Hacker News: Murfalo

New comment by Murfalo in "GLP-1 may slow biological aging"

Murfalo — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:05:28 +0000

Let's play spot the conflict of interest. Three of seven authors tied to a company selling biological aging tests. One consults for Merck, GSK, etc.

There seems some promise at times but I also struggle to see the recent slew of "GLP-1s cure X", where X is seemingly any ailment known to man, as much more than the next Big Pharma gold rush where the profits dwarf any eventual regulatory fines, and taxpayers and real patients are left with the costs.

New comment by Murfalo in "How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet"

Murfalo — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:54:55 +0000

Same. I'm in the US and do not use Amazon at all. Life, and the products I buy, actually got much better. Amazon is overpriced and low quality. Pretty much everywhere else has better products, lower prices and free & fast shipping at this point (Walmart, Target, Home Depot, direct purchases, etc.). Pretty shocked at all the people defending Amazon here.

The clanker torture nexus manifesto

Murfalo — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:57:42 +0000

Article URL: https://jregory.substack.com/p/why-we-are-torturing-clankers

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49945365

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Ask HN: What if we funded math research like we fund AI labs?

Murfalo — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 14:35:03 +0000

The annual U.S. federal budget for basic math research is <$1B.

OpenAI alone just raised ~$122B, and frontier labs are increasingly concentrating enormous amounts of compute and human talent on open math problems.

We seem to be entering a strange situation where a handful of private labs have vastly more resources for attacking these problems than the academics traditionally responsible for doing so.

Have we had the capability all along, just not the hype? Please discuss :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49659173

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Murfalo in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

Murfalo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:54:33 +0000

Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.

New comment by Murfalo in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

Murfalo — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:46:58 +0000

Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.

That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.

We've all seen this movie before, though.

New comment by Murfalo in "LLMs as a Cognitive Virus"

Murfalo — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 21:36:23 +0000

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.

Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents

ChatGPT for Healthcare

Murfalo — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 23:20:52 +0000

Article URL: https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-connects-health-records-and-healthcare-sources/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543957

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Murfalo in "Don't Wordle"

Murfalo — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 16:12:25 +0000

    *      12974
    QAJAQ   1979
    PZAZZ    861
    OBANG    449
    URARI    232
    FLAFF     58
    DWALM     10

(totally didn't cheat: https://github.com/murfalo/dontwordle-assistant)

Wrong antibody used in over 50 cell aging studies

Murfalo — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 23:46:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02352-4

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413705

Points: 30

# Comments: 1

New comment by Murfalo in "Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny"

Murfalo — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 01:08:51 +0000

Obvious? How do you propose adopting and regulating the technology in a way that the public wants and that allows reasonable privacy?

New comment by Murfalo in "How to Exist"

Murfalo — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:25:06 +0000

Right, I think commonly "doing nothing"/meditation is approached with the goal of "doing something", i.e. "getting the hell out of here" or changing instead of sitting with how you feel in the present moment. And, just as you say, that basically defeats the entire purpose.

The well-calibrated Bayesian [pdf] (1982)

Murfalo — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 14:11:12 +0000

Article URL: https://fitelson.org/seminar/dawid.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48921121

Points: 51

# Comments: 32

New comment by Murfalo in "Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)"

Murfalo — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:16:49 +0000

Simple trick for those outside of academia. Google the impact factor of the journal you are reading. If it's below 5 it's fake. If it's 5 or above, it's also fake.