Hacker News: absolutelastone

New comment by absolutelastone in "Leaving Google"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:16:43 +0000

It has always seemed to me that level of strategic direction doesn't come from the CEO's brain, but from the big investors. The CEO's job is to execute what they want.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Leaving Google"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:08:13 +0000

Their timeline sounds right to me. The dot com bubble was about big dreams but ended up with far less reality when stock options crashed to nothing. There was a finance bubble after the internet bubble and you could make a lot more money as a quant.

The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Engineers develop wearable heart attack detection technology"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:53:44 +0000

I agree the legal restrictions (and liability) should be looser. But other countries are pretty bad about this too in my experience. It's more of a medical establishment monopoly thing it seems.

Also you can already buy home ECG devices for a couple hundred bucks. Not sure if there is some history of being banned in the past or whatever, but otherwise I'd guess the main problem is just a lack of much interest in the market.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Engineers develop wearable heart attack detection technology"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 16:39:59 +0000

I suspect it's probably worse than that in reality. From a quick search on state of the art ECG results (the full system of leads attached all over your torso) it looks like around 90 percent specificity (True negative rate) and under 50 percent sensitivity (true positive rate). So it's only pretty good at ruling out heart attacks, but still misses them sometimes. But is pretty bad when it comes to false alarms. I think they use it along with multiple other tests and consideration of symptoms in triage at the hospital.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 04:56:40 +0000

If you trace back through the executive orders (on then off then on again...) regarding DEI, it starts with Obama. Biden did have several and it seems like things started really getting mandated and serious then, perhaps due to BLM. We seem to have an unstable oscillation going back and forth here until it breaks.

But yes it wasn't just top-down. The diversity statements in faculty hiring started about ten years ago and started becoming mandatory and used for screening at many places about five years ago.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sun, 11 May 2025 04:02:06 +0000

The first rule is still to stop digging. Of course you can't spend four years pushing an extremely unpopular position on an issue and expect it to not matter the next day.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 16:05:40 +0000

Well the obvious answer is training. Medicine requires 4 years undergrad plus 4 years grad plus 3+ years residency. You might argue medicine can be replaced by AI similarly, but the issue is risk. That 11 years is to reach the point you can be trusted to make the really high-risk and high-value decisions, not to do the easy stuff analogous to entry-level software.

Software has been an outlier in terms of its high salaries requiring only minimal training. That implies automating it will disproportionately be both easier and more valuable than many other skilled tasks.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Amazon's Vulcan Robots Now Stow Items Faster Than Humans"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 15:33:28 +0000

Doesn't the CPI produce an average estimate of what everyone is already paying for housing as opposed to the full sticker price for a new entrant? Meaning if most people are living in houses they bought in the past at much lower prices and interest rates, then the CPI will be heavily weighted towards their costs as opposed to the much smaller fraction of renters and first-time buyers.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 14:58:22 +0000

There was a massive tech boom in that time with technologies like cars, electricity, and communications.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 04:41:25 +0000

So your argument is that nothing is communism? The fact that it's a single large organization allocating resources is rather key to the whole point. That the same organizational structure doing it is interesting to me anyway. I suspected this line of thinking is too triggering for some people though.

A corporation is not an economic system, just a tiny participant of one. And I'd rather describe their decision making as hierarchical yes, but by middle managers implementing the agendas of higher ups, not necessarily by committees. When they operate by committee they tend to be at their worst...

New comment by absolutelastone in "The trends behind the historically low U.S. birth rate"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 04:21:40 +0000

South Korea has the lowest birth rate. Japan has an older population and higher death rate, so a faster shirking population currently.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 02:33:11 +0000

Seeing all the recent tariff fights and actually finding out what the story is behind some of the different industries, I am becoming much more of the opinion that other countries take over industries as the result of specific agendas targeting those industries and maintaining a large degree of monopoly over them. The US has not reacted much because each country only took one industry or so and it was a way to manipulate them or appease them or whatever, but it is turning into death by a thousand cuts. I definitely think the US government needs to be a lot more involved than they have been in a range of ways. That list of ridiculous-sounding cancelled NSF grants wasn't it though. If you're talking about the SBIR program, that is pretty tiny. I assume it will continue, it is legally set to be at 2% or whatever.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Sat, 10 May 2025 02:19:52 +0000

Government funding of research. We were talking about the NSF after all, not free markets versus central planning.

On that though, I read somewhere that the hierarchical committee-led operation of the funding agencies is the same way communist systems dole out money for everything else too. Not sure if they were being completely serious.

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Fri, 09 May 2025 23:36:08 +0000

That difference in difficulties is kind of the point. Imagine, as an extreme, a company makes a machine with certain functions performed based on which button combinations you press. A second company gets a patent for using the first company's machine for doing various tasks by pressing various button combinations, which are new uses of the machine no one had thought of yet. Now the second company has all the bargaining power in the market and so gets giant margins, despite doing a tiny fraction of the work it takes to make those tasks possible.

I wonder if our current system ended up this way because it is the most efficient in terms of specialization, or because the patent system drove things in this direction where the people last dealing with customers (i.e., those making the software layer) have the best info of what tasks the customers want to do with their computers, and hence patent the solutions first. Leaving hardware vendors no choice but to serve the software monopolies (one after another since the 80's).

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Fri, 09 May 2025 23:13:19 +0000

You seem to be arguing that the second government touches anything then everything it does gets credited to the government funding column. Seems simplistic to me, but you can believe what you like. Go back far enough and there was only private industry, and no government funding until the space race basically.

Either way the fact remains that the billions spent developing GPU's preceded the millions spent to use those GPUs for AI. Not sure what it has to do with polarization of the comment section. I assume it's just people seeking an opportunity to heap abuse on anything close to a representative of the evil "other side".

New comment by absolutelastone in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

absolutelastone — Fri, 09 May 2025 19:46:14 +0000

I think their point is the billions in private investment which preceded those millions.

I think this is a common issue in computer science, where credit is given to sexy "software applications" like AI when the real advances were in the hardware that enabled them, which everyone just views as an uninteresting commodity.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Data manipulations alleged in study that paved way for Microsoft's quantum chip"

absolutelastone — Fri, 09 May 2025 18:52:39 +0000

It wasn't just that by itself. There was a list of several undisclosed data tweaks and manipulations. None were particularly fraudulent or anything, but once you have them all included in the paper, as the former author was complaining, it seems more likely that they just manipulated the theory and data as needed to make them match. There's a big difference between predicting something and demonstrating it in experiment, versus showing your theory can be made to fit some data you have been given when you can pick the right adjustments and subset of data.

New comment by absolutelastone in "Qwen3: Think deeper, act faster"

absolutelastone — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 19:09:04 +0000

one point is a collection of size 1. It is always data.

New comment by absolutelastone in "The side hustle from hell"

absolutelastone — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 18:43:54 +0000

If you don't know the value of what you are buying you are most likely to get even less than what you payed for. In the story they basically got scammed by overseas shops who probably pocketed most of the money and farmed out the effort to minimally-skilled and minimally-paid developers who were in way over their heads.

New comment by absolutelastone in "A single line of code cost $8000"

absolutelastone — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:26:28 +0000

They probably just combined all phoning home information into one. Usage monitoring includes version used, which leads to automatic update when needed (or when bugged...).