Hacker News: Snowfield9571

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "U.S. Senators Vote to Ban Themselves from Trading on Prediction Markets"

Snowfield9571 — Sat, 02 May 2026 03:51:52 +0000

What about their family? What about staffers? What about anyone in the room when insider information is being shared? Good first step but plenty of ways around this. Not really that significant.

Do stock trading next.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom"

Snowfield9571 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 19:56:24 +0000

Add it to the list. Here are just a few more of their flagrant privacy violations.

Facebook/Meta pays teens to install a VPN so they can snoop on user traffic and decrypts competitors traffic (Snapchat) under guidance of Zuckerberg himself. [1]

Facebook/Meta covertly backdoors users phones [2]

Facebook requests phone number for 2FA and then uses for ads/tracking without disclosure [3]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20260116094503/https://localmess....

[3] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/1186...

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Lessons from 14 years at Google"

Snowfield9571 — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:52:49 +0000

Is this AI? It reads like a conglomerate of hacker news career articles. Am I the only one seeing this?

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow"

Snowfield9571 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:32:18 +0000

I am sure it is scary to see young people have reactions to vaccines but if you compare the rates of the side effects in comparison with the rate in those who do get COVID you'll see that, in that context, they are indeed minor

https://newsroom.heart.org/news/myocarditis-risk-significant...

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026"

Snowfield9571 — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 19:49:59 +0000

Any manned mission in the next 100 years or so to the surface of a moon or planet is basically unnecessary and just to show we can. I am not saying this is a bad thing - but much of the reasons we haven't had manned missions is because it isn't worth it. Robots can do most of what we can do already and what they can't we can do remotely. There's really not a great science reason to send people with our current technology. Robots are already the real explorers.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Valve is about to win the console generation"

Snowfield9571 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:38:59 +0000

I think this article makes one assumption that isn't correct. "This means that even though Valve will be selling this hardware at a loss..." From the reviews I have read, Valve is not planning on doing this. They are not doing an Xbox type of deal where games are overpriced and console is cheap. If I am not mistaken, I got this information from the LTT review where they talked with Valve about this directly.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth"

Snowfield9571 — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 23:20:01 +0000

Ya that’s completely false lol. Lots of reasons to criticize LA, being cloudy isn’t one of them

https://wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/clilcd.pl?ca23174

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering"

Snowfield9571 — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:21:02 +0000

What’s it going to be next month?

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Covert web-to-app tracking via localhost on Android"

Snowfield9571 — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 21:59:37 +0000

Found the meta PM that thought of this idea

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Trying to teach in the age of the AI homework machine"

Snowfield9571 — Wed, 28 May 2025 16:32:27 +0000

One can memorize a piano piece, write out the notes on a grand staff and tell you all the different musical patterns in it, but if they never put there hands on the keys they won’t be able to play it. Rote learning is part of learning. This trope that’s gotten popular that if you teach concepts the rest will follow is just false. You need both.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes"

Snowfield9571 — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 15:14:23 +0000

No it’s absolutely the correct term. What are you a BBC anchor?

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit"

Snowfield9571 — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 20:26:11 +0000

I first used GPT 2.5 many years ago through a google colab notebook. These newer models aren’t all that much better. I’m sure they do better on their tests because they’re trained to beat them but really the biggest “innovation” was a UI and API.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies"

Snowfield9571 — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 17:21:28 +0000

I wonder how free hosting services like netlify and vercel handle this? If a free tier user gets spammed do they just pass the cost on? I can't imagine that is the case so they must have some protections built in.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance"

Snowfield9571 — Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:28:08 +0000

Oh on a browser client - yes that makes sense. I made a bad assumption that you managed to block them on streaming devices like roku or apple tv.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Google drops pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveillance"

Snowfield9571 — Mon, 10 Feb 2025 23:00:01 +0000

What do you use that blocks ads from streaming services? I’ve had no luck.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised"

Snowfield9571 — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 03:18:16 +0000

Interesting thought, but significant technologic “break throughs” almost never come from the private sector. A “break through” is just luck, and countless years working on a problem incrementally. That doesn’t typically return profits.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python"

Snowfield9571 — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:49:22 +0000

Except uv doesn’t support conda so there goes many of the niche scientific packages required for many users like me. Someone please prove me wrong because I do love uv when I can use it. I’ve found pixi to be an ok alternative but not nearly as fast.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Ask HN: Looking for a project to volunteer on? (February 2024)"

Snowfield9571 — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:27:02 +0000

You know at first glance I thought the Shell Oil Company was asking for volunteers.

New comment by Snowfield9571 in "Los Angeles Becomes First US City to Outlaw Digital Discrimination"

Snowfield9571 — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 18:35:37 +0000

So the "real" solution is market competition right to make a healthy market- how do we get that? History has repeatedly shown that large corporations hate competition because it means they have to do something to make money. Anyone who comes up with a new idea is just copied or consumed. Sounds to me like the idea that a "free market" is a healthy market is only healthy for the owners of large corporations.