<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: andrewla</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=andrewla</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 08:11:55 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=andrewla" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Carnegie Mellon University Announces Historic $3B Gift from Ken Griffin"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>They're not "renaming" it -- they're "naming" it, right? The School of Computer Science is not currently named for anyone, and his $1B puts his name on the school. It's not like they're changing CMU to KGU.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2026 21:06:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914464</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49914464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "I switched to Brave"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Prop 8, the anti-gay-marriage proposition that Eich donated money to support, passed with 52% of the vote.<p>Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of <i>California</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 20:08:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883649</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49883649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "I switched to Brave"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If you truly find it abhorrent then I think it's fine to continue to call it out. Since this was a position also held by the majority of California voters, or, to reuse my example above, Barack Obama, I find it hard to give much credence to the idea of it being an example of "abhorrent bigotry".<p>I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted for this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 19:12:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882969</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882969</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882969</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hate to say it but I don't think you're right on the legalities even in the children's case. In the US anyway, in most jurisdictions [1], if the child's act was not malicious, then parental responsibility is not automatic, but is contingent on the result being foreseeable [2] by the parents.<p>[1] Hawaii and Louisiana are strange in this regard. Some other states have a version of this but severely cap the amounts.<p>[2] "foreseeable" here standing in for a broad set of legal standards that roughly map to negligence/gross negligence/recklessness on the part of the parent</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 18:38:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882471</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882471</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49882471</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "I switched to Brave"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I updated the comment to say that "... he no longer advocates". In the public record, to be clear, his total contribution to the discourse was a financial disclosure of a donation. We have literally no idea if he has made further donations, either in favor of or against this or any other policy (because smaller donations are anonymous) and he has refused to speak publicly about anything related to this, except to offer general support for "inclusiveness".<p>But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.<p>But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:27:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880542</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880542</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880542</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "I switched to Brave"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a little off-topic, but the article calls it out specifically, accusing Brendan Eich of being an "absolute scumbag" Aren't we past performative displays of outrage over this?<p>He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 28 Sep 2026 15:34:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879682</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49879682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is great context and I feel that this is bringing in a lot of information that I wasn't aware of.<p>If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:27:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849476</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849476</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49849476</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think I mostly agree here -- any cloud provider or frankly SaaS system carries a similar risk. The question is whether they want to explicitly make that part of their terms of service, and in addition have made public statements about their willingness to apply those terms of service.<p>AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:56:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847845</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847845</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847845</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The concern, I think, in its most generous terms, is that they can't buy Anthropic's service the way the could, say, a wrench, because Anthropic can decide at any point to disable the military's ability (even transitively, through other vendors) to use their models if they determined that they do not like what the military is doing with that or if it violates their interpretation of the terms of service.<p>This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:20:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847374</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847374</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847374</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Coulomb's law remains tricky to test at home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is making assumptions about the nature of charge and its relation to force that are what is under discussion! We get no guarantee from nature that the force is linear in the amount of charge; if it turned out to be sqrt(charge) then we'd still have to deal with it. We could redefine charge to the sqrt of the previous quantity, but then other aspects of linearity (like conservation of charge) would have to take a different form.<p>We're lucky (and maybe only in the linear domain, which is more accurately the case) that these ended up being the same.<p>But if it were sqrt(charge) then we'd define Culoumbs constant to have commensurate units to translate sqrt(charge) * sqrt(charge) / distance^2 to force units.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 19:46:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835906</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835906</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49835906</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Coulomb's law remains tricky to test at home"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why would the universe care about dimensional analysis? Besides, the outside constant would do the unit conversion from whatever the right-hand side produces to units of force.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:29:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832042</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832042</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49832042</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The idea that deflation is built into Bitcoin is exactly equivalent to saying "the real value of bitcoin will always increase" which is an absurd premise.<p>Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:52:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742599</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742599</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742599</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Because difficulty does not adapt dynamically, if the miners do not move then the fork will be defunct because it will take literally days to weeks to mine a block, and to mine the 216 blocks that would trigger a difficulty adjustment would also take proportionately longer. So transactions would sit in the mempool and the currency would be mostly useless.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:48:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742559</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742559</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742559</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Neovim have a ~$800k Bitcoin donation sitting untouched since 2023"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Only if there has been an outgoing transaction from that account. If the address has only received deposits then only the hash is available.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:45:34 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742522</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742522</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49742522</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "A warning about 'model welfare'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't understand this -- are you agreeing with me that consciousness is not the basis of human rights or contesting that?<p>Removing the negative from your first sentence (I don't care what it is "not", I only care what it "is"), I read [Consciousness is the basis of human rights because consciousness leads you to you assume, all other humans would experience the world in essentially the same way you do]. I can't completely parse this, but as I read it I don't think this is true; my assumption of human rights is independent of whether all other humans "experience the world in essentially the same way you do".<p>For the second part, can you give me a concrete example of an entity that doesn't "meaningfully differ from [my]self" that isn't a human so that I can weigh this properly? My point is that as of now no such entity exists so I can't give this any creedence.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:58:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732920</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732920</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732920</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "A warning about 'model welfare'"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed.<p>That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate?<p>The major premise seems to be that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness] is an untrue statement. That's the essence of the sections "Circular reasoning" and "Anthropomorphization" and "Consciousness is very likely biological" and "AIs are simulation machines".<p>The minor premise seems to be that [consciousness is the basis of human rights]. This is the point of "Human consciousness is the cornerstone of our legal and ethical rights frameworks"<p>And the conclusion of the syllogism is that this is dangerous, that "Anthropomorphization amplifies AI safety risks". Specifically "seeding doubt about the moral status of AI systems into their own training may significantly elevate the alignment and containment risks of those systems."<p>I find all the arguments in the major premise section to be poor arguments but I accept the conclusion for sure that they are not conscious, and I can provisionally accept the idea that they are not on a path to consciousness.<p>I completely reject the notion that consciousness is the basis of human rights. The premise itself is absurd. We only have one unambiguous example of a class of conscious entities, and that it humans. If a human loses consciousness do they lose rights? If an entity gains consciousness does it get human rights? The former is a clear "no" and the latter is a "insufficient data for a meaningful answer".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:17:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732380</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732380</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49732380</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "How big are factorials?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This brings to mind the analysis in Bender & Orszag; they approach this through difference equations (a bit of a lost art in formal mathematics; very 19th-century feel) rather than integration.<p>Instead of introducing the gamma function, they instead start from the observation that log(F_n) - log(F_n-1) = log(n), so treating this difference as analogous to integration, it says that F_n ~= nlogn + n as the leading asymptotic behavior. This is clear just by substitution and algebra; no calculus necessary (though it helps to "know the answer beforehand").<p>From there you can treat the error term in this as F_n = n^n * e^n * E_n and plug that into the same relationship (F_n = n * F_n-1) to derive what that error term looks like asymptotically, and end up in the same place that the integration on the OP leads to.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2026 18:19:51 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730906</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730906</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49730906</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "25 years of mass surveillance is enough"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think we have to face the fact that we cannot unring this bell. There will be holding actions against things like Flock but in the end they will fail, and at best we will have a loosening of the laws that Flock is being used to enforce and more draconian enforcement of the laws that remain.<p>Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:49:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713429</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713429</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49713429</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Truncated SVD (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Some classic HN discussion from the same era: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695478">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38695478</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 20:53:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703835</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703835</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703835</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by andrewla in "Claude is a Contrarian"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Claude definitely is a victim of its own path-dependent thinking. In a sense it's good to document dead ends and false starts so that others don't make the same mistake but it feels more pathological with Claude because sometimes its first thought is way off base.<p>This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2026 17:16:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700488</link><dc:creator>andrewla</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700488</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49700488</guid></item></channel></rss>