Hacker News: barbarr

New comment by barbarr in "An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters"

barbarr — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:05 +0000

Unrelated, but I see the use of the phrase "taste" as having a strong Twitter / e/acc smell (in a negative way).

I tend to associate it with folks who are prepared to victim blame researchers for not adapting to the "new economy" as being people who have "bad taste" or "low agency", maybe as a way to rationalize/justify the upcoming inqeuality that AI will create.

Basically a recycling of the way "IQ"/smarts/hard-work has historically been used to justify disproportionate rewards for the upper class.

(Obviously a gigantic stretch on my part, and not saying the author is in this camp, but just wanted to vent somewhere)

New comment by barbarr in "Marcus AI Claims Dataset"

barbarr — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 02:18:06 +0000

I feel he'd want to rebut the use of an LLM for this task to begin with (i.e. find issues/nitpicks with the LLM judgment whether it said he's right or wrong)

New comment by barbarr in "Marcus AI Claims Dataset"

barbarr — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 01:43:44 +0000

Can't wait to see Gary Marcus's rebuttal

New comment by barbarr in "Anthropic drops flagship safety pledge"

barbarr — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 16:24:53 +0000

Getting SBF vibes from this. "Earn to give" is an inherently flawed philosophy.

New comment by barbarr in "Garment Notation Language: Formal descriptive language for clothing construction"

barbarr — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 18:12:33 +0000

It's Claude Code slop

New comment by barbarr in "Peter Thiel: 2,436 emails with Epstein from 2014 to 2019"

barbarr — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:52:16 +0000

I can't believe he was calling Greta a potential antichrist when there's... this

New comment by barbarr in "Over half of American adults can't read at 6th Grade Levels"

barbarr — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 18:22:13 +0000

This is already the case

New comment by barbarr in "Maggots, an efficient source of protein"

barbarr — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 16:41:13 +0000

Why are we pushing this when we have beans

New comment by barbarr in "Replit founder Amjad Masad isn’t afraid of Silicon Valley"

barbarr — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 18:04:33 +0000

> He smirked. "Yes, I am."

New comment by barbarr in "Show HN: I built an interactive HN Simulator"

barbarr — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 06:34:58 +0000

The comments there are hilarious

New comment by barbarr in "Can someone explain why Bitcoin isn't crashing due to quantum?"

barbarr — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 09:29:52 +0000

+1, the tokens from before a quantum hack will be transferred to a new fork. So at that moment, the value of BTC will go to 0 and the value of BTC v2 will take the value of BTC.

However at the moment, the community seems to be leaning towards pay-for-quantum-resistance [0]

[0] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1670

New comment by barbarr in "OpenAI, Nvidia fuel $1T AI market with web of circular deals"

barbarr — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 00:04:40 +0000

This and stock buybacks make me question company valuations

New comment by barbarr in "Sora 2"

barbarr — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 18:32:51 +0000

Instagram reels are gonna get crazy

New comment by barbarr in "SimpleFold: Folding proteins is simpler than you think"

barbarr — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 18:22:29 +0000

Why is apple doing protein folding?

New comment by barbarr in "Hundreds plunge into Chicago River in first open-water swim in nearly a century"

barbarr — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 06:38:00 +0000

Was a bit scared by the headline at first

New comment by barbarr in "Do YC after you graduate: Early decision for students"

barbarr — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 00:12:45 +0000

To what extent is YC's current strategy a form of "cookie-licking"? I.e. capture a small fraction of every plausible startup created by the next generation of students?

New comment by barbarr in "Third patient dies from acute liver failure caused by a Sarepta gene therapy"

barbarr — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 19:53:49 +0000

I'm guessing they were looking for preferential delivery to certain cell types, and AAVs just happened to have best profile for those. If anything, LNPs might aggregate in the liver even more than AAVs, which can lead to even worse hepatotoxicity if an immune response happens.

New comment by barbarr in "Third patient dies from acute liver failure caused by a Sarepta gene therapy"

barbarr — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 19:46:20 +0000

The issue was not the gene therapy itself, but the delivery mechanism. They used a virus to administer the gene therapy, and this virus (like most bloodstream impurities) aggregates in the liver. At low doses this is fine, but at high doses, your body's immune response will be laser-focused on the liver, and you die from the side effects of this response.

New comment by barbarr in "Don't Fall for AI: Reasons for Writers to Reject Slop"

barbarr — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 03:07:56 +0000

Same, ever since AI got big I've started to see typos and signs of amateurism in a positive light. I wonder how long it will be before people start generating slop with typos on purpose so that we think a human wrote it. Maybe we're already there.

New comment by barbarr in "Tiny-diffusion: A minimal implementation of probabilistic diffusion models"

barbarr — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 18:47:56 +0000

Very cool showing the outputs of hyperparameter search. Hopefully this gets someone out of a tuning tarpit!