Hacker News: Quinner

New comment by Quinner in "US cities are axing Flock Safety surveillance technology"

Quinner — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:14:23 +0000

Those people have proven very untrustworthy and are structurally unaccountable.

New comment by Quinner in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

Quinner — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:01:49 +0000

Some were pretty bad, but none were nearly that bad. The B-58 Hustler lost 22% of its airframes, the F7U Cutlass 25%, the F-104 Starfighter in German service lost 33%. And those were outliers.

New comment by Quinner in "90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective"

Quinner — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 17:22:49 +0000

The quote is the wrong way of looking at this. The typical rate of successful primary challenges is only 3%. If you take that to 10% its an enormous success, incumbents will say "if I oppose crypto then I triple my odds of losing in a primary, better not do that."

New comment by Quinner in "There's a ridiculous amount of tech in a disposable vape"

Quinner — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:57:54 +0000

The reason disposables are so popular in the US is the FDA banned any flavored cartridges, which doesn't include disposables. The immense battery waste is a direct result of a relatively new law.

New comment by Quinner in "A new AI winter is coming?"

Quinner — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 18:45:32 +0000

If the cars weren't considerably safer drivers than humans they wouldn't be allowed on the road. There isn't as much regulation blocking deploying this healthcare solution... until those errors actually start costing hospitals money from malpractice lawsuits (or not), we don't know whether it will be allowed to remain in use.

New comment by Quinner in "How Anthropic teams use Claude Code"

Quinner — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 19:25:01 +0000

The wages aren't stable either. There's going to be gradual convergence.

New comment by Quinner in "FICO to incorporate buy-now-pay-later loans into credit scores"

Quinner — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 14:39:33 +0000

There's no lobbying necessary, because FICO isn't a government agency, its a private company. Why we have a private company determining such an important thing with minimal government oversight is certainly a question we could be asking.

That being said, there's an innocent explanation for this specifically. BYPL is pretty new as a common type of debt (became popular in the last five years). They're putting it into FICO 10. The last time they updated FICO was FICO 9 which was released in 2014, before that there was FICO 8 in 2008... a lot of banks are still using FICO 8 or even earlier models. Banks are slow to change, and FICO moves slowly because banks don't want their models upended every year. Fwiw if the government was more involved in this I doubt it would be taken into account any faster.

New comment by Quinner in "Google's AI Mode is 'the definition of theft,' publishers say"

Quinner — Fri, 23 May 2025 20:28:49 +0000

I tend to agree with you, but without a structure to incentivize people to produce such material, less of it will be created. If people can't pay the bills by doing research or writing, far fewer people will do it.

New comment by Quinner in "New studies offer insight into Lyme disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms"

Quinner — Wed, 07 May 2025 01:11:29 +0000

Yet the people that were apoplectic about Facebook voluntarily working with the government to combat covid misinformation are mysteriously silent.

New comment by Quinner in "Next stop: Miami"

Quinner — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:24:14 +0000

LA Drivers aren't that bad, driving just is awful there because the amount of traffic. NYC Driving is an absolute pleasure compared to Miami driving. I have what should be an easy ten minute commute and every day I am avoiding an accident due to a driver doing something crazy you would almost never see in another US city.

This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.

New comment by Quinner in "Next stop: Miami"

Quinner — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 17:00:19 +0000

Flooding is absolutely an issue, during the rainy season (third of the year) localized flooding is quite common. Some streets are partially flooded on an almost daily basis, something human drivers are used to but I imagine will pose a new challenge to waymo.

New comment by Quinner in "Bluesky is ushering in a pick-your-own algorithm era of social media"

Quinner — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:16:29 +0000

You can stay on twitter.

New comment by Quinner in "Singularity Missed"

Quinner — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 16:06:40 +0000

What this is really saying is that hardware is a necessary precondition for, but not determinative of, intelligence. If you have a human brain worth of neurons firing randomly you don't get consciousness. The structure and instruction set is crucial. And we are perhaps 20 years away from figuring out how to structure the compute power we have to get the consciousness of a human adult.

New comment by Quinner in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

Quinner — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 15:08:35 +0000

The President of the United States has sole nuclear launch authority. To stop him would either take the cabinet and VP invoking the 25th amendment and removing him from office, or a military officer to disobey direct orders.

New comment by Quinner in "Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B"

Quinner — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 14:49:41 +0000

If public ownership means we give one guy a button to end the world, I'm not sure how's that's a meaningful difference.

New comment by Quinner in "DOJ sues realpage for algorithmic pricing scheme that harms renters"

Quinner — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 17:10:56 +0000

Suddenly there's no incentive to build in all areas.

New comment by Quinner in "I found a 1-click exploit in South Korea's biggest mobile chat app"

Quinner — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 20:36:20 +0000

It's the result of protectionist government policy. The policies are protectionist not just against foreign entry but also against entry of new products into the market. The government picks technology winners. Unsurprisingly, the government doesn't do a great job of this. Infamously it mandated usage of ActiveX and Internet Explorer for banking long after ActiveX had its time in the sun (the government made this the mandate in 1996 and didn't reform it until 2021!)

New comment by Quinner in "Humans began to rapidly accumulate technological knowledge 600k years ago"

Quinner — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 15:31:52 +0000

Internal monologue (or dialogue, as it can play out as imagined conversations) is an apt name for it. Imagine reading a play. Everything is expressed as language, and ideas and concepts are expressed through that language.

New comment by Quinner in "Amazon S3 will no longer charge for several HTTP error codes"

Quinner — Mon, 13 May 2024 19:10:45 +0000

Adds historical context as to a duration of an extremely long-lasting problem?

New comment by Quinner in "Stripe de-couples payments from the rest of its stack"

Quinner — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 15:55:38 +0000

Not sure about this case specifically, but its possible to sell shares in a private company (with some restrictions), and for companies like Stripe that have very high valuations its not that hard to get liquidity.