Hacker News: bongoman37

New comment by bongoman37 in "New Mexico is first state in US to offer universal child care"

bongoman37 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 15:51:24 +0000

Many of the Persian Gulf GCC nations essentially had a form of generous UBI since the early 80s. It has certainly made people far less enterprising and productive. Inflation hasnt happened since they import the vast majority of their requirements. It has led to increased religiosity etc since people are freed up to engage in religious activities all day long and don't necessarily have to develop skills like social competency or engage with others.

Former Staffers Say India's Biggest IT Firm Was Gaming the US Visa System

bongoman37 — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 00:14:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-17/india-s-tcs-misclassified-managers-to-skirt-h-1b-rules-former-staffers-say

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43084550

Points: 16

# Comments: 0

New comment by bongoman37 in "Spanish police arrest ex-fraud chief after €20M found in walls of his house"

bongoman37 — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:14:23 +0000

Nontrivial to use. Still need to pass it to someone to convert fiat to crypto. Bitcoin is a public ledger, would be even easier to tie to him in some ways.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Half of Americans say Public K-12 Education is Going In The Wrong Direction"

bongoman37 — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:48:37 +0000

In our area, the teachers union straight up released a pro-Hamas, anti-Israeli resolution despite no one asking them for their opinion. And we're in a fairly dense Jewish area.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Half of Americans say Public K-12 Education is Going In The Wrong Direction"

bongoman37 — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 17:42:31 +0000

You'd probably have admins and technology suck up most of the funding. At least in the US, funding and outcomes don't have that much of a correlation. DC area schools have among the highest levels of funding per student and the worst outcomes as well.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Malicious AI models on Hugging Face backdoor users' machines"

bongoman37 — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:09:42 +0000

There are action models based on LLMs like Gorilla LLM or autoGPT that take a natural language input and convert that to API calls that could do all sorts of things from sending emails to performing stock trades.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Malicious AI models on Hugging Face backdoor users' machines"

bongoman37 — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:08:04 +0000

I think we need models to safeguard against models and then maybe hard coded rules to safeguard against those models missing out on things. It would be exceedingly hard to verify what all could be maliciously encoded in a billion parameter model waiting to be unleashed with the right sequence of tokens.

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do

bongoman37 — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 21:35:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/02/opinion/transgender-children-gender-dysphoria.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39234747

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by bongoman37 in "Sex differences in work preferences among gifted men and women"

bongoman37 — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 17:41:39 +0000

Yea, he casually added that term as if people wouldn't notice it. High earning, attractive, middle aged men are often targets for sexual harassment by women but it is not taken seriously at all.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Bill Ackman's academic wife Neri Oxman's dissertation is marred by plagiarism"

bongoman37 — Sun, 07 Jan 2024 00:39:49 +0000

Why is this about individuals at all? As a former academic I feel academia has a higher principle to uphold its principles about assigning credit where it is due and so on. Right and left are largely meaningless terms, we should be striving for the truth.

the US government is poised to withdraw longstanding warnings about cholesterol

bongoman37 — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:38:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/10/feds-poised-to-withdraw-longstanding-warnings-about-dietary-cholesterol/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38621052

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bongoman37 in "NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters"

bongoman37 — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 21:06:53 +0000

Its just incalculable what the ROI on this kind of a mission is. It is amazing that US and tech was in the state it was in when the planets aligning themselves happened and we were able to send these out there. A decade here or there and the opportunity would be lost.

New comment by bongoman37 in "One in 10 Japanese Now Aged over 80, Population Report Shows"

bongoman37 — Tue, 19 Sep 2023 19:00:52 +0000

Outside of a few places like the US, people care a hell of a lot about the genetics. Try putting Africans in India, or Japanese in China, and so on, there is no such thing as the melting pot in the vast majority of the world.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force (1963)"

bongoman37 — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 13:14:25 +0000

I think it is also about seeing the most difficult cases and having them stick in your memory as a med student. I have friends who practice medicine and they show the same behavior even when there is no monetary incentive at any stage for them. They do this even for their own parents and kids.

New comment by bongoman37 in "32% of Americans have a tattoo, including 22% who have more than one"

bongoman37 — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 04:13:37 +0000

We knew smoking was bad for a long time. It took time to push through tobacco industry's lobbying and massive amounts of advertising convincing people against what they could evidently see in front of them. I don't think tattoo industry has remotely near that level of push.

New comment by bongoman37 in "Following pushback, Zoom says it won't use customer data to train AI models"

bongoman37 — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 17:49:09 +0000

Microsoft culturally is extremely averse to using customer data for doing these kind of things. I was once talking to a Microsoft exec and he said that once the idea of using contextual ads in Hotmail was brought up (similar to Gmail), and it was shot down hard. The idea of using customer data (even non-paying ones) in this fashion was anathema. Microsoft makes its money from massive enterprise contracts which might be threatened by someone using your data to benefit your competitor in any way.

The Green Card Game

bongoman37 — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 15:50:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.thegreencardgame.com/factor/welcome

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37036104

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Adults with Severe Hemophilia A

bongoman37 — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 03:05:00 +0000

Article URL: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-gene-therapy-adults-severe-hemophilia

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36842672

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

Y Combinator

bongoman37 — Tue, 18 Apr 2023 15:21:03 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_combinator

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35615168

Points: 11

# Comments: 3

New comment by bongoman37 in "Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)"

bongoman37 — Mon, 13 Mar 2023 16:04:46 +0000

Same as how homeopathy, flat earthers, etc can exist. Also people like to have something to call themselves special. This provides a group in which you can show off your 'knowledge' and gadgetry and so on.