Hacker News: blevinstein

New comment by blevinstein in "Dangerous Technology for Americans Only"

blevinstein — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:48:04 +0000

IMO the US administration actions are less about actually caring whether foreigners have access to these tools, and more about legal/political precedence. In the US there's a long history of executive or legislative branches crying "national security" to shut down things they don't like, and courts will rarely stop them (or do so extremely slowly after months of deliberation.

(The other common cry is "child sex abuse" but for obvious reasons this administration is less interested in talking about that particular topic.)

https://xcancel.com/i/status/2010634987872387438

New comment by blevinstein in "Adaptive PDFs"

blevinstein — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:09:10 +0000

Idk what they're using for serving, but it's truncated in the raw HTML, not just the presentation layer. So probably a bug on the backend somewhere? The linked github repo doesn't seem to have the contents of the post.

New comment by blevinstein in "Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app"

blevinstein — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:54:00 +0000

Nice to see some catch-up with Anthropic and others, but this doesn't actually offer cloud coding agents (my favorite Claude and Cursor capability).

I want to code from my mobile device when my laptop is off or unavailable, pushing PRs directly to GitHub. Codex mobile only works with a desktop machine, at which point, I'll just use that machine, what's the point.

New comment by blevinstein in "Iran mulls taking control of all 7 cables passing through Strait of Hormuz"

blevinstein — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:13:34 +0000

"What do you mean by seizing the whole earth; because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you who does it with a great fleet are styled emperor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirates_and_Emperors

New comment by blevinstein in "Ask HN: Who is using OpenClaw?"

blevinstein — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 03:45:21 +0000

I experimented with setting up a dedicated openclaw instance for coding via chats on mobile, but now that cursor and Claude both offer easy coding from the Web/app, I have had it turned off for weeks.

New comment by blevinstein in "Show HN: An interactive map of Tolkien's Middle-earth"

blevinstein — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 01:00:53 +0000

Arda was supposed to be drastically changed after the First Age. This map is from the Second/Third Ages. Do the events from the First Age map currently into what is shown? Do some have to be excluded?

New comment by blevinstein in "Scammed out of $130K via fake Google call, spoofed Google email and auth sync"

blevinstein — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 18:41:55 +0000

I avoided this exact scam. The most important thing is to never trust an incoming phone number. If they can't give you a publicly posted phone number that you can call inbound, they are a scammer.

Google has dozens of properties and it is easy to generate an email from one of them that seems to confirm the attacker's identity. Never trust any of these to identify a legitimate representative.

Verily is closing its medical device program, shifts resources to AI

blevinstein — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:22:12 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/26/verily-is-closing-its-medical-device-program-as-alphabet-shifts-more-resources-to-ai/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45044686

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by blevinstein in "I genuinely don't understand why some people are still bullish about LLMs"

blevinstein — Sat, 29 Mar 2025 15:41:03 +0000

This user just doesn't understand how to use an LLM properly.

The best solution to hallucination and inaccuracy is to give the LLM mechanisms for looking up the information it lacks. Tools, MCP, RAG, etc are crucial for use cases where you are looking for factual responses.

New comment by blevinstein in "A phishing attack involving g.co, Google's URL shortener"

blevinstein — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 16:18:13 +0000

Sounds really similar to my experience a few months ago. I commented here about it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/googleworkspace/s/NtJpputXtg

There was something in Google workspace that allowed the scanners to have an email sent to them, AND an additional and of their choice. But when I asked about calling them back, I was told that wasn't possible, which made me suspicious.

New comment by blevinstein in "Why is my LG Washing Machine using 3.6GB of data/day?"

blevinstein — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 23:13:00 +0000

I think that was a joke. DLC normally means downloadable content.

New comment by blevinstein in "Send Me to Heaven"

blevinstein — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 21:27:20 +0000

Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?

Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.

Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?

New comment by blevinstein in "Software engineering topics I changed my mind on"

blevinstein — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 02:06:14 +0000

Product manager and project manager are different roles. I think the author was specifically designating the latter.

US Space Force members to be called “Guardians”

blevinstein — Sat, 19 Dec 2020 21:58:28 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/19/us/space-force-guardians-mike-pence.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25481627

Points: 2

# Comments: 2

New comment by blevinstein in "Don’t do the long take home assignments like coinbase"

blevinstein — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 23:21:03 +0000

I also recently went through the Coinbase interview process, and was pleasantly surprised that they offered this compensation for the take-home interview part.

Overall, a 4-6 hour task, to be completed on your own over a 1-week period, seems reasonable to me.

New comment by blevinstein in "(2013) George W. Bush is smarter than you"

blevinstein — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 23:19:34 +0000

Estimates online suggest that GWB has an IQ of 120-125, making him smarter than the average college grad, perhaps slightly less intelligent than the average person with an advanced degree.

It's also worth noting that IQ is not a particularly good predictor of presidential success, and only a partial measure of intelligence.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax#ci...

http://www.assessmentpsychology.com/

New comment by blevinstein in "A One-Line Proof of the Infinitude of Primes"

blevinstein — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 22:03:33 +0000

This proof is nearly equivalent to that proof, but uses the sine function to generate a contradiction. The crucial step involves the fact that:

1 + 2 * product(p', p')

must be divisible by some prime number, where

product(p', p')

is the product of all primes you were talking about.

New comment by blevinstein in "India's demonetisation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes"

blevinstein — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 16:02:42 +0000

500 rupees = $7.52, 1000 rupees = $15.05

These are not large denomination bills.

New comment by blevinstein in "Show HN: Puput, listen to your email for free when traveling, using missed calls"

blevinstein — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 09:21:35 +0000

I would be surprised if this doesn't constitute a violation of Terms of Service somewhere along the line? Something that could provide grounds for one of the telecom companies involved to have it taken down, if it were to be successful.

Basically, it means that you can send information (in one direction only), without paying for use of the telecom network. Taken to an extreme, it should be possible to create a "free walkie talkie" app that worked all over the world, for free, by repeatedly calling back and forth but never connecting the call.

New comment by blevinstein in "Carl Sagan's idea for Contact video game (1983) [video]"

blevinstein — Sat, 14 Nov 2015 02:03:45 +0000

I recently spent some time working on exactly this, in 2D:

https://github.com/blevinstein/SRAsteroids

To see what it looks like, you can check out this youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hSCz7tRl1s

I wrote an engine that modeled object positions as "timelines", where position varies with time, and demonstrated the basic relativistic effects (length contraction, time dilation, and frequency shifting). Unfortunately, I never really figured out how to turn these into actual game mechanics.