Hacker News: base698

New comment by base698 in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

base698 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 13:15:05 +0000

It's yet another Goodhart's law effect: > Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.

The economic ideas are interesting, but the manipulation and 2nd order effects makes it not work as designed.

New comment by base698 in "Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all"

base698 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 12:40:34 +0000

Which grammar tools?

New comment by base698 in "Testing Ads in ChatGPT"

base698 — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:22:00 +0000

BETRAYAL

New comment by base698 in "Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI"

base698 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:55:16 +0000

Would you say the same for 191 people rescued hiking in Yosemite a year?

New comment by base698 in "Man who videotaped himself BASE jumping in Yosemite arrested, says it was AI"

base698 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:48:10 +0000

The legal history is a bit more complex. TLDR: assholes that were BASE jumping in Yosemite in the early 1980s did things like throw burning barrels off the top of El Capitan and take trucks on trails not designed for vehicle traffic.

Comparing the number of BASE jumpers (small thousands) and the number of hikers and climbers (millions) BASE jumpers just can't have the political influence for access.

Random note, Brendan Weinstein who posted here on occasion recently died BASE jumping: https://www.reddit.com/r/SkyDiving/comments/1q6n7v2/brendan_...

New comment by base698 in "Trillions spent and big software projects are still failing"

base698 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 11:14:57 +0000

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Gall’s law wins again.

New comment by base698 in "The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)"

base698 — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 14:56:43 +0000

I started a project this year similar to this with rats. It’s now two axis with tracking and a stereo camera with depth detection. The amount of hours I’ve spent on it is astounding but I’ve learned a lot!

Also, ended up swapping the Pi I started with to a jetson.

New comment by base698 in "AWS to bare metal two years later: Answering your questions about leaving AWS"

base698 — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 13:36:03 +0000

Until you factor in the legions of devops writing terraform, iam, and cicd scripts.

New comment by base698 in "Quantification of fibrinaloid clots in plasma from pediatric Long COVID patients"

base698 — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 15:11:23 +0000

https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/19/immune-markers-post-vaccina...

They are looking into that.

New comment by base698 in "Claude Sonnet 4.5"

base698 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 13:23:28 +0000

Perceptual Hash. I have a Python script that does just this I did a million years ago: https://gist.github.com/base698/42d24be9309520fe8ad768844868...

I used it to match frames between different quality video streams. Operates on gray scale.

Toddlerbot: Open-Source Humanoid Robot

base698 — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:04:25 +0000

Article URL: https://toddlerbot.github.io/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45217372

Points: 133

# Comments: 23

New comment by base698 in "A case study in bad hiring practice and how to fix it"

base698 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:18:59 +0000

Exceptionally, I had both the highest and lowest grade in linear algebra. Probably not what they mean though.

New comment by base698 in "GPT-5"

base698 — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 17:59:06 +0000

Weight of the air deflecting downward. Plain ole Newtonian equal and opposite reaction.

New comment by base698 in "6 weeks of Claude Code"

base698 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 16:36:14 +0000

I’ve used both. Claude more extensively. I’ve had good results with Gemini too, however it seems easier to get stuck in a loop. Happens with Claude too but not quite as frequent.

By loop I mean you tell it no don’t implement this service, look at this file instead and mimic that and instead it does what it did before.

New comment by base698 in "Gemini Embedding: Powering RAG and context engineering"

base698 — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 23:27:17 +0000

Or you find your users search for id strings like k1231o to find ref docs and end up needing key word search and reranking.

New comment by base698 in "OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent casually clicks through "I am not a robot" verification"

base698 — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 12:42:10 +0000

I have a product I built that uses some standard automation tools to do order entry into an accounting system. Currently my customer pays people to manually type the orders in from their web portal. The accounting system is closed and they don’t allow easy ways to automate these workflows. Automation is gated behind mega expensive consultants. I’m hoping in the arms race of locking it down to try to prevent 3rd party integration the AI operator model will end up working.

Hard for me to see how it’s ethical to force your customers to do tons of menial data entry when the orders are sitting right there in json.

New comment by base698 in "Personal aviation is about to get interesting (2023)"

base698 — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 19:04:12 +0000

I routinely flew that far in a plane I spent $100k on. You can land and refuel and a plane that 155+ kts can get quite far in two hops with 3 hour legs. The weather and other maintenance inconveniences is more the issue.

New comment by base698 in "Death by AI"

base698 — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 12:06:52 +0000

You could make a browser extension to filter your content through AI and rewrite it to something else you find more palatable. Ironically, with AI you could probably complete it in an hour.

New comment by base698 in "ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action"

base698 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 19:49:53 +0000

Similar to what was shown in the video when I make a large purchase like a home or car I usually obsess for a couple of years and make a huge spreadsheet to evaluate my decisions. Having an agent get all the spreadsheet data would be a big win. I had some success recently trying that with manus.

New comment by base698 in "Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and XAI Granted Up to $200M from Defense Department"

base698 — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 22:58:48 +0000

I think that would be power components like transformers for the grid.