Hacker News: Alex3917

New comment by Alex3917 in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

Alex3917 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 17:11:56 +0000

I think the parent comment was a reference to the famous “Economists must learn to subtract” commercial that AdBusters ran.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

Alex3917 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:34:00 +0000

> checking any text for watermarks requires sending the entire text to Anthropic

Couldn’t it be checked in the TEE using confidential computing to keep Anthropic’s algorithm secret?

New comment by Alex3917 in "Minecraft Java raises recommended memory to 16GB ahead of Vulkan transition"

Alex3917 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:36:28 +0000

Really? I still have my 9.95 PayPal email receipt from buying the game in 2010, but I don’t have a single email sent to that email address about any sort of migration.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Magnolias Are So Old That They're Pollinated by Beetles, Not Bees"

Alex3917 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:36:48 +0000

Email me and I can connect you with some. There is a FB group for folks growing them in the NYC area, plus a list of all the parks where they are planted.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Scientists find molecular-level evidence for two structures in liquid water"

Alex3917 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:24:50 +0000

> Homeopathy was invented after the discovery of germ theory [1][2]. So not really.

Germ Theory was only finally accepted (after initially being rejected) due to the advent of evidence-based medicine, which homeopathy popularized.

Sam Altman May Control Our Future–Can He Be Trusted?

Alex3917 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:29:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/s/sF3UUl7Dfv

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47661419

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by Alex3917 in "Demand for autism care is soaring"

Alex3917 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:05:40 +0000

There is a huge amount of overlap between the genes associated with schizophrenia and the genes associated with autism. This is part of what makes it tricky to diagnose yourself, because anyone who has the genes for schizophrenia is also going to have a lot of autism symptoms even if they don't have autism.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Google closes deal to acquire Wiz"

Alex3917 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:09:08 +0000

Not to be confused with Google’s existing product called Wiz.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

Alex3917 — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:11:47 +0000

Having worked at both greenfield startups and unicorns, I've found that virtually every problem I've encountered at the unicorn startups was caused by folks being incompetent at the greenfield level. Maybe when you get to the scale of Google things are different, but it's certainly possible to build a business big enough to retire off that doesn't require any more technical knowledge than what you'd learn at a two-person pre-PMF startup.

New comment by Alex3917 in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

Alex3917 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 20:34:19 +0000

For both Amazon and Nvidia, their marginal costs are probably much lower than their fixed costs.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

Alex3917 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:46:19 +0000

> Did they buy some code for Gmail from an older company?

They bought both Deja and Neotonic.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

Alex3917 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 13:25:25 +0000

I mean the I would really only include the code for things like:

- Fetching email messages

- Parsing email headers

- Mime parsing

- Converting the text of email bodies into UTF-8

- Threading messages

- Eliding reply text

Given that the official story is that pb made the first version of Gmail in a day, does anyone actually believe that he wrote the code for any of those things in a day? If you honestly believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

Wait till you learn that the source code in Chrome also predates the existence of Google.

New comment by Alex3917 in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

Alex3917 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:19:44 +0000

This is a pretty good talk on the history of email: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrGfahzt-4Q

New comment by Alex3917 in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

Alex3917 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 03:07:47 +0000

He wasn't sitting there writing binary code and implementing all 7 layers of the OSI stack by hand, he was was gluing together pre-existing components. And the pre-existing components he had access to include two major email startups acquired by Google in 2001 and 2003, which were founded in 1995 and 1997 respectively. (Although he does have at least two patents for features and algorithms he co-invented while making Gmail.)

New comment by Alex3917 in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

Alex3917 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 23:56:34 +0000

> You guys cloned a whole suite of products in a short period of time that cost millions of dollars.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the functionality isn't actually cloned, only the UI. The actual code powering Gmail probably dates back to the late 80s or early 90s and has had several hundred thousands of hours of work put into it. This is just a webpage that looks kind of similar.

I point this out only because I've seen people saying that software businesses don't have moats anymore because of this, which is taking away a completely false lesson.

New comment by Alex3917 in "OpenAI are quietly adopting skills, now available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI"

Alex3917 — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 01:19:08 +0000

> Prompt engineering is like a shittier verson of writing a VBA app inside Excel or Access.

Sure, if you could use VBA to read a patient's current complaint, vitals, and medical history, look up all the relevant research on Google Scholar, and then output a recommended course of treatment.

Gmail emoji reactions will be enabled by default starting Feb

Alex3917 — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 04:34:04 +0000

Article URL: https://www.prettyfwd.com/t/XOR4SAN3R1qitLNl5hHwNg/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46214117

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Angular v21

Alex3917 — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:52:41 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.angular.dev/announcing-angular-v21-57946c34f14b

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45986967

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by Alex3917 in "New gel restores dental enamel and could revolutionise tooth repair"

Alex3917 — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:01:42 +0000

This is the key issue. There is zero doubt whatsoever that flossing is essential, and the fact that the empirical evidence is equivocal shows the limitations of science to prove even the most obvious things.

New State-of-the-Art, Open Weight Model for Nine Polygenic Risk Scores

Alex3917 — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 16:41:54 +0000

Article URL: https://mynucleus.com/labs/origin

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45657946

Points: 2

# Comments: 0