Hacker News: LargeWu

New comment by LargeWu in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

LargeWu — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 17:18:59 +0000

Letting AI generate your image also dances around the issues of attribution and licensing, for better or worse.

New comment by LargeWu in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

LargeWu — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 01:27:49 +0000

These companies are never, ever going to make their money back off of retail customers. It's not even clear if those customers would be profitable at all, let alone enough to justify hundreds of billions in capital expenditures.

New comment by LargeWu in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

LargeWu — Fri, 22 May 2026 13:00:02 +0000

I want advice from the one questioning whether we should, not just whether we can.

New comment by LargeWu in "Steve Wozniak cheered after telling students they have AI – actual intelligence"

LargeWu — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:58:52 +0000

Not only benefits from it, but the very one causing it to happen.

New comment by LargeWu in "An Apple (II) for Teacher"

LargeWu — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:31:37 +0000

Didn't see it mentioned in the article, but Apple also had a program called "An Apple for a Teacher" which allowed teachers to purchase directly from Apple at a big discount for personal use. My dad secured a IIgs this way, which mostly found use as a gaming machine for myself. But it certainly helped to reinforce the Apple -> schools pipeline because teachers wanted to use what they knew.

New comment by LargeWu in "'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level"

LargeWu — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:34:04 +0000

This is true. It is also true that waiting until things bottom out will make things even worse. It will be more expensive and options will be more limited.

There will need to be a federal bailout to relocate everyone who needs help. The government should also probably announce a policy that there will be no future disaster relief that involves rebuilding, only relocating.

New Orleans will be the first, but not the last American city to collapse. Miami is probably next. Salt Lake City could very well run out of water, nevermind the increasingly toxic lakebed. Phoenix too. In the next hundred years people are going to learn why environmentalists use the word "sustainability" so much.

New comment by LargeWu in "'Point of no return': New Orleans relocation must start now due to sea level"

LargeWu — Tue, 05 May 2026 01:53:51 +0000

The difference is that schools, crime, etc., are all what they are right now. It's there, it's verifiable. Anybody buying in has access to the full information. They can walk around the neighborhood and see for themselves.

The flooding and inevitable destruction of the city is decades away. It's still abstract. Some people might even think it is preventable.

I don't think it's unethical to sell. People have their own motivations. Maybe a buyer just wants it for 5 years, who knows. Probably the risk will get baked into market price. What does need to happen though is the federal government needs to step up, because they're the only ones who can, and guarantee they will buy it for a certain percentage of appraised market value. I would imagine that percentage will decline over time until they declare the city a total loss, after which your property is declared worthless. If they do this now, they can make it possible for people to leave with some semblance of dignity and mitigate hardships.

New comment by LargeWu in "Why Almost Everyone Loses–Except a Few Sharks–On Prediction Markets"

LargeWu — Mon, 04 May 2026 14:33:00 +0000

"The solution is parlay style payouts"

I think you mean parimutuel payouts?

New comment by LargeWu in "GitHub's Fake Star Economy"

LargeWu — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:14:23 +0000

They say Silicon Valley was more of a documentary than a comedy, and now we have one more way life imitates art: A growing army of Erlich Bachmann's.

New comment by LargeWu in "Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive"

LargeWu — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:04:53 +0000

For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.

https://relisten.net/

New comment by LargeWu in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

LargeWu — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:41:11 +0000

Because the "it'll create X jobs" implies it's ongoing. It's a disingenuous attempt to oversell the benefits because they know if they're transparent about it, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great deal.

New comment by LargeWu in "Missouri town fires half its city council over data center deal"

LargeWu — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 18:38:46 +0000

"If they require the datacenter to be a closed water system and pay for their own electricity..."

This assertion is doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and when it isn't true, it can cause huge externalities not just for the local community but possibly an entire region. It also does not address the noise problem.

Additionally, your jobs estimates are likely high and include short-term construction jobs which may not even go to locals anyway.

New comment by LargeWu in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

LargeWu — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:24:14 +0000

I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism used to be tethered to producing things that were useful. The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking and extraction.

New comment by LargeWu in "Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)"

LargeWu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:59:55 +0000

Is there a viable career path for researchers who choose to focus on replication instead of novel discoveries? I assume replications are perceived as less prestigious, but it's also important work.

New comment by LargeWu in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

LargeWu — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:42:55 +0000

For one thing, yeast was in short supply, so if you wanted to bake regularly, sourdough was a good option if you could keep it going.

New comment by LargeWu in "How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post"

LargeWu — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:53:11 +0000

Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.

New comment by LargeWu in "Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation"

LargeWu — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:55:50 +0000

> LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice

I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.

New comment by LargeWu in "U.S. Formally Withdraws from World Health Organization"

LargeWu — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:27:33 +0000

It's less what should he have done, than what shouldn't he have done. Specifically, he pushed conspiracy theories, demonized his health experts, and touted ineffective cures, and ultimately cast doubt on the safety of the vaccines. All to pander to his base. He had a remarkable chance to build trust in government via a truly extraordinary vaccine rollout, to a crowd which is historically distrustful. Instead he squandered that goodwill on petty fights and self aggrandizement.

New comment by LargeWu in "The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis"

LargeWu — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:19:00 +0000

Palantir is built explicitly for surveillance, in a way the other companies you listed are not. There is no comparison here. It's like saying the City of Minneapolis is complicit because they maintain the roads ICE is driving on.

New comment by LargeWu in "Scott Adams has died"

LargeWu — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:34:56 +0000

The thesis of the article says "If it was bad under Obama, imagine how much worse it is now". It's literally in the headline. This is not the dunk you think it is.

Nobody disputes ICE was bad then. The difference is that Obama wasn't cheering them on, saying anybody who was abused or even murdered by ICE deserved it. Trump isn't just allowing this, he's given them a mandate to act this way.