Hacker News: HexPhantom

New comment by HexPhantom in "Making a vintage LLM from scratch"

HexPhantom — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:05:40 +0000

You may not build your daily system that way afterwards, but the mental model sticks

New comment by HexPhantom in "Making a vintage LLM from scratch"

HexPhantom — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:03:41 +0000

Yeah, that seems like an important distinction

New comment by HexPhantom in "Making a vintage LLM from scratch"

HexPhantom — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 12:01:40 +0000

Instead of always trying to make models more current and general, there may be value in making them deliberately narrow, historically constrained and weird in a well-defined way

New comment by HexPhantom in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

HexPhantom — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:45:15 +0000

The vitamin D angle seems much more plausible to me as a public-health issue than as an explanation for broad population-level cognitive differences

New comment by HexPhantom in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

HexPhantom — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:43:38 +0000

What I find more plausible is that low sun exposure is one small contributor among many

New comment by HexPhantom in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

HexPhantom — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:41:23 +0000

The paper isn't saying vitamin D determines cognition in general, just that there was a modest signal in a couple of memory measures

New comment by HexPhantom in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

HexPhantom — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:38:34 +0000

Women in the study weren't all starting from very low vitamin D levels

New comment by HexPhantom in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

HexPhantom — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:35:10 +0000

I'd read this less as "high-dose vitamin D makes kids smarter" and more as "prenatal vitamin D might matter for some neurodevelopmental outcomes, and it’s worth testing more directly"

New comment by HexPhantom in "AI will be used to estimate age of asylum seekers from next year"

HexPhantom — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:13:46 +0000

I think "accountability sink" is the right phrase here

New comment by HexPhantom in "AI will be used to estimate age of asylum seekers from next year"

HexPhantom — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:11:38 +0000

I think the only plausible argument for AI here is not "it knows age better than humans," but "it might be more consistent than ad hoc visual judgments by different officers"

New comment by HexPhantom in "The Art of Money Getting"

HexPhantom — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:23:43 +0000

I especially like "do they show their work?" In a gold rush, obscurity is often part of the business model: vague claims, unverifiable demos, hand-wavy benchmarks, carefully managed customer stories. Companies serving serious professions eventually have to deal with people who ask boring, concrete questions and expect boring, concrete answers

New comment by HexPhantom in "The Art of Money Getting"

HexPhantom — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:14:54 +0000

Maybe a respectable company is one where the answer to "what would make this business more profitable but worse for the world?" is not treated as a product roadmap

New comment by HexPhantom in "The Art of Money Getting"

HexPhantom — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:08:23 +0000

I think that's why integrity matters so much: it removes a whole layer of moral bookkeeping from daily life

New comment by HexPhantom in "The Art of Money Getting"

HexPhantom — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:59:09 +0000

I think that's a good distinction: not everyone in tech has to be "passionate" in the romantic sense, but it's hard to do good work for years if you actively dislike the underlying activity

New comment by HexPhantom in "The Art of Money Getting"

HexPhantom — Sun, 24 May 2026 11:54:06 +0000

Some of it is very 19th-century and easy to over-romanticize, but "reputation is the asset" and "debt trades away freedom" have aged pretty well

New comment by HexPhantom in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

HexPhantom — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:55:16 +0000

Either way, the bird ends up with the same strange bargain: unobstructed vision paid for by an inefficient metabolic workaround

New comment by HexPhantom in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

HexPhantom — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:50:46 +0000

Once you look closely, theiliar animal face kind of disappears and you're just staring at alien biological hardware

New comment by HexPhantom in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

HexPhantom — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:45:30 +0000

And the photography almost steals the show

New comment by HexPhantom in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

HexPhantom — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:38:50 +0000

Apparently they skipped sunglasses and evolved a glucose-hungry retina instead. Seems like an expensive solution, but hard to argue with the results

New comment by HexPhantom in "The bird eye was pushed to an evolutionary extreme"

HexPhantom — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:36:25 +0000

Soo evolution doesn't always optimize for biochemical efficiency in isolation. Sometimes it optimizes the whole system, and "wasteful" metabolism can be the right answer if it removes a bigger constraint.