Hacker News: 1980phipsi

New comment by 1980phipsi in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

1980phipsi — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:10:51 +0000

You can deposit checks via the app pretty easily.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Nobody gets promoted for simplicity"

1980phipsi — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 15:40:10 +0000

I attach a copy of the file and then provide a network location for where it is located. Makes it easy for people to just open up a simple copy to look at it and they know where to go to access the original.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978"

1980phipsi — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 16:59:47 +0000

It's packaging an existing product differently than a fully new product. Would still require either new machines or adapting existing machines for it.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III"

1980phipsi — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 13:09:09 +0000

My thinking is that the company creating the game would train the AI in advance (like a generative adversarial network), not that any kind of training would happen on the users' computer. They could periodically send updates or improvements (maybe by having it play in multiplayer or something).

New comment by 1980phipsi in "OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III"

1980phipsi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:24:50 +0000

I would love to see someone use modern machine learning techniques to make a kick ass Civ AI.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Child prodigies rarely become elite performers"

1980phipsi — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 04:57:06 +0000

This sounds like Berkson’s paradox.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores"

1980phipsi — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 16:59:25 +0000

The lack of people in them was the thing about going to one that always felt weird to me.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files"

1980phipsi — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 01:58:26 +0000

I was able to install the D language compiler DMD by providing a .deb file.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69781bb5-cf90-800c-8549-c845259c33...

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Things I've learned in my 10 years as an engineering manager"

1980phipsi — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:52:43 +0000

At the end of the day, the goal is to make a product that people find useful. How that ends up happening is almost completely irrelevant to the people actually using the product.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI"

1980phipsi — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:41:07 +0000

How is this for an ordering:

Good human written docs > AI written docs > no docs > bad human written docs

New comment by 1980phipsi in "What a year of solar and batteries saved us in 2025"

1980phipsi — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 17:39:54 +0000

Any idea why swapping didn't pan out for Tesla? My understanding is they are doing that in China.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

1980phipsi — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 19:53:28 +0000

> Anyone familiar with basic economics is pulling their hair out reading this, because there's one extremely obvious way to lower the price of building new housing: Reducing or eliminating tariffs on construction equipment and materials and ensuring a robust supply of low-cost labor.

And just in general reducing the restrictions on building in places with high rent to income ratios.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "State of the Fin 2026-01-06"

1980phipsi — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 17:52:37 +0000

Yeah, I don't mind paying for something, but they broke a bunch of stuff last year and it's still not fixed. That's what annoys me about plex.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention"

1980phipsi — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:45:31 +0000

> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.

MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time.

For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "GOG Patrons- Join gamers keeping classics alive"

1980phipsi — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 17:03:38 +0000

I think it's reasonable to argue something like, "some IP protection is good, but too much is bad, and we probably have too much right now." It would be impossible to calibrate the laws so that the amount of IP protection is socially optimal, but we can look at the areas where the protection is too much and start there.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Imagine 130M Washing Machines"

1980phipsi — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:47:12 +0000

>> A few billionaires might have additional vacation homes, but they are not going to consume a million homes, much less 10 million.

> Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment.

I'm sure he is not unfamiliar with either...

Not sure what landlords have to do with anything since washing machines are often included as part of a rental (or the apartment doesn't have a washing machine, but what does that have to do with landlords?).

And vacant property investment is a small fraction of total property ownership in the US. It's more common that people have a vacation home and rent it out part of the year.

>> progressive consumption taxes

> When someone proposes one, let me know.

They have been proposed...many times. In fact, the US's system has elements of a progressive consumption tax already since people can put retirement savings in IRAs/401ks. What would make it a more complete progressive consumption tax would be to either raise the limits on contributions to these retirement accounts (and remove income limits), and also introduce accounts like these that are meant as more universal savings vehicles. This is preferred (in my view at least) to just cutting dividend and capital gains rates to 0% since that would benefit existing rich people.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Weighting an average to minimize variance"

1980phipsi — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:16:09 +0000

Let w be the vector of weights and S be the comformable matrix of covariances. The portfolio variance is given by w’Sw. So just minimize that with whatever constraints you want. If you just asssume weights sum to one, it is a classic quadratic optimization with linear equality constraints. Well known solutions.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term"

1980phipsi — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:52:53 +0000

> It is also important to note that, until recently, the GenAI industry’s focus has largely been on training workloads. In training workloads, CUDA is very important, but when it comes to inference, even reasoning inference, CUDA is not that important, so the chances of expanding the TPU footprint in inference are much higher than those in training (although TPUs do really well in training as well – Gemini 3 the prime example).

Does anyone have a sense of why CUDA is more important for training than inference?

New comment by 1980phipsi in "TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term"

1980phipsi — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:35:47 +0000

Aka vertical integration.

New comment by 1980phipsi in "Weighting an average to minimize variance"

1980phipsi — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 18:08:31 +0000

It’s much clearer when you write these problems in terms of matrix math. The minimum variance portfolio is very important in finance.