extracting financial disclosure and police reports with OpenAI Structured Output

My (admittedly aged) experience with XBRL is that each company was able to define its own fields/format within that spec, and that most didn't agree on common names for common fields. Parsing it wasn't fun.

derivagralon America's best-paid CEOs have the worst-paid employees

As I understand it, with low (<1%) interest rates... Take a low-interest loan against a % of your wealth. If you can get the loan, then it seems like you get to have your cake (unrealized appreciation gains) and eat it too (non-income money now.)

Not riskless, but there's a lot of upside.

derivagralon Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Leaked Stanford Talk

Not just one I guess?

https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

derivagralon Deals with the devil aren't what they used to be

This goes somewhat deeper than you might expect. "Literal" spells are for sale on e.g. ebay, and presumably authenticity/belief are managed like reputation?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/bn_7023443545

derivagralon Oldest white wine in the world found in a first-century tomb in Spain

You say that, but us humans have quite the history!

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...

derivagralon Deterioration of local community a major driver of loss of play-based childhood

> when it was non-white immigrants

Irish and Italians in my area would beg to differ. I'll grant it wasn't federal policy, at least.

derivagralon Amazon owes $525M in cloud-storage patent fight, US jury says

> The large incumbents would simply poach away key people and have that R&D in a month!

This reads to me like those key people have no incentive to stay after applying their knowledge to the org.