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potamic

2,387 karma · joined August 22, 2020

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potamic··on President pardons 9 for Clean Air violations for 'fixing their car'
I think they're more talking about systemic effects resulting from such a concept. When you have unchecked power concentrated at a single position, that position will inevitably use that power for their own personal gain, which in the case of pardons happens by enabling crime.
potamic··on Show HN: Pieces – Social network for people
The problems with social networks is pretty widely understood. Simply acknowledging them as problems, with a promise to tackle, is not enough to attract people imo. It would help to go into detail how exactly you propose to solve them, what is it you would do different where others have tried and failed?
potamic··on Mystery identity of 'Green Boots' climber is finally solved after DNA test
In some cases leaving people behind to die as well.

https://apnews.com/article/pakistan-porter-death-k2-norwegia...

potamic··on Fintech Engineering Handbook
Why content-addressed storage? I'm assuming this is mostly for auditability after the fact? Wouldn't it make sense to use some business identifier to be able to refer it back easily?
potamic··on US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia
Money in this context is just proxy for value. You have exchanged cash for an equal value of stock. After this either could go up or down in value as the market determines. Sometimes the market doesn't like one kind of cash even and that value can reduce. On the other hand, if everyone is invested into a certain kind of cash then it's unlikely that cash would ever lose its value. Stocks have to work the same way fundamentally. The difference so far has been the volume at which these transactions happen. But since 2008, the volume of stock transactions has been growing exponentially. Has it crossed a critical mass ensuring its value will be propped up for a really long time?
potamic··on US AI stock sell-off shakes markets from Wall Street to Asia
All these media people who write about markets need to adjust their perspectives on what a sell-off means. A 2% reduction for a market cap of 80 trillion dollars still leaves about 78 trillion dollars in the market. The way the market behaves when there's 78 trillion dollars would be very different from how it would if there were 20 trillion dollars. With volumes of these kind, the instrument becomes a currency in itself causing a sort of runaway effect that will keep it going. When everyone's money is in the market, would the market ever fall?
potamic··on Midjourney Medical
What parameters were higher than expected? The critical ones, glucose, electrolytes, lipids should stay low when fasting.
potamic··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
I was looking for something like contributoriq but never came across this. Where do you market these mainly?
potamic··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)
Astroturfing is the biggest problem for online forums now. Bots can hide behind residential IPs and AI can generate tonnes of innocuous slop to overwhelm all other content. No human moderation will be able to keep up with it. Anyone building an online forum should think hard about this, I don't think it'll be easy to solve.
potamic··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
Sure, but only to the means where they see a multiple. And sometimes that be at odds with the fundamental value prop of a business.
potamic··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
I think you misread my comment, I might've been lazy in constructing it. I don't mean to mentor anyone, rather I'm putting out my read of the situation so there's a common ground over which to discuss.

For me, raising $100m when it's not needed doesn't add up. Nobody lends money with the idea to "keep it, just in case". There are always commitments and expectations and obligations to meet those expectations. So when they said they didn't really need to raise, while also not talking about investor expectations, feels there's more to the situation than is being let on.

potamic··on OpenRouter raises $113M Series B
> We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!

That's a nice narrative but I suspect you're not touching upon the investor pressure side of things. Your earlier investors would be upon you to show a multiple in valuation beyond what the balance sheets can show. The only way to do that is to raise more money.

The problem with this is that you're now beholden to another set of investors who will also expect a multiple on their investment which makes increasing valuation your primary objective, even to the detriment of the business. With a margin business you could sustain for a long time even when the market stagnates, but you've lost that option when you first took money from someone. It's an all or nothing play now.

potamic··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
> if the sales team call you make sure legal is in the room.

What's the deal? It couldn't harm just listening to sales, could it?

I presume legal would it be involved before anything is signed in any case?

potamic··on The Making of Indian Statistics
This was a great read unfortunately tainted by horrible graphics. If the publisher is reading this, please consider this feedback.

1. Animations are meant to distract by design, and putting them where someone is deeply engrossed in the article, disengages from whatever you're reading and breaks the flow.

2. Scrolling animations are fine for non-functional elements like intros, but I couldn't get all the folders open easily and have to fiddle around with the scroll to be able to see the artifacts.

3. Probably the worst of all, I was acutely aware of the main logo altering (someone took their name too seriously) constantly in the corner of my eye. This was so jarring, I found myself hurrying up to finish the article.

4. Twice my browser tab crashed on this page. While not strictly a design consideration, more moving parts means more chances of something breaking. Do you want to compromise the article because some graphics didn't work?

The article itself was really good. Very informative and interesting. I wanted to sit down and take it in leisurely, but the graphics were annoying to such an extent I found myself hurrying to finish it up.

But I do understand this can be a very polarizing opinion. There are probably people who absolutely loved the graphics and for whom it added to the experience. But I'm also sure there are people for whom it was nothing but a deterrent. The best approach in such a case is graceful degradation. Allow people who can't stand animations and effects to turn them off and gracefully degrade your page to retain all the functional aspects and still present your core content.

potamic··on Over 97% of the 'Linux' Foundation's Budget Goes Not to Linux
A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.

There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.

potamic··on Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard
As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.
potamic··on Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race
There is the silver medal syndrome.
potamic··on Website streamed live directly from a model
What's the average cost per interaction?
potamic··on Website streamed live directly from a model
Cool concept! What's the idea behind draft version and higher version?
potamic··on OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”
For every investor who has made money, there is another who has lost an equal amount. Money cannot be created, it can only change hands!
potamic··on Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly 'quadruple tap'
> The logic is to cause difficulties for the civilian population so much that they will then turn against the militants

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

potamic··on Reflecting on my own strange year at Uber
> During this period, I was instructed to delete her contact and the text messages between me and her from my phone. I complied, as I was scared to lose my job. Those messages, which would have been favorable to me on the question of who initiated what, are now gone.

This is so weird. I can't imagine a company instructing their employee to delete their personal correspondence. It's such an overreach, it doesn't comprehend.

potamic··on DIY Soft Drinks
> In some countries (like Canada), soft-drink manufacturers are required to disclose the exact amount of each artificial sweetener they use in the drink

Can you share some links? Neither amazon.ca nor walmart.ca seem to show this.

potamic··on Newly created Polymarket accounts win big on well-timed Iran ceasefire bets
Institutions do not stake their own money and are somewhat averse to the direction of the market. As for common people, they're generally not known to do the most rational thing.
potamic··on Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset
Dated Jan 9. When the headlines is in present tense, it is kinda misleading to post as-is at a later time.
potamic··on Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters
Can't see replies, what did they say?
potamic··on The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran
They didn't have any natural resources that could be exploited.
potamic··on Large US company came after me for releasing a free open-source alternative
CEOs turning civil when backlash on their company goes viral is a trope as old as time. I guarantee the CEO green-lighted this entire thing in the first place.
potamic··on I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure
> You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs

Does it do distributed inference? What kinda token speeds do you get?

potamic··on Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water
Off topic, but selecting text and right clicking does not work on this site. I'm finding more and more sites of late where this is the case. Wondering if this is intentional or some issue with a popular framework everyone's using.
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