Hacker News: dreambuffer

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

dreambuffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:27:06 +0000

Putting aside that PG does not engage with AOC's point, he also doesn't engage with the much stronger argument against them: Billionaires are clearly a national security risk.

New comment by dreambuffer in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

dreambuffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:54:51 +0000

Well, no, no country on earth has an expectancy in the mid 80s, I was being generous with your wording. 40-50 countries have expectancy between 80-84, which is early 80s. Most countries are sub-80.

New comment by dreambuffer in "The Redistribution of Housing Wealth Caused by Rent Control [pdf]"

dreambuffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:46:28 +0000

Yeah, sure, but only like, 10-100 fewer housing units per 100k people.

New comment by dreambuffer in "The Redistribution of Housing Wealth Caused by Rent Control [pdf]"

dreambuffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 04:02:49 +0000

So they're losing out on a few dozen new units, but it is made up for by renters across the board having to pay less rent and thus having more money to put into the economy? Seems like a good trade to me?

New comment by dreambuffer in "The Redistribution of Housing Wealth Caused by Rent Control [pdf]"

dreambuffer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 03:35:06 +0000

How do you quantify "incentive"? Is a landlord really looking at 5% lower property value and deciding it's not worth investing? Is this even true in aggregate?

New comment by dreambuffer in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

dreambuffer — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:24:26 +0000

That doesn't seem to be true, the global expectancy is 73 and only a dozen of the wealthiest countries are mid 80s. I wouldn't be worried about dying at 70, but maybe I'm built of tougher stuff.

New comment by dreambuffer in "CRISPR tech selectively shreds cancer cells, including "undruggable" cancers"

dreambuffer — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 02:07:59 +0000

I don't mean to sound insensitive, but don't most people die around age 70-80?

New comment by dreambuffer in "Surveillance is not safety: A statement on the UK's latest threat to privacy [pdf]"

dreambuffer — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:08:25 +0000

Rome had the "frumentarii", which was essentially a proto intelligence agency to do spywork for emperors.

New comment by dreambuffer in "Social Animus"

dreambuffer — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:47:14 +0000

No worries, I can see how it would lol

New comment by dreambuffer in "The Internet Has Become Too American to Trust"

dreambuffer — Fri, 29 May 2026 23:53:50 +0000

The distrust is not even ideological anymore, we just want our services to keep working without some guy deciding to nuke everything the next day for literally no reason.

New comment by dreambuffer in "Social Animus"

dreambuffer — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:39:48 +0000

I never said I was better than them, but I can acknowledge that some people are. Even then, only in the domain of software, not in terms of human value.

New comment by dreambuffer in "Social Animus"

dreambuffer — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:46:13 +0000

This post resonates with my situation very much, although I have not made even a tiny fraction of the contributions this person has. I think if a person like this is struggling to find work, but the donkeys who code my government's dysfunctional websites are all fully employed, it suggests the software industry is in very big trouble.

That being said, and speaking from my own experience, one can develop ego problems if they've been undervalued by society. You can start viewing other people as lesser than you for not understanding your situation. I managed to escape those toxic thought patterns by practising empathy as a deliberate activity, and forcing myself to give love and grace to others until it felt natural.

New comment by dreambuffer in "The sigmoids won't save you"

dreambuffer — Sat, 16 May 2026 00:56:42 +0000

There was no implication of anything you're suggesting. It's a question of correctness (bias vs facts, predicting the sun will rise vs predicting the end of the world), whether you think it's important to be correct as a matter of reputation, and how correctness should be weighed if it is indeed important to one's reputation (a once-off comment vs a full report).

Not interested in further arguments about this.

New comment by dreambuffer in "The sigmoids won't save you"

dreambuffer — Fri, 15 May 2026 22:23:18 +0000

He co-authored a report, which is something more than an opinion. It may be used to inspire policy. There should be greater reputational consequences for publishing something you spent a few months studying and writing about along with several experts. Just my opinion.

New comment by dreambuffer in "The sigmoids won't save you"

dreambuffer — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:45:30 +0000

FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I don't think you can use lindy on trends as if trends are static objects, but that's another conversation.

New comment by dreambuffer in "Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like"

dreambuffer — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:44:56 +0000

This assumes:

- that you spend no amount of time looking things up, reorganising, or otherwise getting stuck

- that you have a solution to the problem ready to go at all times

- that your solution is better than the LLM's solution

I highly, highly doubt that all 3 of these are true. I doubt even 1 of them is true, I think you just don't know how to use LLMs in a focused way.

New comment by dreambuffer in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

dreambuffer — Mon, 04 May 2026 07:50:34 +0000

Depends, some systems are dynamic. There is also a gray area where obscurity can be computationally infeasible to attack, but not bound by traditional polynomial assumptions in cryptography.

As is always the case in these semantic discussions, the answer depends on your initial axioms and assumptions, which does kind of make most of these discussions pointless (but I did learn a lot from this one).

New comment by dreambuffer in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

dreambuffer — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:34:20 +0000

I understand it now, thanks

New comment by dreambuffer in "Security through obscurity is not bad"

dreambuffer — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:29:24 +0000

I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean here. If something is obscured, by definition it is less visible. Being 'less typical' is a form of security because most attacks rely on some form of pattern recognition, and obscurity literally dissolves patterns into noise.

New comment by dreambuffer in "New statue in London, attributed to Banksy, of a suited man, blinded by a flag"

dreambuffer — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:13:33 +0000

England has a long history producing artwork against some institution, only for that institution to get worse over time. George Orwell wrote about the dangers of authoritarianism and surveillance, and since then the UK government has only ratcheted up their surveillance and authority. They also made a movie called This is England which straightforwardly depicts young English nationalists ruining their lives with nationalism, and 20 years later there are more nationalists in England than at any point after WW2.

Will Banksy's legacy be more or less the same?