Hacker News: derektank

New comment by derektank in "FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive"

derektank — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:09:19 +0000

He didn’t. He retained the IP of his election forecast models and he publishes the results from them on his newsletter, The Silver Bulletin

New comment by derektank in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

derektank — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:10:52 +0000

Search costs aren’t trivial and, prior to LLMs, being able to find the piece of information on Wikipedia or software on GitHub that solved your problem took time, a lot of time if you weren’t an expert and unfamiliar with the jargon.

New comment by derektank in "Every AI Subscription Is a Ticking Time Bomb for Enterprise"

derektank — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:03:08 +0000

Exactly, the principal-agent problem applies to all agents, be they human, corporate, or robotic

New comment by derektank in "Accelerando (2005)"

derektank — Sat, 16 May 2026 18:14:01 +0000

I think A Fire Upon the Deep would be a more enjoyable starting place for someone that likes the Culture series, even though A Deepness in the Sky is generally considered the better novel.

New comment by derektank in "ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline"

derektank — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:08:19 +0000

I still own a Fivey the Fox t-shirt

New comment by derektank in "ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline"

derektank — Sat, 16 May 2026 04:07:26 +0000

538 has basically always been a licensed product, first with the NYT in 2010, and then with ESPN/ABC/Disney since they left the NYT in 2013. There were only 2 years where it was an independent blog

New comment by derektank in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

derektank — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:31:16 +0000

I wouldn’t say they have an undefined truth value. Their source of truth is their training data. The problem is that human text is not tightly coupled to the capital T truth.

New comment by derektank in "The other half of AI safety"

derektank — Thu, 14 May 2026 01:39:17 +0000

I think this is a great analogy, but it’s not exactly an optimistic one. We haven’t really done a great job managing hyper palatable food up until this point tbh. The best solution we’ve found involves paying hundreds of dollars a month for a pharmaceutical that helps the people most at risk to the harms of hyper palatable food manage their cravings for it. I hope we find a better alternative for the people that get addicted to hyper palatable socializing, but maybe individual cognitive tinkering is the best tool we have.

New comment by derektank in "Starship V3"

derektank — Wed, 13 May 2026 04:17:19 +0000

>why not just install it in e.g. Morocco instead

The number of political actors that can stop you from building in Morocco (or confiscate/damage your invested capital once you deploy it) are numerous. The number that can do so in space? Maybe a half dozen. We’re already seeing states and municipalities in the US moving to ban data centers and the energy infrastructure needed to power them. Building in space faces no such procedural roadblocks.

The economics still seem like an open question, but if the demand for compute is high enough, space based data centers might be the only option

New comment by derektank in "A.I. note takers are making lawyers nervous"

derektank — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:46:29 +0000

>casually discussing a feature you're stuck working on that you think is a bad idea.

I’ll be honest, this is something that I hope AI note taking tools capture and incorporate into summaries of the company’s status. Especially if they act as an intermediary without revealing the specific person who said it. There’s a lot of information latent within organizations that doesn’t get properly shared due to concerns of retaliation or simply embarrassment that would benefit everyone by being communicated sooner.

New comment by derektank in "Local AI needs to be the norm"

derektank — Mon, 11 May 2026 01:03:06 +0000

It’s well within the capabilities of governments in developed countries. If Mistral did not already exist, I would definitely expect the French government to invest in a national LLM, if only because of how defensive they are of the French language.

New comment by derektank in "Poland is now among the 20 largest economies"

derektank — Fri, 08 May 2026 13:22:26 +0000

> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses” that seem to plague the western world

Uhh, the Law and Justice party was packing the Polish Constitutional Court, filling the government with party loyalists, and placing restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly only a few years ago. I suppose veering close to a constitutional crisis isn’t ideological per se, but that framing doesn’t seem quite right

New comment by derektank in "Gambling ads on social media reach more than twice as many men as women: study"

derektank — Fri, 08 May 2026 06:04:24 +0000

>Our economy is zero sum in the short term

Um, no, it’s not. It’s notoriously hard to estimate exactly but annual consumer surplus in the US alone is estimated to be in the trillions of dollars.

New comment by derektank in "U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP"

derektank — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:36:17 +0000

Kelton is a leading proponent of MMT and while I wouldn’t call her a dummy, she and other MMT proponents work themselves into pretzels trying to pretend inflation isn’t a serious problem that needs to be addressed by policymakers.

New comment by derektank in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

derektank — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:27:10 +0000

If you look at the actual text of the bill, it’s much more expansive than simply profiling people. It defines dynamic pricing as, “THE PRACTICE OF VARYING THE PRICES OF CONSUMER GOODS OR SERVICES WITHIN A BUSINESS DAY BASED ON DEMAND OR OTHER FACTORS, INCLUDING THROUGH THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OR MODELS THAT RETRAIN OR RECALIBRATE BASED ON RECEIVED INFORMATION IN NEAR REAL–TIME.”[1]

This absolutely would ban changing the price in the middle of the day in response to changes in temperature, as the parent comment suggested.

[1]https://mgaleg.maryland.gov/2026RS/bills/hb/hb0895f.pdf

New comment by derektank in "Maryland to ban A.I.-driven price increases in grocery stores"

derektank — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:20:15 +0000

Yeah, I think time-based algorithmic pricing is good and helps reduce shortages. As long as everyone can get the same price at the same time, I have no issues with how that price was arrived at. What concerns me is different consumers being offered different prices at the same time.

New comment by derektank in "Investors pile into clean energy as Iran war drives push for energy security"

derektank — Sun, 03 May 2026 14:10:36 +0000

The world’s dependence on China for solar panel manufacturing is troubling, but unlike oil, once the generating facility is installed you’re no longer dependent on your supplier (at least for a decade or two). I would be more concerned about batteries if I was in government

New comment by derektank in "I aggregated 28 US Government auction sites into one search"

derektank — Fri, 01 May 2026 01:29:49 +0000

The lowest bidder meme is real, exactly because, for a certain number of contracts, either very junior of very understaffed acquisition professionals will bid out contracts with underspecified requirements. If the contracts have well developed specs, yes, milspec can be great (though it often has an equally great commercial off the shelf comparable).

New comment by derektank in "U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP"

derektank — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:57:11 +0000

“Stephanie Kelton: Have you considered the possibility that raising rates might move inflation higher?

Jason Furman: No”

Covid really exposed who did and did not understand what they were doing.

New comment by derektank in "U.S. Debt Tops 100% of GDP"

derektank — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 13:53:15 +0000

They continue lending to the US government because they are demanding a higher rate of return. The risk premium (i.e. the problem) is priced in.