Hacker News: abra0

New comment by abra0 in "Obsidian Sync now has a headless client"

abra0 — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 20:28:12 +0000

Finally! I had to set up a container with X on my headless server to get a few text files reliably synced, crazy stuff.

New comment by abra0 in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

abra0 — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 11:14:35 +0000

This is a really fun problem! I suggest anyone who likes optimization in a very broad sense to try their hand at it. Might be the most fun I've had while interviewing. I had to spend a week-worth of evenings on it to fully scratch the itch, and I managed to get 1112 cycles. But that was mostly manual, before the current crop of agentic models (clopus 4.5, gpt5.2). I wonder how far you can RalphWiggum it!

New comment by abra0 in "Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title"

abra0 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:47:00 +0000

Here: https://excel-esports.com/product/world-of-warcraft-mewc-202...

You're supposed to do a $0 checkout for some reason and then download them

New comment by abra0 in "Europe's first geostationary sounder satellite is launched"

abra0 — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:46:17 +0000

> MTG-S1 is the first geostationary meteorological sounder satellite to fly over Europe

I was confused for a minute on how it's both _geostationary_ and _over Europe_ -- you can't be geostationary if your orbit is not over the equator!

Turns out[1] the MTG-S1 satellite is in fact geostationary and parked at exactly 0°00'00"N 0°00'00"E (off the coast of Ghana), 42164 km up from the center of Earth, it's just pointing at Europe at an angle.

1 - https://space.oscar.wmo.int/satellites/view/mtg_s1

New comment by abra0 in "Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge"

abra0 — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 15:03:46 +0000

Tbh it still puzzles me why gameplay degradation specifically was chosen as a way to try to discourage piracy. I imagine many more people hit the degradations, thought the game was just buggy and abandoned it, compared to people who were motivated by bad gameplay to give the developers money.

The mindfuck angle is pretty effective though. This article wouldn't have been written otherwise.

Uncovering the mechanics of The Games: Winter Challenge

abra0 — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:29:39 +0000

Article URL: https://mrwint.github.io/winter/writeup/writeup.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820076

Points: 267

# Comments: 107

Reverse-engineering why 'The Games: Winter Challenge' (1991) is unwinnable

abra0 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 22:14:43 +0000

Article URL: https://mrwint.github.io/winter/writeup/writeup.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43799002

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by abra0 in "Ozempic linked to lower Alzheimer's risk in people with Type 2 diabetes"

abra0 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:21:52 +0000

The real question is whether these side-effects are going to be worse than 20 years of not taking it.

New comment by abra0 in "Dokku: My favorite personal serverless platform"

abra0 — Tue, 27 Aug 2024 01:18:50 +0000

That's where I am too right now for personal projects, and I ended up reimplementing parts of Dokuploy for that, but I don't feel much of a need to move from "fun little docker compose" for some reason

New comment by abra0 in "Building a deep learning rig"

abra0 — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 23:32:23 +0000

That's a great point! I'd agree that just the extra emotional motivation from having your own thing is worth a ton. I get some distance down that way by having a large RAM no GPU box, so that things are slow but at least possible for random small one offs.

New comment by abra0 in "Building a deep learning rig"

abra0 — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 15:43:03 +0000

Well if you are not using a rented machine during a period of time, you should release it.

Agreed on reliability and data transfer, that's a good point.

Out of curiosity, what do you use a 2x3090 rig for? Bulk not time-sensitive inference on down quanted models?

New comment by abra0 in "Building a deep learning rig"

abra0 — Sat, 24 Feb 2024 14:42:38 +0000

I was thinking of doing something similar, but I am a bit sceptical about how the economics on this works out. On vast.ai renting a 3x3090 rig is $0.6/hour. The electricity price of operating this in e.g. Germany is somewhere about $0.05/hour. If the OP paid 1700 EUR for the cards, the breakeven point would be around (haha) 3090 hours in, or ~128 days, assuming non-stop usage. It's probably cool to do that if you have a specific goal in mind, but to tinker around with LLMs and for unfocused exploration I'd advise folks to just rent.

New comment by abra0 in "Many AI safety orgs have tried to criminalize currently-existing open-source AI"

abra0 — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 18:18:56 +0000

The third effort is referred to sometimes as AI not-kill-everyone-ism, a tacky and unwieldy term that is unlikely to be co-opted or lead to the unproductive discussion like around the OP article.

It is pretty sad to read people bash together the efforts to understand and control the technology better and the companies doing their usual profit maximization.

New comment by abra0 in "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO"

abra0 — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 12:18:28 +0000

More effort spent on early commercialization like keeping ChatGPT running might mean less effort on cutting edge capabilities. Altman was never an AI safety person, so my personal hope is that Anthropic avoids this by having higher quality leadership.

New comment by abra0 in "Greg Brockman quits OpenAI"

abra0 — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 02:20:32 +0000

>rightfully so

How the hell can people be so confident about this? You describe two smart people reasonably disagreeing about a complicated topic

New comment by abra0 in "What Ilya Sutskever really wants"

abra0 — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 02:13:34 +0000

If there's a lot of smoke coming, people are running out of the building and you can see an ominous red glow in the windows, shouting "FIRE" is the right thing to do even if we are not going to be engulfed in flames this very second or the next. The potential costs given the evidence we all have are simply not comparable.

New comment by abra0 in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

abra0 — Fri, 10 Nov 2023 01:01:18 +0000

Bonus question on O-1: what do you think are the easiest boxes to check for a talented professionals in AI? High salary and critical capacity for established organizations are a given, but what else?

New comment by abra0 in "ChatGPT’s system prompts"

abra0 — Sun, 15 Oct 2023 11:24:36 +0000

Could some knowledge have been finetuned into it, and be outside of the prompt?

New comment by abra0 in "Amazon will invest up to $4B in Anthropic"

abra0 — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 08:53:34 +0000

Great to see investment in the most alignment-conscious of the AI orgs.

New comment by abra0 in "Architecture diagrams enable better conversations"

abra0 — Tue, 22 Aug 2023 17:45:05 +0000

What are the tools people use to draw diagrams? I've tried many things and settled on Miro on an iPad (infinite canvas + pencil), but I still think this space is underinvested in.

The downside of diagrams from code is the loss of the wysiwyg aspect -- I want to be able to manipulate things visually.