Hacker News: MinimalAction

New comment by MinimalAction in "Decoy Font"

MinimalAction — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 17:07:36 +0000

Extremely cool. I'm sure they'll eventually be trained to read it, but it's nice until then to trick AI.

I'm mad at AI companies for stealing texts from the entire internet knowledge base and now privatizing those profits in some sense.

New comment by MinimalAction in "SpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading"

MinimalAction — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 13:02:09 +0000

As a scientific adventure, SpaceX is a worthy company full of awesome people. But the management and VCs is another story, as usual. To price it at a market cap of $1.8T, somewhere double that of Walmart is insane.

New comment by MinimalAction in "What will be left for us to work on?"

MinimalAction — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:00:59 +0000

I'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.

New comment by MinimalAction in "Billion Dollar PDFs"

MinimalAction — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:48:17 +0000

I liked the idea, but this literally could have been a list. The AI-generated pages with filler text create a stark contrast in utility compared to the influential nature of the listed papers.

New comment by MinimalAction in "Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads"

MinimalAction — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 07:45:05 +0000

It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.

New comment by MinimalAction in "French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation"

MinimalAction — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 20:03:17 +0000

That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.

New comment by MinimalAction in "French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation"

MinimalAction — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:08:32 +0000

Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.

It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.

New comment by MinimalAction in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

MinimalAction — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:08:28 +0000

What's the biggest draw of GrapheneOS apart from de-googling? Does it have a better battery life? And compliance with NFC payments?

New comment by MinimalAction in "GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17"

MinimalAction — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:05:54 +0000

Well, for some reason Pixel 9 series and also 10 pro is excluded?

New comment by MinimalAction in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

MinimalAction — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:24:16 +0000

Interesting that they disclose this right after IPO.

New comment by MinimalAction in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

MinimalAction — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:04:24 +0000

Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.

New comment by MinimalAction in "US battery manufacturing output continues to break records"

MinimalAction — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:04:20 +0000

Just looked up Chinese production capacity (~1700 GWh). That's orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the world. What did they do differently?

New comment by MinimalAction in "Hetzner Price Adjustment"

MinimalAction — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:49:11 +0000

I understand this is ultimately due to AI boom.

A couple of naive questions:

1. What's the bottleneck in ramping up RAM production? Is it the availability of silicon itself? Or the factories are at capacity?

2. Is this supposed to ease up despite the AI boom? Definitely would ease up if busted.

New comment by MinimalAction in "How to earn a billion dollars"

MinimalAction — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:15:07 +0000

$10M is also perhaps asking for too much to live a modest life even without working, but I hear you with rising costs and healthcare. In any case, $10M is 100x smaller than $1B.

New comment by MinimalAction in "How to earn a billion dollars"

MinimalAction — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:15:00 +0000

First question: why? Why should I (or anyone) earn a billion dollars? PG made it seem like that's the ultimate goal somehow. Also, why only a billion dollars, PG? You see your infinite cancerous growth machine doesn't stop?

This article did not sit well with me. I have found myself rereading Beyond Smart, How to Write Usefully, The Need to Read, Life is Short. But this one is harmful; nobody needs a billion dollars.

New comment by MinimalAction in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

MinimalAction — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:51:42 +0000

Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.

New comment by MinimalAction in "How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science"

MinimalAction — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:31:22 +0000

I am happy to know this emblem of knowledge stream keeps coming until 2035. It is wonderful to know our innovations have flown 200 odd million miles and work for so long!

New comment by MinimalAction in "The Last Technical Interview"

MinimalAction — Sat, 30 May 2026 16:04:23 +0000

Yes! At some point, the author even complains about the (weaker) US law for employee on how it's a mess to fire somebody, but easy to let go from an internship. So much about stability that employees seek.

New comment by MinimalAction in "Do they know we can tell it's AI slop?"

MinimalAction — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:04:09 +0000

This itself feels generated by AI. Especially the last few paragraphs in there.

New comment by MinimalAction in "Can we have the day off?"

MinimalAction — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:53:35 +0000

Given the pace of AI growth, it is quite possible to have years off if layoffs begin in many places. We are training AI to replace many jobs. It seems like entry-level jobs are the only ones affected, but that's for now. Anything short of executive level jobs are perhaps on the chopping block for time to come. Now, why wouldn't be execs be replaced? They could, but they wouldn't cut themselves off.