Hacker News Reader

falcor84on The Amazon tax

>"The best" is not a static product. If Amazon had no way for vendors to showcase their product ... Would you want to live in a world in which you CAN'T bump your placement?

Agreed about it not being static, but I don't see why ads should be that answer. The easiest way to "bump" a product is just sell it for less for an introduction period, so that people sorting Low->High will see it before the current highest rated one, at least until they get high ratings, and then can increase the price. If they're going to be losing money on marketing, it would be nicer if it goes to consumers.

falcor84on Constantine's Bridge Has Surfaced from Beneath the Danube

http://archive.today/2e7Gx

There's no paywall, but I couldn't see the content with all more popups.

falcor84on Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents

There's a clear and significant difference between content that a company created itself, and the data they collected from their customers.

falcor84on GIMP Development Update

Well, they weren't quite wrong - it is an order of magnitude easier to reverse engineer an xml-based format than a binary one, especially now with LLMs.

falcor84on AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

Enzymes haven't introduced any fundamentally new capabilities. Any reaction they catalyze could just happen on its own.

falcor84on AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

Wait, why are you not worried?

falcor84on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

I wouldn't be surprised if it is in some places, but nevertheless I wonder - is there a good reason for that? I don't think any lawmaker actually wants tax calculations to have the potential of not halting, right? ... right?

falcor84on France's tax authority had data stolen on 680k taxpayers

It was really hard for me to parse that headline. I'd instead suggest:

Hacker claims exfiltrating data on 680,000 French taxpayers.

falcor84on AI is removing the middle class of software engineering?

I don't accept that argument. As I see it, laws should be structured as data rather than code, using a clean non-Turing-Complete DSL for any embedded logic and calculations. Maybe there would still be occasional situations when new software features are needed, but it should be a rare occurrence rather than on every new change.

falcor84on The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

Interesting, so based on this, do you think that Socrates would have been more ok with learning from an AI that can speak back to defend its claims (assuming we address the sycophantic tendencies) than with learning from "frozen" books?

falcor84on The Tragedy of the Cognitive Commons

>Every time the AI solves a problem that I would not have been able to efficiently solve alone, it has replaced an interaction that previously would have happened with a mentor/supervisor/code reviewer.

I suppose that Socrates would strongly agree, seeing how the same argument could be applied to learning from a book.

falcor84on Muse Glimmer: Meta's open model built for always-on local agents. 30B parameters

> Built for agents that don't stop with reliable tool-calling, persistent state across restarts, and self-managed memory across hours-long sessions.

That "don't stop with reliable tool-calling" part took me a while to parse. I'm not sure which exact punctuation mark is needed there (comma, colon, em-dash?), but this is one of those examples of a sentence that would probably be easier to read if it were written by an LLM.

falcor84on Nearest Pint

You're off by a factor of 10: 14k/150 is ~93 residents per pub.

falcor84on 99% of My Website Traffic Is Bots

It's a sequence of thin lines, between using Chrome out of the box, to using something like Brave, to using a highly customized Zen Browser, to having ChatGPT look up a particular page for you, to using a small BeautifulSoup/scrapy script to scrape dozens of pages, to scraping the entire web. And at every point on this spectrum it's humans driving a "user agent" tool to make requests and process responses on their behalf.

falcor84on A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

Well agreed, but it's not new, the web has been actively made user hostile by every website owner and their "273 partners".

falcor84on Crash experiences of highly automated vehicles and human drivers

>Results: Overall, 22% of L4 crash involvements were deemed police-reportable or maybe police-reportable, and two thirds of these occurred in driverless operation. L4 vehicles were unlikely to be the striking vehicle or primary contributor to crashes. Waymo L4 vehicles in driverless operation had police-reportable crash involvement rates 68% lower than human drivers in the same areas and years. Waymo’s rate of rear-ending another vehicle was 91% lower; its vehicles’ rate of being rear-ended was 40% lower. These results apply only to the L4 vehicles in driverless operation that were studied.

That's impressive stats, coming from what seems to be an independent org.

Edit: I just saw previous discussion on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49026276

falcor84on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)

Sorry, I'm confused. My formulation "experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person" and your "topic experts overestimate how much the average person knows about it" seem semantically identical to me, just from a different side of the relation. What nuance did I miss?

falcor84on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)

There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person.

And of course there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/

falcor84on Taylor Farms has rewritten its cyclospora statement four times in sixteen days

> Especially because it takes weeks before the infected start showing symptoms.

I just wanted to say that your phrasing here is a fabulously ominous one for the first episode of an HBO show.

falcor84on The session you cannot take with you

Sorry about the nitpicking, but s/monopoly/duopoly/

falcor84on I made a game where you build a CPU from logic gates

Yes, pretty much, but stopping at the cpu level (about the first half of the course).

falcor84on Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

I appreciate the grammar refresher, but my comment was about a monopoly on AI being very unlikely rather than it being an ontological impossibility.

What am I missing? Why should we be concerned about AI leading to a monopoly? And for which company?

falcor84on Now is the time to give LLMs access to the ACM digital library

What monopoly? What I'm seeing over these last 3 years is the fastest and fiercest competition I could imagine.

falcor84on Sam Altman is ready to decelerate

While I'm as cynical as anyone, for what it's worth, it seems to me that such deceleration is broadly in line with their founding charter, where they wrote:

> We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project. We will work out specifics in case-by-case agreements, but a typical triggering condition might be “a better-than-even chance of success in the next two years.”

https://openai.com/charter/

falcor84on AI companies spend record sums on Washington lobbying

You're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.

falcor84on Fields Medals 2026

I don't get the argument. It sounds to me like you're saying that because my own chess skills are insufficient to allow me to have a proper game with a grandmaster and I end up losing on move 10 because after a stupid blunder, then I should conclude that this grandmaster is just a tool?

falcor84on Fields Medals 2026

> Do you feel like you're having a conversation with a peer when you prompt an LLM in the topic you're an expert of? For the love of God, I'd hope not.

Yes, I do feel that. Make of it what you will.

falcor84on Fields Medals 2026

But it's not the same thing. I went through this conversation between Terry Tao and ChatGPT about the Jacobian Conjecture counterexample [0] and it looks a lot more like a conversation between peers than him using a tool.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49010345

falcor84on What happens when the information runs out

Maybe you forgot to put "Enhance" in the prompt?