Hacker News: bpp

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

bpp — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 14:01:21 +0000

If I put a tontine on the blockchain does that make it legal?

New comment by bpp in "OpenAI raises $110B on $730B pre-money valuation"

bpp — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:14:27 +0000

I'd assume the real trigger here is "reaching AGI," which would help OpenAI shrug off some of their Microsoft commitments thus making OpenAI models available on Amazon Bedrock. Which is what Amazon is really after.

New comment by bpp in "United States Digital Service renamed to DOGE"

bpp — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 02:51:57 +0000

It's not illogical to staff up an agency charged with efficiency so you can cut more staffing elsewhere. This is honestly what most SaaS does.

New comment by bpp in "United States Digital Service renamed to DOGE"

bpp — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 02:41:36 +0000

I have a few friends who were involved in the creation of the US Digital Service, and as it stands it is one of the absolute best parts of our government. Formed after the Healthcare.gov disaster, the USDS brings Silicon Valley tech knowledge to the government in an attempt to ensure that we all have the online government services that we deserve. It's a tiny agency up against a massive bureaucracy that is anything but open to new ways of doing things. And they've made progress, but not enough.

I'm going to try to look on the bright side and say that maybe this means the wonderful people at the USDS are about to get a huge influx of funding and staffing, and will get to better fulfill the promise of their agency. But at the same time, I'm afraid that this White House may not have the best interests of this particular agency in mind.

Fun side story: on my first day working on Barack Obama's presidential transition, I spent about four hours watching a presentation from the Section 508[1] department about how to make screen-reader accessible PDFs. It took three people to give that presentation – one to speak, one for the live demo, and another to advance the slides. It was quite a downshift from the campaign, where we'd moved very quickly to harness the tech we needed.

[1] https://www.section508.gov/

New comment by bpp in "Ask HN: Why does no one seem to care that AI gives wrong answers?"

bpp — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 21:21:53 +0000

I work in AI product eng for a larger company. The honest answer is that with good RAG and few-shot prompting, we can consider actual incorrect output to be a serious and reproducible bug. This means that when we call LLMs in production, we get about the same wrong-answer rate as we do any other kind of product engineering bug.

New comment by bpp in "A game magazine that spent two years taunting a Final Fantasy VIII hater"

bpp — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:25:34 +0000

Laughed out loud.

And FWIW loved Final Fantasy VIII. More then VII. The soundtrack was fantastic, I used to have an imported full orchestral arrangement that was in heavy rotation in my tweens.

New comment by bpp in "Submarine missing near Titanic used a $30 Logitech gamepad for steering"

bpp — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 23:05:23 +0000

I haven't thought about that episode of "Pinky and the Brain" in years, thanks for a chuckle.

New comment by bpp in "China reports human case of H3N8 bird flu"

bpp — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 22:48:23 +0000

I wouldn't call Monkeypox a maybe virus, especially along with these. Its spread was mostly limited to a single community (sexually active gay men), and it absolutely would have spread out of control had there not been a very strong vaccination campaign with high rates of compliance. Within that community, there were many people who were impacted and many others who changed their behavior to help mitigate to spread.

New comment by bpp in "Atlassian: We estimate the rebuilding effort to last for up to 2 more weeks"

bpp — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:18:13 +0000

Works until you get a bug in the deletion job. I've seen exactly this happen.

New comment by bpp in "How does Brown University know where you are?"

bpp — Sun, 06 Dec 2020 00:46:52 +0000

When I was a student at Brown, Facebook would report which dorm you were logged in from, right there on your profile (for all to see!). If Facebook knew where you were on campus, campus IT certainly has a view into your physical location. Nothing about this surprises me.

New comment by bpp in "[dead]"

bpp — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:55:42 +0000

This seems worth taking with a grain of salt. I've never heard of this source before today, and the top story on the homepage opens with "MOST MAINSTREAM MEDIA MAVENS ARE BRAZEN PUBLIC RELATIONS AGENTS FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY." At the very least, "The National Pulse" has an agenda that they're pushing.

New comment by bpp in "A single character code change"

bpp — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 18:58:22 +0000

The explanation I saw indicated that they keep readers on the site longer, which helps with both SEO and ad revenue (if they scroll deeper).

New comment by bpp in "I was just subjected to the most credible phishing attempt I’ve experienced"

bpp — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 14:40:30 +0000

With regard to the phone number spoofing: I recently had an actual call from American Express's security department marked by AT&T as "Fraud Risk," presumably because it's been spoofed in the past. It delayed the detection and resolution of the theft of my card number (not by much, but still...). It's criminal that we haven't better secured the Caller ID system.

New comment by bpp in "Ask HN: How do you handle logging?"

bpp — Thu, 29 Aug 2019 00:30:58 +0000

Been using Stackdriver for four years and will back up those who are saying it works very well.

New comment by bpp in "Fast constant-time GCD algorithm and modular inversion"

bpp — Thu, 13 Jun 2019 06:23:30 +0000

Thanks for clarifying – really changes the connotation of the headline.

New comment by bpp in "How the Internet Travels Across Oceans"

bpp — Mon, 11 Mar 2019 12:26:05 +0000

Came here just to post this link; it's really stuck with me over the years.

New comment by bpp in "Scientists brew cannabis using modified beer yeast"

bpp — Mon, 04 Mar 2019 14:53:26 +0000

Roughly 1/3 of cannabis is grown inside [1], primarily for reasons of quality control. I'd actually expect this number to grow as the legal market expands and tighter control is needed to keep up with regulations. Which is to say that I'm sure there's a market for this.

[1] https://sweatingthebigstuff.com/percentage-medical-cannabis-...

New comment by bpp in "Open Letter from New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon"

bpp — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 23:23:52 +0000

I'm curious why Congress has chosen not to regulate (or ban) the grant of tax incentives to companies as enticements for development; this seems to easily fall under the interstate commerce clause. All states lose out when they compete against each other in this way.

New comment by bpp in "US shutdown: Flight delays caused by staff shortages"

bpp — Fri, 25 Jan 2019 16:20:29 +0000

That's not quite right. We won't know how pay works out until there's an appropriation ending the shutdown, but in past shutdowns both essential and non-essential employees have been paid what they're owed (I'm not quite sure how this works for hourly workers).

Which is to say we'll have forced some people to work for no pay, and paid others for doing no work. (Yes, the pay is in fact just delayed. But "no pay" is pithier.)

New comment by bpp in "Tumblr will ban all adult content on December 17th"

bpp — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 20:00:01 +0000

Huge market opportunity for OnlyFans.com and similar Patreon-for-porn sites.