Hacker News Reader

jonplacketton Anthropic acquires Stainless

Are they buying these for the tech, the people or to prevent supply chain hacks?

jonplacketton OpenAI and Government of Malta partner to roll out ChatGPT Plus to all citizens

> for one year

So it’s basically I giant government-sponsored free trial.

jonplacketton UK sovereign LLM inference

Tbf the title only says sovereign _inference_

jonplacketton What the Hell Was Going on with Cigarette Ads in the 70s?

Hug of death

jonplacketton Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did

Biphasic sleep is a lot different to be woken up randomly by a child though.

jonplacketton Why modern parents feel more sleep deprived than our ancestors did

> One study, for example, found that first-time mothers in Germany on average get an hour less of sleep per night in the first three months after their baby is born than they did pre-pregnancy. Fathers lose a third of an hour.

Yeah but how many times were they woken up in the night?

With a baby you might still get 8 hours total but you’re woken up 4 times a night which makes that sleep way less effective.

jonplacketton Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)

Yeah it comes and goes doesn’t it. My 8 year old started waking us up twice a night for a week a while back!

But subjecting non-parents to 9 years of sleep deprivation would definitely be against the Geneva convention.

jonplacketton Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)

Ah thanks! This is the nicest response to a comment I’ve received.

Hang in there with the 6 month old. It gets easier every month. Mine are 4 and 8 now. Sometimes I really miss having a tiny baby - but I do like sleeping now.

jonplacketton Becoming a father shrinks your cerebrum (2022)

The control group should still be sleep deprived for 6 months and see what that does to their brain.

jonplacketton The USB Situation

It would help if computers / phones had an easy way to just identify a cable when you plug it in. Is this hard to do or just something normal people never care about?

jonplacketton Pentagon spending on drones jumps from $225M to $55B in one year

What is weird is that all these current super expensive high tech weapons like aircraft carriers, f22s are basically like cavalry in the tank era.

Drones (and cheap-ish ballistic missiles) have turned it all on its head.

In the war with Iran you have the USA shooting down 50k drones with multiple multi-million dollar missiles. Some of the THAAD missiles are over 10 million each - and you have to launch 2 to get an interception.

Meanwhile they have to keep the aircraft carriers hundreds of miles off shore or they’ll be sunk with hypersonic missiles.

The economics are crazy but even if you’re willing to pay, the capacity to build enough isn’t there either.

jonplacketton Online age verification is the hill to die on

The reason is that this whole push for age verification is nothing to do with actually stopping kids seeing the content. If it was then this kind of solution would be being legislated for. It’s just about making everyone identifiable.

jonplacketton Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930

Question: could you train a model like this from before a known but important scientific breakthrough happened and see if it is able to work it out.

At least then you know the answer yourself and know it’s something that can be reasonably worked out.

jonplacketton Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

A purist just wants it to be about the runner not the shoe.

jonplacketton Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

This is not the point

jonplacketton Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

There’s info in one of the other threads about better carb intake too.

But yeah at this point, “it’s the shoes, stupid” should defo be the main part of the conversation.

jonplacketton Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

These were Sabastian Sawe's splits

5km - 14:14 10km - 28:35 15km - 43:10 20km - 57:21 Half - 60:29 25km - 71:41 30km - 1:26:03 35km - 1:39:57 40km - 1:53:39 Finish - 1:59:30

Yomif Kejelcha also ran sub-two, clocking 1:59:41 on his debut marathon

You have to feel for Kejelcha - breaking 2h marathon and not even winning the race!

jonplacketton Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

Sometimes they have big running machines with a crash mat around them running at 2h marathon pace at running shows. I’ve o ly seen them on video - no one can keep up with it for more than 30 odd seconds. It’s INSANE they are running this fast.

Also bear in mind running a single mile under 4 mins was considered impossible for a long time.

jonplacketton Tell HN: An app is silently installing itself on my iPhone every day

Yesterday I put my AirPod in and squeezed it, expecting Spotify to play - but it must have quit, and instead my mac opened up Music - and that album was STILL there and started to play. How many years has it been?

jonplacketton Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition

But it says it’s the same for decaf. That is more interesting

jonplacketton SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B

Every now and then I feel like I got a handle on AI and it makes sense. Then something like this happens and either my whole concept of it is wrong, or this makes no sense and is insane.

jonplacketton NIST scientists create 'any wavelength' lasers

I wondered this too - why are you being downvoted for asking?

All the difficulty to create that laser it seems fair enough to ask!

jonplacketton Darkbloom – Private inference on idle Macs

I think the point they’re making though is that the numbers seem too good to be true.

ie. Does anyone know the payback time for a B100 used just for inference? I assume it’s more than a couple of months? Or is it just training that costs so much?

jonplacketton Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others

This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it?

Like the point of being more intelligent than someone or something is to an extent being able to simulate their brain and thinking with your own brain.

We’re cleverer than animals because we can simulate all their actions before they do them.

You can’t simulate something more advanced than yourself.

jonplacketton Japanese, French and Omani vessels cross Strait of Hormuz

Maybe do some research before just dispatching random thoughts

https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/europe/2026/04/03/franc...

jonplacketton Running Gemma 4 locally with LM Studio's new headless CLI and Claude Code

So wait what is the interaction between Gemma and Claude?

jonplacketton Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

They read The Three Body problem

jonplacketton Britain today generating 90%+ of electricity from renewables

What company are you with for that tariff? Do you have solar panels or something?

jonplacketton Judge blocks Pentagon effort to 'punish' Anthropic with supply chain risk label

It’s all a big PR campaign. They will reveal shortly that they used Claude as their legal team.