Hacker News: d_burfoot

New comment by d_burfoot in "Midjourney Medical"

d_burfoot — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:44:42 +0000

> What possible use could there be for doing this?

The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labeled images - small because you needed to have an expert study the image and label it as healthy/cancer/etc. But the "GPT breakthrough" was that it was better to use vast unlabeled datasets - in the case of LLMs, text - than small labeled ones.

New comment by d_burfoot in "How to earn a billion dollars"

d_burfoot — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 14:16:35 +0000

There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of.

If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact will diffuse quickly throughout society, causing the path to become overcrowded, which pushes down the average performance. So at time T2 the path will no longer outperform. This is analogous to a stock becoming overpriced due to hype. I consider the founder path to be enormously overcrowded at this point.

The key to finding a good career is to play a kind of Money Ball - find paths that, for whatever reason, are mispriced and thus undercrowded.

New comment by d_burfoot in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

d_burfoot — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:35:17 +0000

The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town.

Also, there is already a park right to the west of the residential section shown in the map, called Fannie Robinson park.

https://shorturl.at/jbWuw

New comment by d_burfoot in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

d_burfoot — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:26:42 +0000

39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and payments that are far in excess of the revenues they bring in, that's what is meant by "unfunded liabilities".

New comment by d_burfoot in "Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?"

d_burfoot — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:33:00 +0000

> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn

I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by pointing out that the net national debt, including unfunded liabilities, is estimated to be $175T [0]. The government could appropriate all the equity from the top 3000 largest companies, and also the entire real estate market, and it still would not be able to pay its debt (RE market is $55T).

[0] https://balajis.com/p/americas-175-trillion-problem

New comment by d_burfoot in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

d_burfoot — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:09:26 +0000

It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.

New comment by d_burfoot in "The real cost of owning a home"

d_burfoot — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:25:05 +0000

The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are:

1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as a money manager: they allow you to make an investment that will hopefully appreciate more quickly than the interest rate. There are many other investments that have this property (e.g. the stock market), but banks won't loan to you to invest in them!

2) A mortgage acts as a forced savings rate: you pay the bank every month, and when you're done after 30 years, you have a large asset. So a large mortgage is (for some people) a good psychological commitment mechanism that imposes financial discipline.

New comment by d_burfoot in "Alberta to hold referendum on whether to remain in Canada"

d_burfoot — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:02:42 +0000

Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, they are mere political artifacts like rules, regulations, tax codes, etc. If the people want to change them, they absolutely have the right to do so.

https://unifixion.substack.com/p/political-boundaries-are-no...

New comment by d_burfoot in "Shunning AI is the human choice"

d_burfoot — Thu, 21 May 2026 14:26:23 +0000

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests and disease due to population concentration; it meant a bland diet that did fully meet nutritional requirements; it meant social hierarchies of kings and priests. But societies that did not adopt agriculture were outcompeted and eventually destroyed by those that did.

New comment by d_burfoot in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

d_burfoot — Wed, 13 May 2026 23:00:40 +0000

I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corruption and bribery. It is far more economically efficient for the bad guys (whoever they are in your view) to bribe a few DC legislators than dozens of state politicians in places like Montpelier and Hartford. Centralized, unaccountable power in DC means that when big rich corrupt companies bribe the right people, they can force the entire country to followed their preferred policies. A good example is how Purdue Pharma bribed the head of the FDA to approve OxyContin, leading directly to the opioid crisis.

New comment by d_burfoot in ""Not Medically Necessary": Helping America's Health Insurers Deny Coverage"

d_burfoot — Wed, 13 May 2026 20:09:50 +0000

America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solution is to end regulation at the federal level, and allow the states to determine what regulations they may deem appropriate. As a New Hampshire libertarian, I do not want Californian progressives telling me how our state must manage health care spending, and I am sure they feel the same way about me.

New comment by d_burfoot in "I am building a cloud"

d_burfoot — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:55:01 +0000

I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of computers, and run open-source cloud software on them that provides 95% of the features that most businesses need.

Running a cloud data center could be a business like operating a self-storage facility or a car wash. Small investors love this kind of operation.

New comment by d_burfoot in "Where did my taxes go?"

d_burfoot — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:18:30 +0000

Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that are considered "social democracies" such as Finland, France and Canada. If you look at wealthy blue cities like NYC or SF, the spending is on the order of $50K/p/y, comparable to Norway.

It is not realistic to believe that we can become a nice wholesome European country if we just raise taxes a bit. The extra money will just be squandered and stolen.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

New comment by d_burfoot in "Java is fast, code might not be"

d_burfoot — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:59:50 +0000

> So just manual memory management with extra steps

This is actually the perfect situation: you are allowed to do it carefully and manually for 1% of code on the hot path, but you don't have to worry about it for the 99% of the code that's not.

New comment by d_burfoot in "Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)"

d_burfoot — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 14:24:40 +0000

I don't disagree with these principles, but if I wanted to compress all my programming wisdom into 5 rules, I wouldn't spend 3 out of the 5 slots on performance. Performance is just a component of correctness : if you have a good methodology to achieve correctness, you will get performance along the way.

My #1 programming principle would be phrased using a concept from John Boyd: make your OODA loops fast. In software this can often mean simple things like "make compile time fast" or "make sure you can detect errors quickly".

New comment by d_burfoot in "A Survival Guide to a PhD (2016)"

d_burfoot — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:52:38 +0000

Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith.

(This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).

New comment by d_burfoot in "Nvidia backs AI data center startup Nscale as it hits $14.6B valuation"

d_burfoot — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:45:45 +0000

The business plan makes sense to me. They are a company that is focussed specifically on building AI data centers, which is a huge part of the economy at the moment. The big cloud players know about generic data centers, but there are likely big efficiency wins to be gained by specializing on AI. There is also the geopolitical angle: European countries (and others!) will likely trust a UK-based company more than one of the American BigCos. NVidia is a great partner and investor for them: NScale will buy billions worth of NVDA chips, and also send information and learnings about the unique needs of the market to the chipmaker.

That being said, financial engineering tricks like depreciation and tax sheltering are of course hugely important in the global economy. It's likely that NVDA has a lot of cash sitting in Europe that it doesn't want to repatriate because it would have to pay taxes on it.

New comment by d_burfoot in "The Brand Age"

d_burfoot — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 19:55:31 +0000

Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation. But you were allowed to wear a watch - it was important to get to church and work on time - so people starting wearing expensive watches instead of jewelry.

New comment by d_burfoot in "Don't become an engineering manager"

d_burfoot — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 21:08:37 +0000

It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values of X that are often undertaken:

- Don't move to Detroit

- Don't go into academia

- Don't use dating apps

- Don't buy Google stock

It's most obvious for the last one: you should buy Google (or any other) stock if you think it's underpriced and sell it if you think it's overpriced. But even for the other advice, a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis holds. If there were a massive exodus of people from academia, causing universities to increase salaries and reduce administrative burdens, going into academia might be great for the right people. For many people Detroit is a terrible city, but I know a guy who worked for the Tigers, and bought a large house for a small amount of money, and did a lovely job renovating it, so Detroit worked well for him.

Life is all about finding underpriced value: options that you will appreciate more than others, for whatever reason.

New comment by d_burfoot in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

d_burfoot — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 20:44:36 +0000

These kinds of stories may seem silly to some (certainly it would seem silly to my past self), but I think these narratives of personal journeys are going to become more and more important to humanity as AI and automation take over most jobs.