Hacker News: cs702

New comment by cs702 in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

cs702 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:33:22 +0000

Ah, OK. Sorry I didn't get it right away!

New comment by cs702 in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

cs702 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:59:57 +0000

Thank you. Apologies in advance for nitpicking, but I think the correct spelling is "pardoned" (a quick search on Google confirms it).

New comment by cs702 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

cs702 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 20:47:23 +0000

UPDATE: Well-regarded people on HN are saying OpenAI's most recent GPT-5x codex model is better than Claude 5x for certain coding tasks:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47707494

New comment by cs702 in "Bitcoin and quantum computing"

cs702 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:57:24 +0000

The core developers need buy-in from nodes controlling > 50% of the computing power in the network to make any fundamental change to the network.

New comment by cs702 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

cs702 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:56:07 +0000

Thank you for keeping HN sane :-)

New comment by cs702 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

cs702 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 01:11:30 +0000

I didn't asking him to evaluate them. I asked him how customer and partners perceive them.

He's had so many conversations that he likely has a sense of how perceptions of the company and its offerings have changed.

I'm curious.

New comment by cs702 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

cs702 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 19:41:43 +0000

Thank you. Yes, I saw that. The company's always been surrounded by endless talk about insane hype, speculative bubbles, and financial engineering. I wasn't asking so much about that.

I was asking more about your informed view on how OpenAI's technology, products, and roadmap are perceived, particularly by customers and partners, in comparison to those of competitors.

If you have an opinion about that, everyone here would love to hear about it.

New comment by cs702 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

cs702 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 13:27:15 +0000

Thank you for coming on HN and offering to answer questions.[a]

This is a fantastic piece, very timely, evidently well-researched, and also well-written. Judging by the little that I know, it's accurate. Thank you for doing the work and sharing it with the world.

OpenAI may be in a more tenuous competitive position than many people realize. Recent anecdotal evidence suggests the company has lost its lead in the AI race to Anthropic.[b]

Many people here, on HN, who develop software prefer Claude, because they think it's a better product.[c]

Is your understanding of OpenAI's current competitive position similar?

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[a] You may want to provide proof online that you are who you say you are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet%2C_nobody_know...

[b] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-04-01/openais-sh...

[c] For example, there are 2x more stories mentioning Claude than ChatGPT on HN over the past year. Compare https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru... to https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

New comment by cs702 in "Firm boosts H.264 streaming license fees from $100k up to staggering $4.5M"

cs702 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 20:41:34 +0000

Profit-seeking at society's expense.

Also known as rent-seeking: "The act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, heightened debt levels, risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline."[a]

Sigh.

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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

The Oil Shocks of the 1970s

cs702 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:16:09 +0000

Article URL: https://energyhistory.yale.edu/the-oil-shocks-of-the-1970s/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47549090

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by cs702 in "Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms"

cs702 — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:44:17 +0000

That's peanuts.[a]

[a] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/peanu...

AI hallucinations haunt users more than job losses

cs702 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 15:34:36 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ft.com/content/e074d3a9-7fd8-447d-ac0a-e0de756ac5c5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47478597

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

What Does Extreme Wealth Do to the Brain?

cs702 — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 11:04:13 +0000

Article URL: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/what-does-extreme-wealth-do-to-the-brain.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397458

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by cs702 in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

cs702 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:37:16 +0000

Only a court can decide if the actions are fraud, but they sure look like it to me. Fraud doesn't excuse the lack of due diligence.

New comment by cs702 in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

cs702 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:28:07 +0000

That's true, but only to a point. Due diligence is not uncommon, especially with more traditional forms of credit.

I resorted to the mortgage-lending analogy so others could quickly grok what multi-pledging means.

New comment by cs702 in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

cs702 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:53:30 +0000

My understanding is that many private credit funds have been very lax about conducting basic due diligence on the creditworthiness of borrowers.

For example, take First Brands, a multi-billion-dollar company which filed for bankruptcy last year. First Brands had pledged the same assets as collateral for loans from multiple private-credit funds. Those loans were being carried at a fantasy NAV of 100 cents per dollar, until suddenly they were not. Did none of these lenders submit UCC filings so other lenders could check which assets had already been pledged as collateral? Did none of these lenders ever check to see which assets had already been pledged? Did all these lenders make loans based on blind trust?

Failing to check and verify that assets have not been pledged as collateral to other lenders is an amateur mistake. It's reckless, really. The equivalent in home-mortgage lending would for a mortgage lender never even bothering to check that a homeowner isn't getting multiple first-lien mortgages simultaneously on the same home, then forgetting to put the first lien on the property title.

My take is that for many private credit funds, NAVs are basically fantasy.

New comment by cs702 in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

cs702 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:29:39 +0000

Trouble has been brewing in private credit for quite a while, but lenders and investors have been reluctant to write anything down, resorting to all kinds of "extend and pretend" games to avoid write-downs.

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...

New comment by cs702 in "US private credit defaults hit record 9.2% in 2025, Fitch says"

cs702 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:24:12 +0000

tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock...

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[a] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47351462

New comment by cs702 in "AI Agent Hacks McKinsey"

cs702 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:49:03 +0000

... in two hours:

> No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream. ... Within 2 hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database.

Having seen firsthand how insecure some enterprise systems are, I'm not exactly surprised. Decision makers at the top are focused first and foremost on corporate and personal exposure to liability, also known as CYA in corporate-speak. The nitty-gritty details of security are always left to people far down the corporate chain who are supposed to know what they're doing.

New comment by cs702 in "The U.S. borrowed $50B a week for the past five months, the CBO says"

cs702 — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 21:02:30 +0000

Linkbait headline. Without context, these figures mean nothing.

You can see the debt-to-GDP ratios here:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S