Hacker News: d2049

New comment by d2049 in "Teen safety, freedom, and privacy"

d2049 — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:51:01 +0000

Reminder that Sam Altman chose to rush the safety process for GPT-4o so that he could launch before Gemini, which then led directly to this teen's suicide:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45026886

Bay Area startup Harmonic gets gold medal at 2025 IMO with formal verification

d2049 — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:30:53 +0000

Article URL: https://harmonic.fun/news

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44727918

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by d2049 in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

d2049 — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 05:52:49 +0000

This was more than several years prior to that, I just tried to look up the financial aid of previous years and for some reason couldn't find it. If someone else finds it, I'd be curious to take a look.

New comment by d2049 in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

d2049 — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 05:50:17 +0000

I met him when I was at MIT for Campus Preview Weekend when accepted students visit the school. Is it necessary to assume things in such a cynical fashion?

New comment by d2049 in "Microsoft will soon let you clone your voice for Teams meetings"

d2049 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 19:36:10 +0000

I'm a bit hesitant to give my voice away to really any company. Is it really that much of a stretch to imagine the ways this could go wrong?

New comment by d2049 in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

d2049 — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 19:29:39 +0000

When I was touring colleges as a high school senior I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. He decided to go to a state school which was a lot less expensive but whose academics weren't close to the same level. This stuff matters to people.

New comment by d2049 in "Please stop the coding challenges"

d2049 — Fri, 15 Nov 2024 16:12:27 +0000

> build a mini-app from scratch in just a few hours

It depends on what kind of functionality we're talking about, but this kind of task is exactly what people at my current startup have been assigned at times. It is absolutely possible to build a CRUD web app with reactive UI using modern tools in a few hours.

> This is like asking a Ruby developer to debug PHP as a test of flexibility

Again it depends on what the debugging task is. At every startup I've worked at, it's expected that an engineer is able to jump into a task that they know very little about. Granted it becomes less reasonable the more niche the task, but PHP and Ruby are not particularly far apart in skillsets in the grand scheme of things. I would expect any web engineer to be able to do this.

> Hiring processes should focus on problem-solving, collaboration, and growth in relevant areas

I agree with this. And, hiring should also focus on technical ability which does include working through difficult and unknown problems by oneself.

New comment by d2049 in "Many people overestimate the percentage of immigrants in their country"

d2049 — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:52:45 +0000

Just out of curiosity, where do you live?

New comment by d2049 in "Life, death, and retirement"

d2049 — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 14:45:20 +0000

This is the person who was in the news a few years ago for commuting to Google campus using 19 different methods in 19 days

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZWftDrwY2U

New comment by d2049 in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

d2049 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 13:13:56 +0000

Probably the phrase "you hold the keys to your clone" should give anyone pause.

I once worked at a company where the head of security gave a talk to every incoming technical staff member and the gist was, "You can't trust anyone who says they take privacy seriously. You must be paranoid at all times." When you've been around the block enough times, you realize they were right.

You can guarantee you won't be hacked? You can guarantee that if the company becomes massively successful, you won't start selling data to third parties ten years down the road?

New comment by d2049 in "Show HN: A real time AI video agent with under 1 second of latency"

d2049 — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 02:45:51 +0000

Is anyone else thinking that it might not be a good idea to give away your voice and face to a startup that is making digital clones of people?

New comment by d2049 in "Governor Newsom signs landmark bill to protect kids from social media addiction"

d2049 — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 16:46:09 +0000

For this interested in topic, you might enjoy reading The Anxious Generation, which has been on the NYT nonfiction bestseller list for a while. It goes into the data on how teen mental illness rates greatly increased when smartphones (apps + the front-facing camera) and social media algorithms were developed. The harmful effects are obvious to anyone who ever interacts with kids. The book also proposes several basic changes like delaying when kids are given smartphones and disallowing phones in schools, as well as advocating for play-based schools.

New comment by d2049 in "23andMe changed its terms of service to prevent hacked customers from suing"

d2049 — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 16:11:07 +0000

I would have presumed that security-minded people, which includes those who work in tech, would not so easily give away their genome, and that most of 23andMe's customers are a slice of the general population. But then I read about things like WorldCoin and that people who go to startup parties jump at the chance to give away scans of their retinas and I'm befuddled. Why would anyone willingly do that?

New comment by d2049 in "WiFi can read through walls"

d2049 — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 04:12:38 +0000

A couple questions —

Could you link to the film you used, and also the curtains?

Did this at all block your ability to use your own cellphone?

New comment by d2049 in "Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions"

d2049 — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 04:26:26 +0000

The world you propose sounds good in theory, but we are starting at a point where certain groups of people have been discriminated against (or enslaved) for the better part of two centuries. So some argue that we cannot simply treat everyone "equitably" when our society has been decidedly inequitable up to this point.

New comment by d2049 in "Pixel fucked: Inside Hollywood's VFX crisis"

d2049 — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 04:46:33 +0000

I guess there's no unions for VFX work? They're meant to prevent companies from making unreasonable demands of workers, that are described many times in the article.

New comment by d2049 in "The Rubik’s cube world record has been broken at 3.13 seconds [video]"

d2049 — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 06:40:20 +0000

That's Max Park. I'm not a cuber but I recognize him from the excellent short documentary The Speed Cubers, on Netflix. It's nerdy, engaging, and heartwarming — perfect for HN.

New comment by d2049 in "Ask HN: Do average tech companies care about felony probation for SWE?"

d2049 — Wed, 24 May 2023 02:05:41 +0000

Is it lawful for an employer to factor in criminal history when choosing employees? Asking for my own education.

New comment by d2049 in "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Lex Fridman Podcast [video]"

d2049 — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 20:24:38 +0000

What are the reasons you've heard your friends give? I don't know anyone who's done it.

New comment by d2049 in "OpenAI Status: Multiple engines are down"

d2049 — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 05:30:17 +0000

Many companies have skilled engineers and enough hardware, and still have outages. It's an expected part of running any software service. Outages can be minimized, but the idea that they can be eliminated with enough people and computing resources is not how things work, from my experience.