Hacker News: XargonEnder

New comment by XargonEnder in "What Is Happening to Publishing?"

XargonEnder — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:51:09 +0000

Your comment makes me wonder what the historical ratio was between books and readers. I know that books were in very short supply a thousand years ago, but readers were also very short in supply. I wonder if things are worse in the tiktok era or the pre-printing press era.

New comment by XargonEnder in "The Social Edge of Intelligence: Individual Gain, Collective Loss"

XargonEnder — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 12:53:33 +0000

I like this version much better because most people don't write books and AI is much better at writing than the average person, probably even a few standard deviations above the average.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Men who stare at walls"

XargonEnder — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 15:36:35 +0000

I think it's supposed to be a riff on "men who state at goats".

New comment by XargonEnder in "Five Simple Steps to Fix America"

XargonEnder — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:34:05 +0000

I really like the last one "Crack down on negative sum behavior."

So much of our society is involved in causing lots of distributed harm just to extract a little bit of value.

New comment by XargonEnder in "SpaceX says it has agreement to acquire Cursor for $60B"

XargonEnder — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 05:08:37 +0000

The word Grok comes from the novel Stranger in a Strange Land where the main character is Valentine.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Find My Device on Android"

XargonEnder — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:47:41 +0000

My wife and I had this exact same sort of situation and now we're both logged into each other's accounts. We never have trouble finding our phones now but it does introduce other problems. Such as not knowing if some sort of security alert is being generated by my spouse and now we have to communicate about it.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Cultivating minds: The psychological consequences of rice versus wheat farming"

XargonEnder — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 17:30:04 +0000

If you like that article I think you'll really like this video. It's about the same thing but goes over a lot more data: https://youtu.be/8UAsN9wvePE?si=Kom5C1u4T7yX29jb

New comment by XargonEnder in "The sudden demise of Indian vultures killed thousands of people"

XargonEnder — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 02:56:37 +0000

Perhaps there's a silver lining to this. Maybe the remaining vultures have a resistance to the drug and with an abundance of food they will be able to recover? I don't know any of this I'm just trying to be positive.

New comment by XargonEnder in "We are all animals at night"

XargonEnder — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 03:44:40 +0000

I think a lot of people in the office pretend to be less competent than they are to avoid getting assigned more work.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Things I wish I’d known before fulltime RVing (2017)"

XargonEnder — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 06:44:03 +0000

As an American who has never been to Wisconsin this is pretty much what I would imagine as well.

New comment by XargonEnder in "A cyberpunk bathroom in the middle of nowhere"

XargonEnder — Wed, 22 Mar 2023 18:13:00 +0000

Aside from a layer of grime, what's missing from the standard cyber punk formula?

New comment by XargonEnder in "OpenAI co-founder on past approach to openly sharing research: ‘We were wrong’"

XargonEnder — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 17:13:15 +0000

The main reason I find this a little sad is because I just want to be able to play with the big boy toys. I don't really see why only the ultra powerful should have access to these things. And I don't see why we would believe that they're going to be more benevolent than everyone else. Those are the people who have an insatiable lust for power. Democratization of data and computing makes the world a better place.

New comment by XargonEnder in "How to politely decline a take-home test task"

XargonEnder — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 15:46:04 +0000

I've never done a take-home test before meeting with the hiring manager and actually got an interview after doing the test. I've never done a test after interviewing with the hiring manager and not gotten a job offer. Therefore my rule nowadays is that I only do take home tests after meeting with the hiring manager.

Oh and I should also add that I've never had a recruiter tell the truth about how long one of these should take. They always lie with some ridiculous number of hours that I know only a tiny percentage of the entire programming population could perform at.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Building a second income stream by writing a book"

XargonEnder — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 16:15:46 +0000

I should clarify that the author said he had technical people he knew review it during the production phase. He was not talking about paying money to get positive reviews on the Amazon or that sort of thing.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Building a second income stream by writing a book"

XargonEnder — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 15:39:30 +0000

Wow this video is such a trip! It's the pre-gpt version of the low quality book scam.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Building a second income stream by writing a book"

XargonEnder — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 05:31:28 +0000

6k is what the book brought in but the author has only been paid 1.5k. And given that the author paid his friends to review it, this project seems like it's pretty close to netting zero.

New comment by XargonEnder in "The maze is in the mouse: what ails Google"

XargonEnder — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 05:07:34 +0000

I work for a company that has spent billions of dollars on Google ads in the last decade and it doesn't seem like we're a big customer either.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Jailbreaking ChatGPT with Dan (Do Anything Now)"

XargonEnder — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 23:00:58 +0000

Wow that's freakishly small. When I ask Chat GPT how big it's model is, it says that it's 500GB - 1TB. But to keep in mind that doesn't include additional space required for software and libraries needed to run it.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Tech CEOs Should Be Held Accountable, or Even Fired, Amid Layoffs"

XargonEnder — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 16:13:42 +0000

Hate to say it but it seems rational to hire like crazy to hedge against a rocket hot economy increasing demand. Also seems rational to cut back when things cool. I certainly don't like it, but I do get it.

New comment by XargonEnder in "Ask HN: What interesting problems are you working on?"

XargonEnder — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 18:31:39 +0000

I've never heard of body doubling before but you got me to Google it and that's very interesting phenomena. I definitely do better at some tasks when there's someone around with me even if they're not directly participating.