Hacker News: Analemma_

New comment by Analemma_ in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

Analemma_ — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:15:52 +0000

You SBF defenders have such a weird view of how the law works. If I embezzle money from my company and then bet it all on black in Vegas, intending to give it back if I win, your implication here is equivalent to saying I did commit a crime if the wheel comes up red, but I did not commit any crime if it comes up black.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Waymo Premier"

Analemma_ — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:27:59 +0000

"Car obeys the speed limit, drivers lucid with rage" definitely sounds like my memories of Boston.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Where is the AI jobs crisis?"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:09:19 +0000

Yeah I'm starting to think the BLS needs to do "Boomer aging adjustments" to jobs numbers, in a similar manner to how they do "seasonal farming adjustments". Until we get through the Boomer population bulge, healthcare is going to keep adding jobs for quite a while regardless of how the rest of the economy does, but that doesn't necessarily mean the overall labor market is healthy.

If you leave out healthcare, 2025 had massive job losses overall, with Boomer bedpan cleaning bringing the net number up to just above zero.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Claude Fable 5"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:58:03 +0000

To the extent nuclear arms control works, I think it's only because nuclear weapons are so hard to build-- uranium enrichment is hugely expensive and complicated, and plutonium weapons need actual reactors.

If it was possible for ordinary companies to build nuclear weapons, and also release open-source ones that anyone could use to compete with the paid ones, I suspect we'd all have been dead a long time ago, arms control treaties or no.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Claude Fable 5"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:22:43 +0000

It's the "If we don't, someone else will" effect. So long as there are competitive markets and competition between nation-states, a single player cannot unilaterally defect from the race, no matter how dangerous it is. Half the comments on HN lately are "wtf Claude is so dumb compared to Codex; I'm switching"-- nobody can slow down while those exist.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Solar Energy Saves Europeans $135M a Day"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 17:03:04 +0000

The price of electricity is set by the marginal cost of the most expensive individual source - if your grid is 80% solar, 20% coal, the price you pay is the price of coal, because the solar providers can increase their prices to just below that of coal. Obviously I'm simplifying somewhat, but that's the general dynamic.

This is "by design" in the sense that it offers big subsidies to more solar generation to come online, but you won't see the biggest price cuts until the last expensive sources are pushed off the grid entirely. Because Germany's marginal source is coal, they pay way more than countries whose marginal source is gas or nuclear.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Is Grep All You Need? How Agent Harnesses Reshape Agentic Search"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 16:55:44 +0000

Why do you have subscription lock-in? Even if you pay for a yearly subscription, Anthropic will refund you pro rata if you cancel early.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Federal judge blocks H1B visa $100K fee"

Analemma_ — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:35:19 +0000

The Alaska Permanent Fund from their oil revenue is worth $90 billion and they send every resident an annual $1,000 check on top of heavily subsidized fuel. I think they can pay competitive teacher salaries.

New comment by Analemma_ in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

Analemma_ — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:09:17 +0000

Google is also issuing a bunch of debt this year. It sounds like they need a lot of capital and want to keep a particular debt/equity ratio, rather than having a strong opinion on their share price.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Life is too short for a slow terminal"

Analemma_ — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:56:15 +0000

I suspect you enabled some weird setting that you've forgotten about. ghostty isn't unimaginably fast but it's faster than iTerm 2 which is plenty. And I'm sitting here with a lengthy Claude Code session open, as well as a couple tabs for my docker container and dev servers, and its idle CPU usage is 0.0%.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Spherical Voronoi Diagram"

Analemma_ — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:24:59 +0000

> That it was pushed into other usages was a function of cold war politics (makes Russia seem larger/more intimidating) and needs to be considered in that context.

Is this actually true, or was it just done "on autopilot" because before universal public education most people using maps of the entire world were navigators for whom Mercator made the most sense?

I don't know, I just hear a lot of conspiracy theories about the dominance of Mercator. If it's not Cold War politics then it's "white supremacists trying to make North America/Europe larger and Africa smaller", and I think laziness and just going with what worked in the past is a more likely explanation.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

Analemma_ — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:00:34 +0000

Does the thing where it wanted to move every conversation onto the topic of "white genocide in South Africa" not count as a filter on the output?

New comment by Analemma_ in "Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers"

Analemma_ — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:48:08 +0000

On the one hand, yes, this is really embarrassing for Grok. On the other hand, everyone except a couple Twitter randos already thinks Grok is worthless junk: there's no reputation left for it to to lose. And Elon is crying all the way to the bank with an extra $11bn in annual revenue.

New comment by Analemma_ in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

Analemma_ — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:56:03 +0000

I disagree? The point of a numbers station is that it broadcasts in the clear and anyone with a receiver can get it, but only people with the appropriate decryption key can make any use of it. Since it's broadcasting all the time, there's no need for steganography or covert transmission. That's exactly what a numbers station is.

Where the article loses me is the implication that this is somehow sinister or beyond the pale: it's just piggybacking on a global transmitter network that exists anyway, why not?

New comment by Analemma_ in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

Analemma_ — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:06:25 +0000

What examples have there been in the past of a company which did all its growth in the 1-year period following the IPO, then stopped right when they were added to the index?

New comment by Analemma_ in "SpaceX, Other Mega IPOs Denied Fast Index Entry by S&P"

Analemma_ — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:02:00 +0000

The new stocks are still going in, they're just going in after a year (the normal rules), rather than 5 or 15 days. The outrage here wasn't that the stocks were going into the indexes at all, it's that they were going in before price discovery, several quarters of earnings, more float, and expiration of insider lock-up periods, which seemed especially sketchy because of the (correct or not) perception that these IPO valuations are inflated and unrealistic. It seemed like they were trying to dump the bag on the public.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Anthropic's open-source framework for AI-powered vulnerability discovery"

Analemma_ — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:30:28 +0000

I mean, you don't need to run it all the time, right? You do it once over your entire existing codebase to start and then once over the diff in your CI/CD pipeline when you make a new change. I'm sure it's not literally that simple but I doubt these need to churn 24/7/365 either.

New comment by Analemma_ in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

Analemma_ — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:43:36 +0000

Oh, SpaceX already has that covered: thanks to the TX legislature, SpaceX shareholders cannot file shareholder lawsuits, you can only complain to the "Texas Business Court" or get binding arbitration [0].

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-21/spa...

New comment by Analemma_ in "macOS needs its grid back"

Analemma_ — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 02:00:49 +0000

Oh man, thank you! I was just complaining the other day about the missing Spaces grid… when they first took it away in Lion I looked frantically for the setting to bring it back, with no such luck.

Ironically, I think the reason they took it away was to help with fullscreen macOS apps, which are a garbage anti-feature it doesn’t seem like anybody uses. Long live the grid!

New comment by Analemma_ in "Microsoft builds MacBook Pro rival with NVIDIA-powered Surface Laptop Ultra"

Analemma_ — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:53:18 +0000

I mean, I used to be - with the disclaimer that I worked at Microsoft for a while (left in 2019), there was a hot minute when Surface devices were good and on an upward trajectory to become great. Microsoft was doing interesting things with new form factors and interface devices-- the Surface Book, Studio and Dial weren't all hits, but they were some of the only noteworthy experiments in PCs-- and they actually cared about build quality in a way pretty much no other PC manufacturer did.

Then Panay left, Windows 11 has been a debacle, and Nadella seems to give zero fucks about anything which isn't Copilot or Azure, so the Surface momentum that they spent so much time building has just coasted to a complete stop. It's sad.