Hacker News: bongoman42

New comment by bongoman42 in "Israel-bound flight lands in Saudi Arabia after violent incident between pilots"

bongoman42 — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 18:27:58 +0000

From later news, the the stabbing pilot is an Omani national and the stabbed pilot is Indian and it looks like a terror attack. Interestingly, the pilots who landed the plane appear to be Ukrainian and Russian.

New comment by bongoman42 in "DraftKings Is Using AI to Behaviorally Target Chronic Gamblers"

bongoman42 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:10:43 +0000

The libertarian in me says people should be allowed to make their own choices but I can't negate that gambling in poor is overall significantly negative for society. Before India banned this kind of gambling, I had a firend who worked as a data scientist for Dream11, an online fatasy cricket like gambling app. He was able to see a lot about the people playing. Oftentimes, the daily 'ticket size' was somewhere around 100-300INR (about $1-3), these were folks earning maybe 1.5 to twice that at the most. Their kids were often going hungry so their parents could play.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Who People Talk to When They're Struggling"

bongoman42 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:32:50 +0000

This is a solved problem in 2026. You can create as many bots with varied personalities to talk to. Therapists have a vested interest in you continuing to talk to them and can induce neuroses in susceptible individuals.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Mistral OCR 4"

bongoman42 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 14:26:33 +0000

We use Qwen 7B parameter model for this in production. It works quite well.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Removing 'um' from a recording is harder than it sounds"

bongoman42 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:17:51 +0000

A part of saying something like um is to continue your speech and prevent the other person or someone else in the group from interjecting.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Premature optimization is fun sometimes"

bongoman42 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:52:45 +0000

If it wasn't fun you wouldn't need to have an aphorism against it.

New comment by bongoman42 in "A walking tour of surveillance infrastructure in Seattle (2020)"

bongoman42 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:10:00 +0000

This is largely because states will not cooperate with ICE to help identify criminals among immigrants. ICE is not an issue in states where the police are cooperating with it.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

bongoman42 — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:48:10 +0000

The Islamic system literally permits slavery, including sexual slavery. It is far worse than capitalism any day.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

bongoman42 — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:37:25 +0000

The middle east has the largest concentration of billionaires outside of US/China and huge poverty alongside. It is so grotesque that the rich will often just kill people and casually pay blood money.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Meta blocks human rights accounts from reaching audiences in Saudi Arabia, UAE"

bongoman42 — Wed, 20 May 2026 20:34:53 +0000

NASA went and turned itself into a gigantic inefficient bureaucracy to the point that SpaceX considers NASA experience a negative.

New comment by bongoman42 in "The Dating App Swipe Is Dying. What Comes Next May Be Worse"

bongoman42 — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:21:27 +0000

Dating apps are really good for women, particularly young women. Several of my women friends have said they can have a decent partner for an evening or a weekend with as little as 30 mins of time investment.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Meta's New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale"

bongoman42 — Thu, 14 May 2026 16:10:17 +0000

I have a friend at Meta. He said he hates every moment of working there but when the sweet RSUs drop every month it makes it all worth it.

New comment by bongoman42 in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

bongoman42 — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:50:48 +0000

Government is not great at picking up or creating ideas. Academia has to lead in that and then show government why it would be best for the nation to fund those. The government is good at long term funding for ideas that may not be the best for private sector right away but it should not be creating ideas themselves otherwise you would get things like Lysenkoism.

New comment by bongoman42 in "SpaceX files to go public"

bongoman42 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 02:43:31 +0000

I use it, overall, it is not too bad. I wouldn't use it for coding etc, but its access to X means it can answer news related stuff much better. Its guardrails are lower so it does fairly innocuous things that will have ChatGPT or Gemini refusing to do.

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs

bongoman42 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:53:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2602.16800

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492847

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

OpenAI is throwing everything into building an automated researcher

bongoman42 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 03:30:03 +0000

Article URL: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-is-throwing-everything-into-building-a-fully-automated-researcher/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47485213

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by bongoman42 in "MoD sources warn Palantir role at heart of government is threat to UK security"

bongoman42 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:23:45 +0000

'Do the integration' is where all the fun and money is.

New comment by bongoman42 in "ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did"

bongoman42 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 22:07:07 +0000

It is a different mindset and they are happy with what they are doing. I come from India where there is a ton of that labor. When I lived there, I had a couple of full time house help, supplemented by cook etc as needed. They had plenty of time by themselves. They would genuinely just zone out when they had free time, even significantly long. THey liked the easiness of the job, and the fact that once it is over, it is just over. No need to think about tomorrow, take your work in your head etc. A lot of the world's people are like that, maybe even a significant majority.

New comment by bongoman42 in "Amazon Ring's lost dog ad sparks backlash amid fears of mass surveillance"

bongoman42 — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 13:33:54 +0000

I don't even live in a super rural area, but if you think you could just walk a couple of kms in a couple of foot of snow to get something like a bookcase and bring it over is hilarious. Also, I would rather not receive packages for my neighbors, and I assume they wouldn't for me either. Ring works fine, I don't share the footage but I feel it is a cost of living in high crime regions.

Lawnchair Larry Flight

bongoman42 — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:37:43 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawnchair_Larry_flight

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46915770

Points: 1

# Comments: 0