Hacker News: christina97

New comment by christina97 in "Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B"

christina97 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 19:05:18 +0000

Everyone appears surprised by this news. It’s clear that they don’t have a product with some incredible moat. But they clearly have good engineering and product people that came up with a product people wanted. On top of that they have very strong marketing muscle that took the AI world by storm. And as far as I’ve seen, they still lead in some part of the latency-quality (-cost) curve?

They may well be a good team to throw money behind if you are hoping to bet on a new AI lab.

New comment by christina97 in "OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics"

christina97 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:19:48 +0000

It’s fine to dislike AI slop and not engage with it. But I would claim there is a difference between a human submitting a sloppy paper to a journal vs producing one with AI. The former is lazy and unprofessional, the latter is an interesting experiment. I appreciate not wanting to engage in an experiment you didn’t sign up for, but therein lies the difference between this with an attitude of embracing new technology and those wanting to stick to the old. I think Terrence Tao has had a very interesting attitude to AI recently and had also had some fruitful outcomes from it.

New comment by christina97 in "Things that apparently cause cancer"

christina97 — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:25:10 +0000

No, because no correlation was proved. It’s just a flawed methodology.

New comment by christina97 in "We're Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI"

christina97 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 15:49:04 +0000

Strawman. It’s very obvious that people are frustrated by the combination of no perceived benefit with all kinds of perceived risks and downsides.

New comment by christina97 in "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"

christina97 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:02:19 +0000

That is the entire point of it. When it’s hard to tell what’s the machine and what’s a human, that’s precisely the definition of passing it.

New comment by christina97 in "Vote on which of Hacker News' challenges for AI have been met"

christina97 — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 02:00:05 +0000

I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t think the AI labs are too concerned about bad press lately. It’s more likely that there actually are some tradeoffs where training on synthetic data gives the model tics but is the only way to improve intelligence.

New comment by christina97 in "Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026"

christina97 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:10:54 +0000

Yeah there is no such thing as selling a commodity below its market price on the open market. Someone else will come and arbitrage that away, or it’s not an open market.

New comment by christina97 in "Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes"

christina97 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:08:59 +0000

A huge reason for the US strength in tech is the R&D tax credit, and its entire purpose is to spur investment in next generation technologies. It doesn’t seem like an insane stretch to classify investments in AI hardware as R&D, especially given their high risk nature.

Taxes are also not a zero-sum game: more innovation increases the pie for all, including the government.

I feel like this is mainly yet another anti-AI hit piece.

New comment by christina97 in "Footguns with Postgres “at time zone 'UTC'”"

christina97 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 13:01:16 +0000

Presumably if the conversion logic changes. Eg user enters a future date in a place but the timezone in that place changes in the future.

New comment by christina97 in "Amazon blocks Meta’s new Muse AI agent from shopping on amazon.com"

christina97 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:07:22 +0000

I use Claude Code often for entirely non-code things: the harness concept is super helpful for going through documents etc.

I think these Claw-type harnesses are basically this for somewhat less technical folks. If eg Muse has been able to make this work smoothly from your phone for completely non-techy people, then that seems like an incredible product.

New comment by christina97 in "Saving another 100TB of RAM"

christina97 — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:51:24 +0000

I’m not sure why folks are finding this so revolutionary. There are teams of scientists at big techs with PhDs working on all kinds of optimization across compute fleets. This seems cute but its exposition of math is more along the lines of “look at how cool I am that I could do a bit of calculus”, and that makes me question the technical depth at CF.

I found the motivation pretty lackluster: nowhere does it actually explain why you use consistent hashing (dividing the item space naively/regularly would actually cause much more than 1/n items to move, which is unintuitive) and how you actually use it.

That said, it got me to spend a few minutes studying this and got me to understand the key bit I was missing.

New comment by christina97 in "North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes"

christina97 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:55:46 +0000

If they can’t build high speed rail along the corridor then surely they cannot geo engineer it either!

New comment by christina97 in "How GLM built its own inference infrastructure"

christina97 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 15:41:59 +0000

Nobody pretended that Chinese firms would just lay back and twiddle their thumbs when faced with import restrictions. The question was whether they would be far enough to be able to catch up without much issue or so far behind that they wouldn’t ever effectively catch up or that by the time they did, it wouldn’t matter.

Half-arsed export restrictions are the best of both worlds for these firms: enough of an incentive to take homegrown hardware seriously, yet not aggressive enough to cause meaningful handicap in the meantime.

New comment by christina97 in "GPT-5.6 Sol Pricing Cut by 50%"

christina97 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 15:00:41 +0000

They’re trying to compete with open weight models here. It’s a very different customer segment.

New comment by christina97 in "Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+"

christina97 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:11:57 +0000

Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.

I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?

New comment by christina97 in "Semaglutide linked to lower predicted dementia risk"

christina97 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:06:29 +0000

GLP-1s seem like a night and day difference in intervention adherence though. For various obvious and non-obvious reasons, it’s very hard to produce an intervention that people will adhere to to make the test group lose weight.

New comment by christina97 in "I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program"

christina97 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:52:28 +0000

Is it not common knowledge that this is the entire purpose of loyalty programs? As far as I know, if you don’t give them your details and just swipe a card, they are not doing facial recognition and PCI stops them from linking your purchases too heavily.

I’m not really surprised by anything here but the fact that McDonalds disclosed all their predictions?

The bigger question here is whether it is good for large corporations to be run with such brutal profit motives, running on extremely precise data to uncover how to best make a bigger profit. It doesn’t appear good to me, but it is how the entire US economy operates. The lift from the per-customer loyalty timeseries and per-customer upsells is probably modest compared to the rest of the data driven work to understand how to sell more “product”.

New comment by christina97 in "Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows"

christina97 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:39:42 +0000

The GP is claiming Meta is an awful company for what they have done and how they continue to treat their employees. That’s a perfectly ok opinion to hold, and many seem to agree.

Have DeepSeek, Moonshot, or the other Chinese AI companies done such things that attract moral outrage?

New comment by christina97 in "AMD acquires Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models in silicon"

christina97 — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 23:41:31 +0000

There’s some kind of tradeoff between speed, cost, and quality for every application. I would be perfectly happy with a model 6 months old that was 50x faster for many uses. Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff). I would take an even dumber model for more speed (lower latency in particular).

New comment by christina97 in "Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork"

christina97 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:00:59 +0000

Copyright is an automatic protection (meaning you don’t need to register it, like registered trademarks), for certain types of creative works. Contracts are one way to dish out these rights (eg. for a fee).

If you have a work that is not copyrightable, and you give it to people lawfully, then you cannot protect it via copyright.