<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: czl</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=czl</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 29 May 2026 16:18:08 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=czl" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Claude Opus 4.8"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What gp wanted to say is that models are now so smart and useful that even if they managed to be EVEN MORE smart and useful, you wouldn't even notice it.<p>If benchmarks across the board keep trending up and you still don't notice a difference, that's not evidence the model stopped improving. More likely your tasks aren't hard enough to expose the gains, or the model has passed the point where you're able to judge it.<p>You can only tell a good answer from a great one up to your own ceiling. Once the model clears that, both look the same to you, and the extra capability is real whether or not you can see it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 28 May 2026 20:53:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315303</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315303</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315303</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> "--speculative-config",<p>Regarding that last option:
speculation helps max concurrency when it replaces many memory-expensive serial decode rounds with fewer verifier rounds, and the proposer is cheap enough. It hurts when you are already compute-saturated or the acceptance rate is too low. Good idea to benchmark a workload with and without speculative decoding.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:29:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872528</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872528</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47872528</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "The looming college-enrollment death spiral"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> specific type of manipulable gullibility<p>A congregation trained to say “amen” on cue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 13 Apr 2026 22:12:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758591</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758591</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47758591</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Trump's global tariffs struck down by US Supreme Court"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Not a bad idea, but how do we prevent this from creating incentives to engineer similar situations in the future?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 21 Feb 2026 08:25:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098657</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098657</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47098657</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sound like Singapore's system rewards competence + stability, and that makes it hard for opposition to scale, because the incumbents can absorb popular ideas while keeping institutional advantages.<p>That’s demoralizing if you’re doing party-building. But the flip side is: it means citizens do have leverage, just not always in the form of “replace the government.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:16:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966190</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966190</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46966190</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Money is less about personal consumption and more about a voting system for physical reality. When a company holds billions in IOUs, they are holding the power to decide what happens next. That capital allows them to command where the next million tons of aluminum go, which problems engineers solve, and where new infrastructure is built.<p>Even if they never spend that wealth on luxury, they use it to direct the flow of human effort and raw materials. Giving it away for free would mean surrendering their remote control over global resources. At this scale, it is not about wanting more stuff. It is about the ability to organize the world. Whether those most efficient at accumulating capital should hold such concentrated power remains the central tension between growth and equality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 29 Jan 2026 22:17:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46817558</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46817558</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46817558</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Qwen3-Max-Thinking"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>FYI: Newer LLM hosting APIs offer control over amount of "thinking"  (as well as length of reply) -- some by token count others by an enum (high low, medium, etc.).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Jan 2026 02:08:20 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774603</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774603</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46774603</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Children with cancer scammed out of millions fundraised for their treatment"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I hear you on intergenerational stuff. I just don’t think “public education is a scam” fits what most kids actually receive.<p>Kids are not only getting classroom time. They inherit a whole baseline that previous taxpayers built: safer streets, clean water, courts that mostly function, vaccines, roads, libraries, stable money, and the accumulated tech and culture that makes modern jobs even possible. That bundle is huge, and it starts paying out long before anyone is old enough to “owe” anything.<p>Also, adults are not literally trapped. People can move, downshift, opt out of a lot, or choose different communities. Most don’t, even when they complain loudly, and to me that’s a pretty strong signal the deal is at least somewhat reasonable. Not perfect. Not fair for everyone. But not a cartoon pyramid scheme either.<p>If there’s a real fight worth having, it’s making the burdens and benefits less lopsided across generations, not pretending the whole social investment in kids is fake.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2025 11:41:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287392</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287392</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46287392</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Over fifty new hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I do not believe there exists a way to safely use LLMs in scientific processes.<p>What about giving the LLM a narrowly scoped role as a hostile reviewer, while your job is to strengthen the write-up to address any valid objections it raises, plus any hallucinations or confusions it introduces? That’s similar to fuzz testing software to see what breaks or where the reasoning crashes.<p>Used this way, the model isn’t a source of truth or a decision-maker. It’s a stress test for your argument and your clarity. Obviously it shouldn’t be the only check you do, but it can still be a useful tool in the broader validation process.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2025 15:31:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193383</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193383</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46193383</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Mind-reading devices can now predict preconscious thoughts"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>There is no single definition for all scientists. However if you define free will as choices that are completely free of deterministic or even statistically deterministic causes that science could in principle predict, then most scientists would say: no, that kind of free will probably doesn’t exist.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:11:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039370</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039370</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46039370</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "1M Downloads of Zorin OS 18"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> closed lid would flex slightly in your backpack, and press keys on the keyboard,<p>FYI: Over time, this repeated pressure + rubbing (especially with dust or grit in between) can leave permanent key-shaped marks or “ghosts” on the screen. Thin laptops and bags that are tightly packed or bulging make this a lot more likely, since there’s less rigidity and more pressure on the lid.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2025 08:28:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031653</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031653</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46031653</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Ask HN: How are Markov chains so different from tiny LLMs?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mostly agree with your intuition, but I’d phrase it a bit differently.<p>Temperature 0 does not inherently improve “quality”. It just means you always pick the highest probability token at each step, so if you run the same prompt n times you will essentially get the same answer every time. That is great for predictability and some tasks like strict data extraction or boilerplate code, but “highest probability” is not always “best” for every task.<p>If you use a higher temperature and sample multiple times, you get a set of diverse answers. You can then combine them, for example by taking the most common answer, cross checking details, or using one sample to critique another. This kind of self-ensemble can actually reduce hallucinations and boost accuracy for reasoning or open ended questions. In that sense, somewhat counterintuitively, always using temperature 0 can lead to lower quality results if you care about that ensemble style robustness.<p>One small technical nit: even with temperature 0, decoding on a GPU is not guaranteed to be bit identical every run. Large numbers of floating point ops in parallel can change the order of additions and multiplications, and floating point arithmetic is not associative. Different kernel schedules or thread interleavings can give tiny numeric differences that sometimes shift an argmax choice. To make it fully deterministic you often have to disable some GPU optimizations or run on CPU only, which has a performance cost.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:51:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008831</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008831</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008831</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Mag Wealth (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I agree that consumption is the point of production in the long run, but that does not mean consumption is neutral in terms of tradeoffs. When someone consumes, the underlying real resources are gone and cannot be used for other purposes. That is the core of the broken window point: activity can rise while net wealth falls if resources are used in less productive ways than the alternatives. Saying consumption is not "taking from society" skips over the opportunity cost of what could have been built with the same labor and capital.<p>On who controls investment, it is fair to worry about political influence, but it does not follow that highly concentrated private wealth is mostly idle or socially useless. Large fortunes are usually claims on productive assets that employ people and produce goods and services. Capital markets already involve broad and diverse mechanisms like index funds, pensions, and institutional investors that pool the savings of millions of non wealthy people and allocate them based on expected returns. That is not perfect, but it is not simply a handful of billionaires directing everything according to whim.<p>The equation of exchange point also overstates the role of velocity in judging what is good for the economy. A dollar that flows into an asset is not disappearing from the real economy. It is funding someone else who is selling equity or debt and who will use that for wages, R&D, or capital spending. Lower velocity at the cash register can be consistent with higher long run output if more of today’s income is channeled into projects that raise productivity tomorrow. High velocity tied to fragile consumption and low investment can look good in the short term but leave people poorer over time.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2025 12:39:39 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964870</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964870</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45964870</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Mag Wealth (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One of the big advantages humans have is that we are really good at working around constraints rather than just fighting over them. Health care, education, and even things like prenatal screening to reduce serious genetic disease all expand people’s potential and quality of life. Over time, that means more people who are emotionally stable, educated, and healthy, which is exactly what makes “higher quality” partners  possible in the first place.<p>When we treat everything as a zero sum status game, especially when it comes to other human beings, we tend to slide into ugly, destructive dynamics (up to and including wars) where everyone burns resources just to keep their relative place. Cooperation and innovation, on the other hand, are how we turn a fixed pie into a growing one.<p>So yes, relative position matters in some contexts, but the whole reason our species has gotten this far is that we are not limited to fighting over scraps. We can change the size and shape of the pie together.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 10:04:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952273</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952273</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952273</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Mag Wealth (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:47:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952194</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952194</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952194</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Mag Wealth (2024)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You’re slipping into a version of the broken window fallacy here. Consumption isn’t automatically good for society just because it “creates activity.” When you eat an apple, the apple - and all the labor and resources behind it - are gone. Same with luxury goods: the more resource-intensive they are, the more real wealth they permanently use up compared with simpler alternatives.<p>What actually increases long-run prosperity isn’t consumption itself, but efficient use of resources and investment - choices that expand the stock of tools, knowledge, and productive capacity in the future. New wealth is created when resources are not immediately consumed, but are instead used to boost productivity.<p>That’s why wealthy people who don’t spend all their wealth aren’t “hoarding” in the economic sense. Their capital is usually invested - financing factories, startups, research, tools, and infrastructure that generate more output. And when they die with wealth still invested, the state captures a chunk through estate and capital-gains taxes.<p>A better way to think about wealth is as decision-making power over how resources are allocated - toward current consumption (including luxuries) or toward future production (investment). Capitalism tends to concentrate that decision power in the hands of those who are best at growing capital, which raises total prosperity but also increases inequality.<p>Consumption uses up wealth; investment grows it. People like Musk have a lot of wealth because they’ve been good at growing it. We should absolutely guard against wealth hijacking politics - but it would be shortsighted to treat their continued investment as a net negative for society.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2025 09:36:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952138</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952138</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45952138</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "What happened with the CIA and The Paris Review?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Faced with subtle lies you may prefer the obvious ones.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 14 Nov 2025 16:46:50 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928658</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928658</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928658</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Voyager 1 is a light-day away by November 2026"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>One thing I keep wondering, though, is whether “life” is tied more to the particular chemistry and environment it uses or to its patterns (the abstract information structure that can, in principle, be re-instantiated on different substrates).<p>If it’s the patterns that matter, do you think it’s actually impossible for those patterns to be transmitted across interstellar distances? Just like a cup of ocean water is packed with DNA, it’s at least conceivable that what we call “cosmic background noise” could, in principle, hide extremely compressed life-patterns that only an advanced civilization could recognize and reconstruct back into something we’d meaningfully call “alive.” And of course, the more efficiently you code that information, the more it statistically has to look like random noise.<p>Not saying this is likely -- just that if the essence of life is informational rather than chemical, "traveling" could look very different for any life that is suitably advanced.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2025 06:53:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45911597</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45911597</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45911597</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Startups are pushing the boundaries of reproductive genetics"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> evolution by natural selection only applies when the adaptation in question affects survivability before reproducing<p>> Anything that happens to you after reproductive age does not get affected by natural selection because the selection pressure of reproduction is gone.<p>You are mostly correct but must also consider traits that affect the odds children will fail to reproduce. People can for example be genetically predisposed to depression or impulsive anger or substance abuse or ... any of which can impact the survival of their children thus selection pressure does not entirely disappear after a child is born.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 09 Nov 2025 23:06:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45870152</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45870152</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45870152</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by czl in "Apple is crossing a Steve Jobs red line"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Our entire societal system is based on increasing revenue (due to inflation).<p>Yes that is capitalism however if inflation cuts value of money in half and in the same time  your revenue doubles, did you actually double your revenue? Do you even need to change your service or product to justify raising prices when the currency is being devalued? For both these questions there is a strong case that the answer is no.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 08 Nov 2025 16:52:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858072</link><dc:creator>czl</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858072</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45858072</guid></item></channel></rss>