Hacker News: HexPhantom

New comment by HexPhantom in "Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids"

HexPhantom — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:16:19 +0000

This is what makes me wonder how much additional benefit an explicit carbon signal actually buys you over normal dynamic pricing

New comment by HexPhantom in "Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids"

HexPhantom — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:13:35 +0000

Sure, but I don't think the two ideas are really in conflict. A low-carbon grid should absolutely be the end goal, but even a mostly clean grid has hours that are cleaner than others

New comment by HexPhantom in "Carbon-aware electricity pricing, measured daily on 38 grids"

HexPhantom — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 10:12:05 +0000

The harder question is probably whether dynamic pricing changes behavior without mostly becoming a penalty for people who have less flexibility in when they use electricity

New comment by HexPhantom in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

HexPhantom — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:58:40 +0000

Humanoid robotics has been optimizing for the wrong benchmark this whole time. Forget dexterity, we need executive presence.

New comment by HexPhantom in "CEO fired developers to make room for AI. Developers create open source AI CEO"

HexPhantom — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:55:19 +0000

Funny that we're reached the point where perfectly normal rhetorical habits can trigger the "AI wrote this" alarm... (or not funny, just ironic)

New comment by HexPhantom in "Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)"

HexPhantom — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:28:53 +0000

A lot of culture is basically accumulated trial and error

New comment by HexPhantom in "Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)"

HexPhantom — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:23:04 +0000

This is painfully familiar. Being able to coast through school can actually delay learning one of the most important skills school is supposed to teach: how to struggle with something for a while without interpreting the struggle as a verdict on your ability

New comment by HexPhantom in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

HexPhantom — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:44:17 +0000

I think you might be slightly "too deep" in the sense that you mostly encounter AI when someone has deliberately chosen an expensive, capable model to solve a real problem

New comment by HexPhantom in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

HexPhantom — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:37:48 +0000

Yep... pen, paper, books and a good teacher are annoyingly hard to beat because they force the student to actually do the cognitive work

New comment by HexPhantom in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

HexPhantom — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:35:34 +0000

The bar should probably be even higher in education than elsewhere. If an AI tool saves a student 30 minutes but also removes the 30 minutes where they would have struggled with the material, it may look like a productivity win while being an educational loss

New comment by HexPhantom in "My friends all hate AI; I just joined an AI startup"

HexPhantom — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 05:32:26 +0000

I agree with most of the diagnosis but I am less convinced that better UX around AI solves the underlying problem. Every product starts out saying "human in the loop" and "augment, don't replace" but the economic incentive is almost always to remove more of the human over time…

New comment by HexPhantom in "Blog about things you don't understand yet"

HexPhantom — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:22:13 +0000

I read that passage a little differently. He explicitly says other kinds of blogging are fine; the "argue a point" rule seems more like a constraint he imposes on himself because it forces him to investigate the subject more deeply

New comment by HexPhantom in "Blog about things you don't understand yet"

HexPhantom — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:19:23 +0000

Having it generate the argument is like letting the robot lift the weight. Having it poke holes in an argument you wrote yourself is more like having a spotter

New comment by HexPhantom in "Blog about things you don't understand yet"

HexPhantom — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 05:17:16 +0000

There's a sweet spot where you know enough to ask useful questions but still remember which parts were confusing in the first place. Experts often lose that

New comment by HexPhantom in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

HexPhantom — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:33:44 +0000

Exactly. The relevant comparison for someone with insomnia isn't melatonin vs perfect natural sleep, it's melatonin plus some morning grogginess vs not getting enough sleep at all

New comment by HexPhantom in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

HexPhantom — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:30:06 +0000

Good point. For regular coffee drinkers, testing an hour after waking without their usual caffeine could be its own cognitive impairment experiment

New comment by HexPhantom in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

HexPhantom — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:28:08 +0000

You'd expect the standard OTC dose to be a sensible starting point, not potentially several times more than a younger person needs

New comment by HexPhantom in "Melatonin impairs morning cognition in healthy young adults (2023)"

HexPhantom — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:25:26 +0000

Seriously, separating the 2mg and 5mg groups would make this a lot more informative

New comment by HexPhantom in "Ten Steps Towards Happiness (2015)"

HexPhantom — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:53:05 +0000

He was not writing abstractly about mortality; he knew exactly what it meant

New comment by HexPhantom in "Ten Steps Towards Happiness (2015)"

HexPhantom — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:50:03 +0000

Learn the whole system, then remove everything unnecessary