Hacker News Reader

salynchnewon The next chapter of the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership

You're making the roundabout argument that MSFT/OpenAI will one day go the way of Yahoo/Alibaba, which is wild.

salynchnewon Anthropic irks White House with limits on models’ use

Could also be an article placed by a competitor + a squeaky wheel.

salynchnewon Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him

This is important. There's a difference between charitable donations that are actually for the public interest vs. shadow lobbying by oil companies.

salynchnewon Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins

Most states (at least in the midwest) have not kept up with their obligations when it comes to funding the historical land grand universities ("state" university, etc.).

salynchnewon Colleges see significant drop in international students as fall semester begins

Historically, America has grown its population via immigration.

Whoops!

salynchnewon A Federal Appellate Court Finds the NLRB to Be Unconstitutional

Until the VERY recent Chevron ruling, that's how Congress's powers were intepreted.

The Necessary and Proper Clause (or Elastic Clause) in the Constitution grants (or granted, I guess) this power.

It's wild to think how Republicans used to complain about activist judges, but the current Federalist Society slate has undone at least 100+ years of precedent in the last half dozen.

salynchnewon Tipping point in Gulf Stream may be reached as early as mid-century

Okay. Let's say the low lows of a middle Sweden equivalent climate are brought more in line with current UK temp ranges. Let's say the winter temp goes up +10 degrees Celsius.

What happens then to, say, the Mediterranean at +10 C average temps? Seems quite bad, eh?

salynchnewon The Therac-25 Incident (2021)

Great WTYP episode on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EQT1gVsE6I

salynchnewon Building the mouse Logitech won't make

> After first publishing this article a helpful commenter let me know Logitech released the MX Ergo S in late 2024, with quieter switches, USB-C, and a $20 price increase. Let's just pretend I wrote this article a year ago! Still, at least this project let me avoid some e-waste.

This is slightly funny, but I've noticed over the years that Google's decline in function as a quality search engine has correlated with lots of wasted time on my end, DIY-ing things that I later found to already exist somewhere in the world.

salynchnewon How well does the money laundering control system work?

"This isn't a problem yet" is the argument, but... if you do enough money laundering for long enough and grow the share of crypto as a share of the economy....

salynchnewon How well does the money laundering control system work?

This is, unfortunately, a problem that many tech companies have made worse and more accessible as they have removed friction from these systems.

Most folks will remember the 2019 temination of lootbox key trading for CS:GO on Steam.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50262447

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/research-identifies-suspicious...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266628172...

I'm not sure what good ways there are to manage this generally, other than limiting the size or types of financial transactions that can occur within a system.

salynchnewon Launch HN: Reality Defender (YC W22) – API for Deepfake and GenAI Detection

This is the way. Don't become VirusTotal for deepfakers.

salynchnewon Launch HN: Reality Defender (YC W22) – API for Deepfake and GenAI Detection

I figure the VirusTotal approach would be bad in this case, as it'd be a vector for bad actors to test AI-generated images to see if they pass or not.

salynchnewon Helion begins work on Washington nuclear fusion plant

Wow. A lot to unpack here. "Propose new alloys or composites" is certainly quite a phrase, given the context.

Has an LLM ever generated any complex CAD design like this that has been built & worked?

salynchnewon The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong

This article appears to be focused mostly on the line of argument that there is some cabal of builders that keep housing prices high. This also mostly seems to use Dallas as a case study, which is weird, b/c you can't test a lot of other argument about the effects of building/permitting requirements.

It should probably instead be titled something like "This one anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

salynchnewon Kaleidos – A portable nuclear microreactor that replaces diesel generators

When the DOE comes after your HOA.

salynchnewon A short post on short trains

Note: This only seems to apply to driverless trains.

Depending on the system in questoin, this might be impractical or impossibly dangerous.

salynchnewon CO2 Battery

Square footage and durability of the form factor?

salynchnewon Tram Trains

Weirdly sparse list, here.

Does San Francisco's Muni LRVs somehow not qualify as a tram train network?

https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/muni-metro-light-r...

salynchnewon Texas has banned talking on college campuses at night. Seriously

The article is old. The bill was signed and will take effect Sept. 1.

salynchnewon Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs

ServiceNow research has additional research along these lines:

https://www.servicenow.com/blogs/2025/using-harmless-data-by...

salynchnewon Bill Dilworth, Caretaker of 'The New York Earth Room,' Is Dead

Quite a study in living life as an artist who loves art, but not the industry that has taken it over.

salynchnewon Evidence of a 12,800-year-old shallow airburst depression in Louisiana

Also, the narrative of the paper references the lead author's dad telling him a story as a child based on not-uncommon geological features, alone. Either this is some amazing coincidence or self-confirmation bias on the part of the authors.

salynchnewon Evidence of a 12,800-year-old shallow airburst depression in Louisiana

There are several papers arguing that there is no "one event" a la https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282522... and others.

salynchnewon Guess I'm a rationalist now

Yeah, people were generally terrified of this stuff back before you could make money off of it.

salynchnewon Guess I'm a Rationalist Now

> caring a lot about shrimp welfare (no one else does).

Ah. I guess they are working out ecology through first principles, I guess?

I feel like a lot of the criticism of EA and rationalism does boil down to some kind of general criticism of naivete and entitlement, which... is probably true when applied to lots of people, regardless of whether they espouse these ideas or not.

It's also easier to criticize obviously doomed/misguided efforts at making the world a better place than to think deeply about how many of the pressing modern day problems (environmental issues, extinction, human suffering, etc.) also seem to be completely intractable, when analyzed in terms of the average individual's ability to take action. I think some criticism of EA or rationalism is also a reaction to a creeping unspoken consensus that "things are only going to get worse" in the future.

salynchnewon Long live American Science and Surplus

Tangentially related: SCRAP in SF is looking for a new location.

https://www.scrap-sf.org/newhome

salynchnewon Japan Post launches 'digital address' system

An address addressing system.

salynchnewon InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel

> All of the historical mass casualty fire storms, involved wooden structure, and steel, concrete,glass, and brick, ended that.

You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.

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

https://nfsa.org/2023/08/22/understanding-combustible-materi...

salynchnewon Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire

After that discussion of draw weight, I can now see why English longbowmen are notable in the the archeological record due their noticeable spinal deformities.

110lbs on a traditional bow? Sheesh.