Hacker News: Agraillo

New comment by Agraillo in "The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime"

Agraillo — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 23:04:02 +0000

No more questions, Your Honor. Forgive my joyful attitude, but it was your choice to participate in this discussion. As you know from your years and thousands of posts, HN threads are often ephemeral and short-lived - and this one is no exception. Or maybe not... because of your active self-defense posting here, I assume for the first time since the arrest. Now dozens of fellow (HN) hackers are querying your nicknames on Google, Algolia, and whatever else they have at hand. I'm not sure they'll find someone who genuinely fights for a more secure world. Or prove me wrong if you wish.

New comment by Agraillo in "The 'untouchable hacker god' behind Finland's biggest crime"

Agraillo — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 18:58:45 +0000

Knowing the timeline of events and the nicknames attributed to him (ryanlol included), some interesting posts can be found. For example, in the period between the CEO starting communication (September 2020) and the clinic's public admission (October 2020) [1], ryanlol replied to a top comment (Oct 3, 2020): "If you’re a hospital or, say, a school district, 'never pay' is simply an unconscionable attitude" [2]. Isn't it a hacker raging at the management that refuses to pay?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vastaamo_data_breach#Backgroun...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24672687

New comment by Agraillo in "Publishing your work increases your luck"

Agraillo — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 11:02:04 +0000

Thanks for sharing. After reading that comment, I realized we should encourage ourselves and others (who are more or less civilized human beings) to be the kind of person who wrote "that's a good thing..." - because fighting trolls is a game with unknown results, but encouraging people works much better. It doesn't always work, though, because sometimes the platform's nature prevents it. Like on Stack Overflow, where commenting on reactions will probably get you downvoted for being off-topic.

New comment by Agraillo in "I know you didn't write this"

Agraillo — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:41:37 +0000

It was funny. On a more serious note, if one works in a sphere where expanding with AI makes "good enough" documents, then I have bad news for him - the sphere has too much redundancy in the first place (the same place that was used for training). So no new information is created in millions of documents made by humans, and this was noticed by the training pattern recognition. You cannot do the same with historical texts; unless we live in a simulation with predictable random generators, the events are random, and there are no rules like "If the king's name starts with a G, he will likely die in the first week of October."

New comment by Agraillo in "History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts"

Agraillo — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 09:30:29 +0000

> Modern LLMs suffer from hindsight contamination. GPT-5 knows how the story ends—WWI, the League's failure, the Spanish flu. This knowledge inevitably shapes responses, even when instructed to "forget.

> Our data comes from more than 20 open-source datasets of historical books and newspapers. ... We currently do not deduplicate the data. The reason is that if documents show up in multiple datasets, they also had greater circulation historically. By leaving these duplicates in the data, we expect the model will be more strongly influenced by documents of greater historical importance.

I found these claims contradictory. Many books that modern readers consider historically significant had only niche circulation at the time of publishing. A quick inquiry likely points to later works by Nietzsche and Marx's Das Kapital. They're possible subjects to the duplication likely influencing the model's responses as if they had been widely known at the time

New comment by Agraillo in "8M users' AI conversations sold for profit by "privacy" extensions"

Agraillo — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:49:45 +0000

Thanks, the last fetched page on archive.org is from 2025-01-26 [1], removed after this date and before 2025-02-13. 155,477 users at the moment, 1 star reviews were mostly about not working. It's interesting that the developers didn't care to remove the button directing to the ff add-on page at least several months after the removal. Maybe was some kind of PR compromise, they probably thought that listing it with linking to a broken page was better than not listing at all.

A review page [2] mentions that this add-on is a peer-to-peer vpn, not having its own dedicated servers that already makes it suspicious.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250126133131/https://addons.mo...

[2] https://www.vpnmentor.com/reviews/urban-vpn/

New comment by Agraillo in "Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books"

Agraillo — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 11:39:44 +0000

Not to argue, but your comment was also thought-provoking, thanks :) It seems like most works of academia are not provoking; rather, they are shaping. Many are written by specialists in the area who carefully choose what to state and suggest, and very often follow the structure of a big "thought" that is further explained and explored. Few pop books that might meet my criteria are basically digests, but fact-based ones. It's interesting that "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is a middle ground in some sense. Daniel Kahneman is definitely from academia, and in my opinion, he wrote a digest of what he touched on during his career, which was also thought-provoking for me, but not on a big scale.

Can you name some works by the mentioned authors that might be called thought-provoking digests of some area of expertise?

New comment by Agraillo in "Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books"

Agraillo — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:39:29 +0000

After reading the description, I'd say this is one of those books that interprets phenomena around us in a novel way, without claiming we should jump off "the shoulders of giants." There have been several like it in my reading history, but since I can't name them instantly, they probably weren't that thought-provoking.

New comment by Agraillo in "Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books"

Agraillo — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 16:30:49 +0000

If you're talking about the competition part of "Moonwalking..." I hear you. Many would argue that the author's participation in the memory competition glues the book together and adds an entertaining angle. Personally, it sometimes feels boring when the author dedicates too much space to dialogs with memory athletes-focusing on mundane topics instead of techniques or what they learned about memory. Still, there are so many fascinating facts and references that I'm okay with it.

Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books

Agraillo — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 13:05:03 +0000

I read many non-fiction books, but recently noticed that only a few qualify as truly heavy, thought-provoking reads, that you literally can't finish in a manageable time because you keep telling yourself, "Wait a minute," then stop to Google something, run an experiment, or just think deeply. My current example (still unfinished) is "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer. It's mind-blowing - the entire memory universe around us that I never properly explored before.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46254256

Points: 23

# Comments: 18

New comment by Agraillo in "There are things that AIs understand and no human can"

Agraillo — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 23:36:34 +0000

A semi-scary thought came while reading the post: LLMs could talk to each other without humans noticing (for example using a very complex acrostic). But not in the form of chat-to-chat, which not only is rarely used in real life but also won't likely have lasting consequences (the context will eventually be lost). I was thinking that new web content, more and more of it AI-generated, could contain hidden messages that later might be absorbed into the training data of other LLMs. Maybe this leans more toward a plot for a black comedy than a genuine concern, but who knows...

New comment by Agraillo in "An SVG is all you need"

Agraillo — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 10:10:29 +0000

I'd say that html+js suggestion of GP still holds, but with caveats. After all these years, HTML has everything needed for this, including images that can be embedded via the data URI scheme [1].

For example, I once adjusted an Object Pascal interactive program (target: Windows/Win32) for the browser target (FreePascal compiler has the JS target). An intermediate result was a bunch of files that worked locally on desktop but struggled on mobile. With a little help from the SingleFile extension [2], I ended up with a single HTML file containing all functionality and content. It worked great, for example, in MiXplorer's internal HTML viewer. I can't recall the exact details, but the file:/// protocol still had issues in Chrome, Firefox, or both. Anyway, preparing a local address correctly with a keyboard is a challenge so let's just assume that having capable file managers running local html files is enough

Sure, to make this manageable, you need good tools that handle all sides of the task. But at least in theory, the format is fully capable. My only global issue was that the state for locally run HTML files is a kind of ephemeral entity, but for interactive multimedia files, you may consider this obstacle small.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme

[2] https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

New comment by Agraillo in "Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

Agraillo — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:54:39 +0000

Maybe the "rewarding the young" in the top comment is from the genes of savanna humans when they collected fruit, hunted and didn't care about expensive medical procedures because the latter simply didn't exist?

New comment by Agraillo in "Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

Agraillo — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 17:41:37 +0000

> The people paying for everything would get to make the decisions.

Just as a thought experiment: what if the threshold for having a vote was tied to paying a positive amount of personal income tax, and the weight of each vote was proportional to the amount paid? How skewed might such a system be? My first reaction is that in countries with high inequality, the wealthy would disproportionately influence the outcome. However, on the other hand, if people avoid or minimize paying taxes, they would lose the power of a weighted vote, which theoretically could incentivize paying taxes in full.

New comment by Agraillo in "Show HN: Forty.News – Daily news, but on a 40-year delay"

Agraillo — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:17:12 +0000

> Apply a 40-year latency buffer. You get the intellectual stimulation of "Big Events" without the fog of war, because you know the world didn't end.

Sometimes, a sense of time and real social interactions comes from small reflections found in nonfiction books of that era. Not 40, but 50 years ago-taken from a nonfiction book unrelated to politics: Lost! by Thomas Thompson , written in 1975. [1]

> Though he had opposed the Vietnam war, he considered himself a political moderate, certainly not a knee-jerk liberal who cried “fascist” at everything attempted by Richard Nixon

Honestly, I’m not expecting anything good from Trump in the coming years, but this line genuinely gave me hope that American democracy is still not in danger.

[1] https://archive.org/details/lost0000thom_j3f3/page/124/mode/...

New comment by Agraillo in "Google begins showing ads in AI Mode (AI answers)"

Agraillo — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:03:06 +0000

As a regular user of both Perplexity and Google AI Mode, I noticed that this move is more or less organic for the Google layout, but not so for Perplexity (if it decides to implement something similar). While blocks of links at Google are always visible, for Perplexity the block of links related to the question requires a click to be shown. Most users of Perplexity who care about checking sources mostly click the inline links that directly navigate to the pages.

It is also interesting that at first when I started using Perplexity I expected for it to understand my question semantically and then use some derivative (correct) terms to query the web. The reality is that, probably for the sake of speed, the web search is performed first, and then the results are summarized. This leads in many cases to a mixed, somehow embarrassing set of links where one obviously sees that not all links in the block are relevant. Maybe Google uses something similar and both tend not to present the block of links as distilled correct knowledge blocks. But Google made the top-right block smaller and relying on the scrolling so this embarrassing effect might be less pronounced.

New comment by Agraillo in "210 IQ Is Not Enough"

Agraillo — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:11:41 +0000

> The most striking finding came from the 10 pairs with “very dissimilar” educational experiences. In this group, the average IQ difference was 15.1 points. This gap is approaching the average difference seen between two randomly selected, unrelated individuals, which is about 17 points

> The authors note some limitations to their work. The group with “very dissimilar” education contained only 10 twin pairs. While this represents all such published individual data from the last century, it is a small sample size

Thanks, the study is interesting, but needs further research.

New comment by Agraillo in "210 IQ Is Not Enough"

Agraillo — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 18:56:45 +0000

I'd choose "smart people achieve too little." The reason is that, looking at the world around me (more or less) sustaining the lives of more than 8 billion people, I'm sure it's because of the scientific and inventive revelations of a few, not just the hard work of millions. (Sorry, millions, your work is important, but without those few, 99% of us would still spend much of our time just seeking and growing food). If the problem is fixed, maybe those 8 billion (or more) people would have much better, healthier lives without the risk of the upcoming climate fiasco. Just my two cents.

New comment by Agraillo in "Cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use"

Agraillo — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:41:50 +0000

Your comment made me see that there are two kinds of "shorts." The best analogy is print magazines. The one you prefer is like when someone tells you that Byte has a short review of a new device - you go to a library, find the issue, and look up the info. TikTok and YouTube Shorts are like glossy magazines often available in waiting rooms, these can be read (or rather consumed) from any page to any page until you're next in the queue. The mere existence and success of such glossy magazines means there will always be demand for this kind of consumption, this time just on another medium.

New comment by Agraillo in "AI-Generated Country Song Is Topping Billboard Chart. That Should Infuriate Us"

Agraillo — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 12:16:53 +0000

> I don’t think country fans have the discerning musical taste that the author somehow expects here

I'm not sure he assumes this, the author (Aaron Ryan) also was briefly interviewed at NPR [1] where the wording is neutral

   And I think that's more so in country music than other genres, which have depended on computers a lot more. Country music has really prided itself on the authenticity in songwriting and in music. And there's a large segment of country music fans that don't even like things like Auto-Tune, and so I think asking country fans and artists to accept AI is a big pill to swallow for a lot of people.

The mystery of who is behind it is not solved, but for another AI artist, Xania Monet, there is more information. In this CBS News fragment [2], the real author of the AI hits, Telisha "Nikki" Jones, defends herself and even shares how she actually works with Suno to create the songs. It’s interesting because, this time, the lyrics are human-originated. To me, she seems like a mix of a music manager, music producer, and co-author all in one. Probably, after her talent is recognized, the label might offer her co-authors, musicians, and others to collaborate with and create hits with real people. But without this first step, when she had to rely on her own skills and opportunities, it wouldn't have been possible. Like an example from AI-less era - without the $7,000-made "El Mariachi," there wouldn’t be Robert Rodriguez as we know him.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/11/10/nx-s1-5604320/breaking-rust-i...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/video/creator-ai-artist-speaks-amid-...