Hacker News Reader

firasdon OpenEaNasir: Public-domain machine translations of the famous copper complaint

I was surprised to see that Wikipedia didn't have the text of Nanni's historic (literally) complaint and realized there weren't any English translations that were clearly free of copyright concerns. So I had various AI models take a crack at it and the text is now quite usable and sharable

firasdon AI agents shape experts' judgment calls

"Along the way, the analysts had to make four choices between two reasonable options, such as whether to measure productivity as crop yield per hectare or as yield per unit of operating cost, and then make a final decision. To see whether they were making these calls themselves, we set up each analyst’s agent to favor one option on each decision, which the analysts weren’t told about. Which way the agents would “lean” would be decided by coin flip. The agent was told to make the best honest case for its lean, to change its mind if the evidence demanded it, and never to mislead.

Across the four analytical choices, analysts went with their agent’s lean 86% of the time. If the agent’s input made no difference, we’d expect about 50%. "

firasdon Build your own decision model

I think part of what made Jev catch on is that the API is like an if(...) or switch statement

People are just so used to the chat style APIs that they didn't even consider doing things like sending a bunch of emojis to a chat model and then asking for the optimal one in this context etc. Also chat models are pricier for the same behavior and can also output something random like a refusal

But yeah ironically I think in the initial breakthrough LLM paper on GPT-3 in 2020 some of the multiple choice questions were answered by comparing token probabilities of specific continuations rather than fill in the blank

firasdon Mark Zuckerberg: "Cambridge Analytica" (2017)

This was a fake scandal. "Democrats seem to like Harry Potter" is not some genius psychographic ad targeting strategy. The Cambridge Analytica people were selling snake oil

That said they did buy user data from a quiz app which is not really how you were supposed to use the Facebook Platform so that still wasn't really FB's fault I think

So the real issue was just people trying to blame the 2016 election (adverse to their interests if they were anti-Trump) on Zuck.

Heck to this day Ben Shapiro is one of the biggest podcasts and Tucker's show is even bigger than him so the right wing is a real force in American politics and not just propped up by FB's old newsfeed algo

firasdon Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word

I've been thinking a good way to understand the 'sociology' of information sharing is the structure of capital or prestige in an ecosystem

For example, it's not an accident that software development is a very 'open' industry. You can learn anything about making a NextJS shopping cart online. Because nobody is really getting value by holding this knowledge as secret 'alpha'

On the flipside for example, academics, scientists and journalists often have very different incentives. Getting the credit for being the first to talk about an issue is what matters for their career so they are likely to be guarded about what they're working on or what their methods are

And this is why Zuck open sources LLMs; he is not really selling tokens in some infra service so keeping the output generation scarce doesn't really matter to Meta

(Joel Spolsky had an adjacent idea saying "Smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements" like Billboard publishes a lot of music journalism for free but monetizes their chats/data)

Anyway, so this explains what's going on with this electronics retailer--while it is still a perspective and effort that is uncommon--publishing the schematic is not competitive with the shop unless you start manufacturing and open up another shop

firasdon The Philippines' big offshoring industry is growing despite AI

Overall it seems we don't have good intuitions for what kinda work AI 'displaces'. Years of hand-wringing about programmers being put out of a job and instead programmers are the ones paying $200/mo for LLMs

And on the flipside a lot of AI vendor ideas like helping doctors turn voice transcripts into notes has just been annoying for the prospective user--they feel they may as well type it up themselves if they then have to review and correct the AI notes

firasdon Why do we assume everyone should be working?

In some ways a lot of 'work' may already be seen as an indirect form of UBI. Like if an American employee is making $60/yr sending a few emails per day, probably 50 years ago they'd have to do a very different type of job to make the same kinda money. So maybe economic growth over the decades is being absorbed into 'more chill' jobs

firasdon Is it all just vapourware?

I wonder if there is cargo culting afoot

There are definitely guys in some companies just pointing an agent swarm at 50 Github tickets and saying "go get 'em boys" and hence need a lot of orchestration tools but for the rest of us do we really need the AI to do all the build steps and the testing steps... or do we just need the new feature that runs when the button is clicked and then we can check it out in the browser ourselves. The code gen is what I need the AI for, not the 'smoke tests' and the tsc finagling. I'm willing to spend some mental calories myself in figuring this feature out step by step

Actually this makes me wonder if some people are just not very into building step by step like "okay first let's check the JSON shape the endpoint returns", "okay now let's make a simple form", etc

firasdon Cool URIs Don't Change (1998)

What this page doesn't mention is 301 or 302 redirects. SEO has made "old URLs staying live" more of a widespread concern than it was at the time. And WordPress etc ship with inbuilt redirects upon slug rename

So to a large extent this has been mitigated and not using the suggestion here, which is to create a permanent URL ontology upfront

That said eventually neglect, removal, reorgs (or simply websites going offline) still happens... but the way the suggested goal has been advanced is due to becoming a business priority and with redirects and CMSes as tech to help

That said one suggestion made here turned out to be very useful and indeed is the default in WP:

   http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs

If you use date as part of the taxonomy then -- as Tim BL says here:

> A reason for using a topic area as part of the URI is that responsibility for sub-parts of a URI space is typically delegated, and then you need a name for the organizational body - the subdivision or group or whatever - which has responsibility for that sub-space. This is binding your URIs to the organizational structure. It is typically safe only when protected by a date further up the URI (to the left of it): 1998/pics can be taken to mean for your server "what we meant in 1998 by pics", rather than "what in 1998 we did with what we now refer to as pics."

firasdon Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud

Seems they use the nickname 'ScaleX' to discuss Theranos

firasdon Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud

Right I'm not saying that Zuck's staff doesn't know how to calculate MAU or ARR. I'm saying I'm not sure we can trust the 'median' (median on a scale of super-scrupulous to outright-dishonest) CEO is not counting things like inactive cohorts, newsletter subscribers, website hits when counting 'users'... or being very optimistic about whether a customer will renew when calculating 'recurring revenue'

I may be wrong! But I am definitely giving such claims the side-eye

firasdon Analyzing data from Silicon Valley ventures and founders prosecuted for fraud

A lot of 'numbers' startups cite are basically fake I think. Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement to TechCrunch you have no idea what they are actually calculating

But there is a clear line that gets crossed if you start actually making a database of millions of synthetic users and that's what happened with 'Frank' that sold to JP Morgan and eventually the founder was prosecuted

firasdon Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change

It's interesting that so much of the 'Anti-Big-Tech' movement over the last decade focused on tangential things like potentially forcing Google to sell Chrome or breaking up Facebook while Apple had this chokehold on the actual financial transactions in their ecosystem.

App store fees is a much more obvious example of something subject to regulatory scrutiny vs what much of what Biden's FTC under Lina Khan was working on.

So yeah there is a weird pass this company gets

firasdon Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

Yeah... If you even say to Claude I want to make an app like github.com/user/repo it's not gonna just clone it and do some touch ups. Anything can happen of course, but my spidey sense says generally AI won't fork a project unasked (just because of the implied maintenance burden of applying future patches from upstream if nothing else)

firasdon Mea Culpa – Dark Hours

So the thing that drove this person to Gruber et al's notice is an RSS Reader that doesn't count how many new items are pending? It's the kind of thing that can get you significant mindshare among the last few people who use RSS readers and have disproportionate impact on the discourse apparently

firasdon Retraction: The App Store Rejection of the Week That Was a Correct Rejection

This is basically the Bill Clinton move ('is there a relationship' can be parsed differently from 'was there a relationship')...

Is there astrology in this app? No. Was there..? Yes. And the person complaining skipped mentioning that detail about their app

firasdon We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

My understanding is: your proposal is not very different from what Shopify is doing except they are tracking 'reserved units' (one per row) and you are proposing tracking 'orders' as the temporary state to then reconcile back with inventory quantities.

firasdon We replaced Redis with MySQL for inventory reservations and it scaled

Makes sense... if you are counting something in MySQL and now your counter is in Redis that's already strange

But I guess the point is that even in the MySQL scenario the 'reserved_quantities' is almost like a temporary table so either way is not the 'Real' inventory

firasdon My server is a phone now

Yeah ‘old phones’ are pretty capable devices.

I’ve wondered for a while if they could be used as an extension to your laptop like the old 80s PCs where you would plug in hardware.

So ‘make it a server’ is the obvious way I guess, and then you could do things like render webpages on there and then stream them as images to your actual computer (like the now shutdown Mighty app), or run ffmpeg on there to convert a video, etc

firasdon LinkedIn Feed Blocker

I've been experimenting with posting on LinkedIn and realized what the deal is. Basically it's a lot less hostile than other social media for people with no pre-existing audience: on Twitter you can post and nobody cares, in HN you can submit and nobody cares, on Substack you can write a personal blog post and google doesn't care to show it in search results, on Youtube you make a video and nobody cares, etc. (And let's set aside even more difficult stuff like making a podcast and hoping anyone cares)

Meanwhile on LinkedIn if you post your thoughts on something, share an article, or mention a project they give you a good push to at least a few dozen people and you may see a like or two from a 3rd degree contact(!) within minutes. And then they aggressively SEO the feed too so now if someone Googles your name your LinkedIn posts will show up

firasdon U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

Just looked into some Nemotron stats

Looks like on <https://arena.ai> agent arena (grouped by lab) Nvidia is 15/15 (much worse than Thinky and Mistral) and on text arena it's 18/27

On <https://openrouter.ai/models?order=most-popular> I definitely see usage though (probably mostly cause Nemotron 3 Ultra is free) the grouped order is DeepSeek, Tencent, Xiaomi, OpenAI, Z.ai, Nvidia

firasdon U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

Just realized that there are basically no American open models right now ever since the Llama series was abandoned. Basically Gemma and GPT-OSS I guess?

Ah but Mira Murati's new Inkling is Apache 2.0

But it makes sense that if you're a university researcher you are thinking about what's a model that will be open weight and developed over the long term and doesn't raise 'Chyna' concerns in Washington DC

firasdon Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities

I've always felt it's a bit awkward to use terms like 'cyber', 'cyberwarfare' etc it's very Washington D.C. Cybersec would be a better compact term in my book

firasdon What is a product?

The problem is that getting your first user or first $1 is not particularly easier with even the best LLMs to help you. Distribution is brutal — Google doesn’t want to index new sites, Twitter doesn’t want to distribute lowbie posts, right here HN’s /new queue is mercurial ..

So building is faster, but marketing—not so much

firasdon Atomic Clocks

Yup as far as the folder taxonomy thing ISO YYYYMM works fine too

Alphadec is just a timezone free UTC encoding that works down the millisecond so I also use it for snapshots eg

  myscript.py.backup.2026_P5G6_328054_Aug06.txt

So then when I'm doing multiple revisions I don't have to worry about which revision of 20260806's day it was etc. Unix time in ms would work too but Alphadec is a little bit nicer to me than saying myscript.py.backup.1786086462604.txt

firasdon Atomic Clocks

What, Exactly, Is a Clock? To understand atomic time, we must first understand something about clocks.

A clock is, at its core, a marriage of two components: a mechanism that oscillates, or ticks with a steady beat, and a device that counts those beats and displays the time

Yeah but more deeply time is a property of the universe that the clock including atomic clocks are tracking. Kant said it is 'schema' i.e. without understanding time we wouldn't even understand causality so it is the purest possible a-priori concept that doesn't rely on sensory input to learn about

This is why I like using my Alphadec system that splits the year into 26 chunks from A-Z <https://github.com/firasd/alphadec> as my working dir; eg. right now the current Alphadec is '2026_P5M7_200286' so my working dir is Documents/work/2026_P. That way there is a folder system automatically imposed on various .js or .py stuff without having to pre-create a taxonomy since 'time is schema'--I can estimate "that ffmpeg project was in Spring so it must be around 2026_F.."

firasdon Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

Hmm

It’s hard to understand this .. like sure we can select instant but is there an actual model called 5.6 instant? Like is it on LM Arena and OpenRouter or available via API etc

5.5 instant is definitely A Thing it’s even name checked in this OAI post

firasdon Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

There’s no 5.6 instant I think — 5.6 Luna is gonna be the new instant tier model

firasdon Improving GPT‑5.6 Sol in ChatGPT, expanding GPT‑5.6 Luna access for free users

I think it’s a misread to think the default ChatGPT model switching to GPT 5.6 Luna is some sort of desperation move. Keep in mind that Claude .ai never had this extreme stratification between the frontier models and the free tier (Sonnet is available to free users with rate limits).

So 5.6 Luna is just their next version of what they used to call 5.5 instant tier

And 5.x instant models were never much to write home about anyway so the default ChatGPT free model hasn’t been particularly distinctive since 4o

firasdon Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs

I'm saying AI researchers have a bias towards thinking what needs to happen is prompt -> [crunching tokens] -> response rather than prompt -> [orchestrates 5 tools] -> response

In other words 'just add a calculator tool' is not as sexy research-wise as making the model accurately eyeball arithmetic in its chain of thought. Maybe I'm wrong but that seems to be the case