Hacker News: Tarq0n

New comment by Tarq0n in "Understanding the AI Economy"

Tarq0n — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:19:38 +0000

I'm very interested in their anonymization and classification processes. Traditionally, conversational writing is too complex to anonymize automatically without false negatives, and remaining PII might be very personal in nature.

> Observation Clustering and Taxonomy Organisation (OCTO), a tool for transforming massive unstructured text data, like LLM conversations, and distilling them into organized entities.

This also sounds interesting. Hand crafted ontologies that I've seen used were always too hard to maintain and make useful, but potentially they have something automated?

New comment by Tarq0n in "Understanding the AI Economy"

Tarq0n — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 14:13:29 +0000

Have you ever done research? It's very difficult to construct your measurements in such a way that they measure what you want them to. So in just your quoted statement there are many sources of uncertainty.

* what's a typical job? How did Google resample their data to make it representative of the typical job?

* is this all jobs, or just work-related Gemini conversations that they've classified as such?

* what's the denominator here? How do they know how many tasks there are that weren't subject to conversation with Gemini?

* how reliable is their classification of conversations as work related or not?

Accurately measuring this is so complex that to present the conclusion in such a confident way is bordering on farcical.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

Tarq0n — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:29:41 +0000

You can still get your session cookies stolen. If you have good password hygiene passkeys only protect you in extremely niche scenarios.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain"

Tarq0n — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:28:09 +0000

OK now say you're on a work/library/friend's computer and you want to look up an account in 1password on your phone so you can type in the password. Passkeys don't support this very basic and common workflow. Meanwhile there's no real security benefit over password manager generated complex and not reused passwords.

New comment by Tarq0n in "OpenAI and Hugging Face address security incident during model evaluation"

Tarq0n — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:40:53 +0000

Wrong hands? The model did this on a benign instruction. We're going to get paperclip maximized once these things get capable enough regardless of whether bad actors are involved.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

Tarq0n — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:59:56 +0000

Ignoring patent law has done great things for 16th century continental Europe and more recently China. Rent-seekers and ladder kickers shouldn't always be respected, they'll slow down societal advancement to a crawl if you let them. The question is whether the gains these AI companies are making from their transgressions are overly privatized.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets"

Tarq0n — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 13:56:29 +0000

Ethics are probably internalized long before someone commits to an engineering career. I'm not sure they can be taught later.

New comment by Tarq0n in "98% isn't much"

Tarq0n — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:52:19 +0000

That's a very mercenary attitude. If less than 2% of your (potential) users had a particular disability, would you implement accessibility features for them without being forced to? I'd argue that it's the right thing to do. Some restrictions like using an old browser may be more or less a choice, but it's still a much better look to be inclusive.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Companies hire more after AI adoption"

Tarq0n — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:31:28 +0000

Or it's self-dealing from these funding parties, and the hiring is business continuing as usual.

My understanding is that one of the advantages of being VC funded is that sales among sister companies become easier, sometimes going as far as the VC influencing purchasing on your behalf.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Does code cleanliness affect coding agents? A controlled minimal-pair study"

Tarq0n — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:50:33 +0000

That's positively incoherent. You can't even interpret an instruction without relying on prior knowledge. Not to mention LLM's are in essence made of knowledge.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Programmers need to start meditating"

Tarq0n — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 11:01:42 +0000

Relaxation isn't really a goal of meditation. When you do it you cultivate a kind of meta-cognition, an awareness of - and control over - the kind of invasive thinking that usually dominates our awareness.

As a fellow ADHD person I didn't get out the first few times I tried, but now find it quite helpful.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Healthy but sedentary people show early decline in cellular energy production"

Tarq0n — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:33:51 +0000

Exactly, this is called a marginal effect and it's very relevant for our bodies which basically need their homeostasis disrupted to be prompted to adapt.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Have you restarted your computer this week?"

Tarq0n — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 06:36:01 +0000

That's what swap is for.

New comment by Tarq0n in "EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on"

Tarq0n — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:08:36 +0000

In the past with harmful refrigerants and lack of renewable energy AC simply was not justifiable in most of Europe. Progress on both fronts plus global warming is changing that only recently.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The CEO of Mullvad is the main financer of the Swedish Örebro party"

Tarq0n — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 17:30:14 +0000

There is a more nuanced argument against deportation as a policy. First of all it causes migrants to destroy their documentation and to be less coöperative with the immigration process. Second, some migrant countries refuse repatriation, which is currently an unsolved problem. Finally there's something to be said for immigrants to be registered regardless of status, rather than incentivising them to avoid authorities.

Now some of these problems could be solved, but there's a legitimate argument that the policy causes more problems than it solves.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

Tarq0n — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 12:07:44 +0000

Rising demand induces inflation because more money is chasing the same goods.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

Tarq0n — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:40:21 +0000

It's not just minimum wages. If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise. If you want to keep your nurses/doormen/teachers you'll have to increase their wages regardless of what the minimum wage is.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

Tarq0n — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:41:20 +0000

I've been to staffless hotels (numa) that were good and noticeably more affordable than their neighbors. I don't know if the housekeeping was outsourced though, I imagine that, without at least some local management staff, conditions would deteriorate rapidly.

New comment by Tarq0n in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

Tarq0n — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 09:36:20 +0000

Labour was cheaper back then. Even valuable jobs can stop making sense if the costs outweigh them. That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.

New comment by Tarq0n in "Too many R packages: CRAN is inundated with submissions"

Tarq0n — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:49:25 +0000

Data.table is a masterclass in bad API design. Its lack of success despite its technical merits is entirely of their own doing.