Hacker News: carschno

New comment by carschno in "I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore"

carschno — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:03:46 +0000

Nuclear family is indeed a recent development and started with industrialization and modern capitalism. While we use the same term, 'family', to refer to (pre-)historic forms of family, too, those family types had little or nothing in common with the modern definition, when it comes to power, inheritance, law, sex, love.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_the_Family%2C_Pr...

New comment by carschno in "How to survive boiling water"

carschno — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 12:50:29 +0000

People interested in this: if you are ever in Amsterdam, I recommend to visit the Micropia museum: https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia

Among many stunning things, they have a shelf full of foods and drinks (behind glasses) with age labels, ranging from days to years. It is fascinating to see how they evolve over time.

New comment by carschno in "How the Elite See Rome"

carschno — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 11:28:52 +0000

Stating the obvious, but you can of course see it as: there are more than enough workers that need the extra money so urgently that they are happy to screw up their health and social life. Whether they really "need" the money is another discussion.

New comment by carschno in "Our Amish Language"

carschno — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:01:54 +0000

Apologies for being nit-picky, but there is no etymological sense. The output of your LLM has the same etymological root, but a different meaning. In terms of translation, it is therefore plain wrong.

Honestly, I was triggered to correct this comment mostly because it illustrates how we tend to explain away mistakes made by an LLM. It's not about subtle 'connotation', but the meaning is just incorrect. No offense meant to the poster, this is a trap the world has been falling into at scale for the past few years.

Reclaiming Digital Sovereignty

carschno — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:55:43 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/publications/2024/dec/reclaiming-digital-sovereignty

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508048

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by carschno in "Google officially announces that ads will be included in AI Mode search results"

carschno — Thu, 21 May 2026 11:11:50 +0000

Don't _ads in search_ account for 100% of their search revenue? Does Google Search offer any other paid services?

New comment by carschno in "We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag"

carschno — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:28:08 +0000

I don't know, and I think there is no easy answer. The point is: the investors don't know how to measure traction either, so they just measure GitHub activity instead, even at the very moment in which it becomes obvious that it does not capture actual traction. The absurdity lies in the statement that the developers still need to gain actual traction while putting additional effort into gaming that metric to satisfy their investors.

New comment by carschno in "We stopped AI bot spam in our GitHub repo using Git's –author flag"

carschno — Tue, 19 May 2026 04:47:45 +0000

> It's especially sensitive for a VC-backed startup that is measured thoroughly by GitHub activity, but we have to pull the trigger:

This sentence also illustrates the absurdity of this investment model. It imposes a trade-off between building good software, and complying with the investor's metrics. They probably call such metrics evidence-based, but this example shows that they arbitrarily capture some numbers to obscure the lack of meaningful measurements.

New comment by carschno in "VS Code inserting 'Co-Authored-by Copilot' into commits regardless of usage"

carschno — Sun, 03 May 2026 08:33:24 +0000

In literally must have missed that. When did Microsoft ever encourage energy saving? Is this related to power saving for extending laptop battery runtime? But then I don't get the link to renewable energy.

Anyway, I agree with the notion of the extreme energy-inefficiency of LLMs. The scale of it makes it hard to imagine any less efficient product will ever be invented.

New comment by carschno in "Google's 200M-parameter time-series foundation model with 16k context"

carschno — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 12:48:29 +0000

You could abstract speech or other audio as a series of sounds, where time is indeed a factor. Speech, however, has patterns that are more similar to written language than to seasonal patterns that are typically assumed in time series. While trained on different data, the architecture of TimesFM is actually similar to LLMs. But not identical, as pointed out at https://research.google/blog/a-decoder-only-foundation-model...:

> Firstly, we need a multilayer perceptron block with residual connections to convert a patch of time-series into a token that can be input to the transformer layers along with positional encodings (PE).

> [...]

> Secondly, at the other end, an output token from the stacked transformer can be used to predict a longer length of subsequent time-points than the input patch length, i.e., the output patch length can be larger than the input patch length.

New comment by carschno in "Personal Encyclopedias"

carschno — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:31:45 +0000

> On top of that, I exported my location timeline from Google Maps, my Uber trips, my bank transactions, and Shazam history. I would ask Claude Code to start with the photos and then gradually give it access to the different data exports.

Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but sharing all my financial and location details with any service seems like opening the floodgates to my house.

My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing all my most private data with any service. There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.

A Call for Meaningful Work at a Slower Pace

carschno — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:50:48 +0000

Article URL: https://jenteottenburghs.wordpress.com/2025/11/18/a-call-for-meaningful-work-at-a-slower-pace/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260131

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by carschno in "My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs"

carschno — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:10:30 +0000

There are various technical corrections, with arguable pros and cons. However, they do not match the underlying problem stated above:

> the rise of business types in tech company leadership

EU MEPs let Chat Control fail

carschno — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 14:44:59 +0000

Article URL: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Setback-for-the-Commission-EU-MEPs-let-chat-control-fail-11197237.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47233149

Points: 7

# Comments: 0

New comment by carschno in "Firefox 148 Launches with AI Kill Switch Feature and More Enhancements"

carschno — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 10:18:02 +0000

The page seems to be a copy from the original Mozilla press release from February 2nd: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/ai-controls/

It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46858492

New comment by carschno in "Water 'Bankruptcy' Era Has Begun for Billions, Scientists Say"

carschno — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 13:52:51 +0000

Here is the paper on which the article is based: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0

New comment by carschno in "Anthropic's original take home assignment open sourced"

carschno — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 09:49:29 +0000

On the one hand, this exercise probably reflects a realistic task. Daily engineering work comprises a lot of reverse engineering and debugging of messy code. On the other hand, this does not seem very suitable as an isolated assignment. The lack of code base-specific context has a lot of potential for frustration. I wonder what they really tested on the candidates, and whether this was what they wanted to filter for.

New comment by carschno in "Investigating the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping"

carschno — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:37:21 +0000

Essentially, the LNM turns out to be unsuitable for various diagnostics it has been applied for:

> Our findings reveal a foundational limitation: at its core, LNM involves a repetitive sampling of one and the same FC matrix. As a result, it systematically maps sets of local brain changes—whether they are patient lesions, magnetic resonance imaging-derived alterations, synthetic or random—onto the same nonspecific properties of the used FC data, producing highly similar networks across conditions.

Investigating the methodological foundation of lesion network mapping

carschno — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:33:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02196-7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633068

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

New comment by carschno in "Netflix Open Content"

carschno — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:33:52 +0000

The last addition was made in 2020.