Hacker News: drmath

New comment by drmath in "Oracle slashes 30k jobs"

drmath — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 21:45:18 +0000

The California WARN act effectively requires 2 months severance for large layoffs at large companies (or 2 months notice, but companies almost always prefer severance).

New comment by drmath in "Google Antigravity exfiltrates data via indirect prompt injection attack"

drmath — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 19:58:37 +0000

One source of trouble here is that the agent's view of the web page is so different from the human's. We could reduce the incidence of these problems by making them more similar.

Agents often have some DOM-to-markdown tool they use to read web pages. If you use the same tool (via a "reader mode") to view the web page, you'd be assured the thing you're telling the agent to read is the same thing you're reading. Cursor / Antigravity / etc. could have an integrated web browser to support this.

That would make what the human sees closer to what the agent sees. We could also go the other way by having the agent's web browsing tool return web page screenshots instead of DOM / HTML / Markdown.

New comment by drmath in "Solarpunk is happening in Africa"

drmath — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 20:52:08 +0000

I could handle this style when it wasn't everywhere. But now I've developed a hypersensitivity and can't bear it. It's like suddenly most of the internet is in a language I can't read.

New comment by drmath in "What Americans die from vs. what the news reports on"

drmath — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 22:40:17 +0000

I wish almost every news article came with a statistics section. If you must, go ahead and write that article about a particular murder or traffic accident or drug trial or earthquake. But if you don't include statistics on similar events over time, geography, demographics, etc, you're misleading more than informing.

I'd _like_ to blame the reader -- inferring anything about how common something is based on how often it's reported is unreasonable. But readers do make that inference, and writers shouldn't pretend they don't know it.

And for most of us nowadays it's not about articles and writers. It's about eight-second video clips on TikTok and creators. So I don't have any hope that we'll become better informed.

New comment by drmath in "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image"

drmath — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 02:01:08 +0000

Even in the just-photoshop-not-ai days product photos had become pretty unreliable as a means of understanding what you're buying. Of course it's much worse now.

New comment by drmath in "Windsurf employee #2: I was given a payout of only 1% what my shares where worth"

drmath — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 23:22:48 +0000

> I've tried to ask dozens of companies that wanted to hire me just for how many shares were outstanding and/or authorized.

"Wanted to hire me" as in they made an offer, or an earlier step? At offer stage, I've never had a company refuse to answer these questions. I don't have "dozens of companies" worth of experience though, maybe one dozen if that.

New comment by drmath in "The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering"

drmath — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 23:10:10 +0000

Haha there's a pigheaded part of me that insists all of that is the "prompt," but I just read your bit about "inferred definitions," and acceptance is probably a healthier attitude.

New comment by drmath in "The new skill in AI is not prompting, it's context engineering"

drmath — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 22:59:40 +0000

Isn't "context" just another word for "prompt?" Techniques have become more complex, but they're still just techniques for assembling the token sequences we feed to the transformer.

New comment by drmath in "Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working"

drmath — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 01:15:30 +0000

Whether or not you're really outliers, it would be very surprising if "my friends and I" were representative of the general population.