Hacker News: burroisolator

New comment by burroisolator in "I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years"

burroisolator — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:14:27 +0000

My guess is if they haven't cured cancer, achieved world peace, colonized Mars, you'll still have a job.

New comment by burroisolator in "Why I Joined OpenAI"

burroisolator — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:08:19 +0000

"it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet." Jevon's paradox probably will mean that lower costs will lead to more use.

New comment by burroisolator in "To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI"

burroisolator — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:25:51 +0000

"Productivity gains are real when you understand that augmentation is better than replacing humans..." Isn't this where the job losses happen? For example, previously you needed 5 tech writers but now you only need 4 to do the same work. Hopefully it just means that the 5th person finds more work to do, but it isn't clear to me that Jevons paradox kicks in for all cases.

New comment by burroisolator in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

burroisolator — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 02:02:11 +0000

"You're absolutely right!" Thanks for pointing it out. I was expecting that kind of perspective when the author brought up horses, but found the conclusion to be odd. Turns out it was just my reading of it.

New comment by burroisolator in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

burroisolator — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 01:31:42 +0000

"In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines.

And not very long after, 93 per cent of those horses had disappeared.

I very much hope we'll get the two decades that horses did."

I'm reminded of the idiom "be careful what you wish for, as you might just get it." Rapid technogical change has historically lead to prosperity over the long term but not in the short term. My fear is that the pace of change this time around is so rapid that the short term destruction will not be something that can be recovered from even over the longer term.

New comment by burroisolator in "Kimi K2 Thinking, a SOTA open-source trillion-parameter reasoning model"

burroisolator — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 20:05:36 +0000

In short, the others have a huge margin if you ignore training costs. See https://martinalderson.com/posts/are-openai-and-anthropic-re... for details.

New comment by burroisolator in "The murky economics of the data-centre investment boom"

burroisolator — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 01:10:50 +0000

Why have spot H100 prices been going down then? It was roughly $3/hr a year ago and now it is closer to $2.2/hr.

New comment by burroisolator in "Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol"

burroisolator — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 05:30:40 +0000

I'll admit I immediately thought of https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/ after seeing this blog post.

New comment by burroisolator in "Trump to impose $100k fee for H-1B worker visas, White House says"

burroisolator — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 01:29:26 +0000

That is my interpretation.

Regardless of whether you think imposing a $100k fee on H1Bs is a good idea or not, there is no way that a 2 day deadline makes sense from an implementation perspective. On a weekend too. This is just going to cause panic and confusion at the border.

New comment by burroisolator in "Sam Altman Slams Meta’s AI Talent Poaching: 'Missionaries Will Beat Mercenaries'"

burroisolator — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:00:50 +0000

AI only got big, especially for coding, because they were able to train on a massive corpus of open source code. I don't think it is a coincidence.

New comment by burroisolator in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

burroisolator — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 01:46:48 +0000

This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.

New comment by burroisolator in "Tell HN: Submit comments to IRS re tax treatment of software dev expenses"

burroisolator — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 19:21:53 +0000

Does it help to submit duplicative arguments? I see some pretty strong arguments in the comments already. I wish there was a way to just upvote an existing comment.

New comment by burroisolator in "Post Mortem on Cloudflare Control Plane and Analytics Outage"

burroisolator — Sat, 04 Nov 2023 16:29:14 +0000

While debatably unprofessional to blame your vendor, I found this read to be fascinating. I'm sure there are blog posts that detail how data centers work and fail but it's rare to get that cross over from a software engineering context. It puts into perspective what it takes for an average data center of this class to fail: power outage, generator failure, and then battery loss.

New comment by burroisolator in "Jobs and Gates banned their kids from iPads and other devices they created"

burroisolator — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 18:06:20 +0000

What incentive would there be to take the risk of being the first in the market?

One idea I've been mulling is a progressive corporate tax. It would encourage companies to split up if there aren't massive synergies to justify the increased tax.

New comment by burroisolator in "The Ritual of Capitalization (2021)"

burroisolator — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 15:05:00 +0000

This is a great introduction to how valuation of public stocks works. In short, market capitalization is positively correlated with gross margin rates and negatively correlated with earnings volatility and the discount rate, which is a leading indicator for FFR.

New comment by burroisolator in "Why gold and Bitcoin are popular"

burroisolator — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 03:06:40 +0000

It doesn't lead to a more secure network because the costs to attack the network are the same. Attackers will have access to the same technology and have similar costs.

Right, I'm not saying there will be a new ASIC; just that there will be no innovation in the Bitcoin space (unless they switch out of PoW) that leads to less energy being used.

New comment by burroisolator in "Why gold and Bitcoin are popular"

burroisolator — Tue, 15 Jun 2021 06:31:35 +0000

I don't think they do if you're just referring to how difficult it is to pull off a 51% attack. Assume the status quo is that it costs X to secure 51% of the hash power. If there is a new ASIC that can hash twice as fast with the same energy use, then suddenly it will cost 0.5X to secure 51% of the hash power. But if the price of Bitcoin remains the same, then miners will have an incentive to double their hash power as that was their breakeven point before. And so now you've gone back to the previous status quo. Assuming the attackers have access to the new ASICs, it still costs X to 51% attack the network.

New comment by burroisolator in "Why gold and Bitcoin are popular"

burroisolator — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 06:51:25 +0000

If a car can be more efficiently produced, the energy spent producing cars will go up because either more cars will be produced or more features will be added to the car. This is a win for the car consumer. This is very different from Bitcoin where any improvements to the efficiency of mining it (such as transitioning to ASICs) does not lead to a tangible benefit for the Bitcoin user. All major non-ASIC miners will eventually be out-competed out, but the amount of energy wasted will always be correlated to the price of Bitcoin.

New comment by burroisolator in "Show HN: ugit – Learn Git Internals by Building Git in Python"

burroisolator — Sat, 19 Sep 2020 10:22:28 +0000

I would certainly take a look. It would be amusing if you released it using the interface itself.

New comment by burroisolator in "Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage"

burroisolator — Mon, 18 May 2020 11:30:03 +0000

How does the author know it isn't the driver that will get the short end of the stick here? To put it differently, what would happen if the restaurant mistakenly charged the driver who is picking up the food more than listed and then the driver pays that mistaken amount with Doordash's credit card? Will they be penalized/fired once Doordash discovers the accounting error?