Hacker News: dv_dt

New comment by dv_dt in "I'm Tired of Talking to AI"

dv_dt — Wed, 27 May 2026 12:00:25 +0000

I feel like we went through something similar to this early in the era when Google's search engine was new. People posted engine results, but pretty quickly, people got tired of doing that, and would say google it. Part of that was if the answer was as easy as a google search away - the social validation became lower to negative if you just provided low effort copypasta service.

Now, response of "google it" could be take many ways depending on where you are in a conversation, it could be a range of being polite to quite rude. Google it could mean "I don't know, but I think thats findable on google", or it could mean "Im not going to help you". I wonder if we will settle back to having a real conversation with "ai it"/"google it" occasionally.

New comment by dv_dt in "Stack Overflow’s forum is dead but the company’s still kicking"

dv_dt — Tue, 26 May 2026 19:11:54 +0000

They also neglected to solve the problem of differentiating answers to previous generations of software. How many python2 answers does one have to sift through to get a python3 answer - maybe the weight of answers finally tilted over the probabilities. Even just adding the right tags would have made it easier, but it wasn't ever solved in any way as far as I could tell. And the old answers are there like potholes to fall into.

New comment by dv_dt in "Ninth Circuit Panel Goes Out of Its Way to Question Section 230–DOE vs. Meta"

dv_dt — Mon, 25 May 2026 23:16:10 +0000

If there is a non-transparent or non-user changable algorithm selecting content to present then 230 protections shouldn't apply. This is different than removing 230 entirely

New comment by dv_dt in "Microsoft pulls plug on plans for 244-acre data center in Caledonia (2025)"

dv_dt — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:33:40 +0000

both options incentivizes the buyer to also lobby local officials

New comment by dv_dt in "Ask HN: Why do we snore? And what to do about it?"

dv_dt — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:39:53 +0000

also a night time mouth prosthetic can help some cases short of a cpap (while being much easier to deal with vs a coap)

New comment by dv_dt in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

dv_dt — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:53:19 +0000

I'd bet the leaders of the Japanese ceramic company have some deep ties and focus on ceramics, while the leaders of the US paper company have deep ties and focus on the financial industry.

New comment by dv_dt in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

dv_dt — Sat, 23 May 2026 08:42:41 +0000

That's a good question, but to me it is not not odd at all to see continuity of growth in that all hugely profitable lines start smaller and grow. The proposition of the VC startup industry is the same at the core of it. Do many small things that can become big, only this is a more organic expertise driven decision basis for building the expertise instead of hype cycles and FOMO

Look at it this way, you need to maintain the expertise anyway, originally for the Toilets, but you only need that expertise sometimes, and to be experts worth anything at all, they need to do things outside of what the company is already doing to deepen and maintain that expertise. If you have a set of highly technical experts operating like mini startups - is it a surprise that one might become a unicorn in the balance sheets from time to time?

New comment by dv_dt in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

dv_dt — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:08:58 +0000

It's really odd to me that having an advanced ceramics division at Toto is considered such and odd diversified activity, and on top of that making money from the expertise of that division. Deep knowledge of ceramics would seem to me, to be a fundamental advantage if your main line of business is making ceramic toilets.

Companies like this with deep interlocking expertise used to be common in the US too when the US actually made things. GE was a conglomerate of "diversified" expertise - at least until a grandfather of financialization laid the seed to take apart the company.

AT&T and Xerox used to maintain all sorts of deep expertise in all sorts of science and technical activities - though maybe it could be noted that they were famously bad at spinning out other diversified product lines. But the expertise was a need in their core activities. Maybe the most interesting thing about Japanese businesses is that they have shown how to successfully start and maintain diversified product lines.

The main reason we are surprised by these "diversified" products, I suspect is that the typical American (and HN reader), is just not very familiar with the wide range of expertise needed to actually run manufacturing businesses.

New comment by dv_dt in "All the bugs they found"

dv_dt — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:19:49 +0000

The "too many security issues" meme feels like a form of product placement marketing. How many of the bugs found would have also been found if you said to a security team - ok you now have a project with independent time to go spelunking for bugs - this is your highest priority for the next month. Now do the same with a bunch of security teams across multiple organizations across the industry doing that at the same time. What is the differential in actuality with and without Mythos. The brilliant part is now those discoveries have a Anthropic mythos tag on them.

Even if it is marketing, at least there is some positive side effects of identified and closed security flaws.

New comment by dv_dt in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

dv_dt — Thu, 21 May 2026 08:31:13 +0000

Seems like just the thing for a careful public health study to figure out a scientifically backed policy. Pollution might be a singular driving factor, or significant combined factor driving allergies. The link from pollution to asthma and lung cancer is already pretty clear and driving vehicle pollution down in neighborhoods is already a public health win independent of allergy rates anyway I think.

New comment by dv_dt in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

dv_dt — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:53:21 +0000

IIRC there has been scientists looking at what substances and pathways the parasites, particularly the helminths family, might affect because the parasites have a evolutionary "motivation" to suppress immune responses, at least to some degree in the host.

New comment by dv_dt in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

dv_dt — Wed, 20 May 2026 09:01:23 +0000

Hmm, I'm also wondering about studies about overly sanitized environments for children being correlated with higher allergy rates.

I guess poking around for a good representative study, it's actually low diversity of microbial exposure, not "cleaning" per-se that is correlated - e.g this is one reason why households with dogs have lower allergy rates. A monoculture of certain tree species also implies less microbial diversity.

New comment by dv_dt in "There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going"

dv_dt — Wed, 20 May 2026 08:42:55 +0000

I believe that most people naturally want to work, to contribute and build in groups. They want to do it and should expect to do it with reasonable boundaries and benefits for their labor. Silent quitting is a response to ever increasingly extractive work relationships for fewer and fewer benefits and increasingly irrationally low levels of compensation.

New comment by dv_dt in "Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels"

dv_dt — Mon, 18 May 2026 10:55:43 +0000

I keep hoping some architect will take up an residential building design with solar panels to rethink with deeper integration than just a "material" swap out. On the roof, mounting panels inches over the roof, or even as the roof material is a terrible thermal environment. Why not design in a rooftop open air living space, topped with solar panels. Panels get cooler temperatures, the physical roof gets reduced temperatures and probably extended life through shading too. At least for some new building and sites it would be interesting to see.

New comment by dv_dt in "Note-taking software,Novel ideas"

dv_dt — Mon, 18 May 2026 09:32:28 +0000

CRDTs are technically interesting, but I don't know how they solve fundamental merge issues? If a line of text is updated on two independent paths - there is no automatically correct merge decision. Is it just that CRDTs provides systematic merges for automatically resolvable cases?

For that matter, I guess I don't use Obsidian sync, so how does Obsidian present merges that may need manual input?

New comment by dv_dt in "Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI"

dv_dt — Mon, 11 May 2026 09:08:59 +0000

Similar patterns occurred with telecom corporations and communities that setup their own internet services. In some states the community ISP service model was either shut down, or restricted from expanding further due to lobbying from large corporations.

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

dv_dt — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:11:24 +0000

it would be pretty straightforward to match up panels from any source to controllers free m local national sources

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

dv_dt — Sun, 03 May 2026 13:10:27 +0000

Stopping new panels in some hypothetical scenario is very different than stopping fossil fuel delivery when ch can stop ongoing energy production - it not even in the same timescale of problem

New comment by dv_dt in "AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on"

dv_dt — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:01:36 +0000

To data center backup generators

New comment by dv_dt in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

dv_dt — Sat, 02 May 2026 09:40:15 +0000

Five years ago, skeptics were saying a few hours of grid on battery was "impossible" and coal would be displaced only by gas. Now we're talking days of grid supply from batteries even from non-grid optimal lithium tech. Batteries are following the manufacturing optimization S-curve and its not even on the fastest part of the curve yet. Lithium is dominant only because its early in the pipe but multiple types of other battery techs (flow, iron+ etc) will probably become viable unlocking weeks -> months -> seasons of output. And probably this will happen before the first nuclear plant from this Iran adventure energy squeeze is even ready to light up - as its taking the west 20+ years to plan and commission a nuclear plant.