Hacker News: epwr

New comment by epwr in "I resigned from Anthropic today"

epwr — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:00:55 +0000

I would disagree with “non-example 2” - there are lots of examples of terrorist organizations that are leveraging AI to increase their capacities. Just because one of the worst cases (eg. deployed biological or chemical weapons) hasn’t happened yet, does not mean that a) these tools are leading to real harm, and b) there’s potential here for extraordinary harms.

One good source I can recommend listening to: https://pca.st/episode/d821fced-b4d5-4c84-b0a3-6ebe913fa638

New comment by epwr in "Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption"

epwr — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 03:25:28 +0000

Wouldn’t a zero data retention agreement be pretty close to this?

New comment by epwr in "Judge says body cameras for Chicago officers "was not a suggestion""

epwr — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 16:42:11 +0000

That is not true. State laws cannot interfere with the work of federal law enforcement, but can require certain behaviours.

Eg. States set speed limits. A federal LEO can break these when required for their duties (eg. chasing a suspect), but only when required (eg. if they are late for a meeting, they still have to obey traffic laws).

Body cameras do not seem to directly interfere with an LEO’s duty, unless “avoiding accountability” is literally their duty.

New comment by epwr in "The zipper is getting its first major upgrade in 100 years"

epwr — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 15:56:06 +0000

Likely they will be heat welded to a polyethylene. You can sew this for extra strength. Which I think means a fully recyclable jacket!

New comment by epwr in "Meta Superintelligence Labs' first paper is about RAG"

epwr — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 04:41:22 +0000

Could you elaborate or link something here? I think about this pretty frequently, so would love to read something!

New comment by epwr in "Show HN: I Made the Hardest Focus App"

epwr — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 05:08:25 +0000

What’s the better app? Would love one that’s actually teaching the rules, not just learning through pattern recognition

New comment by epwr in "So Google's Gemini Doesn't Like Python Programming and Sanskrit?"

epwr — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 22:43:38 +0000

lru_cache has the benefit of being explicit about the replacement policy. So I find it more appropriate in cases where I want a size limit in the cache which, for me, is almost always.

I’m not sure use cases you see caches in, but any long running process should likely have a size limit on the cache.

New comment by epwr in "Ask HN: Are height adjustable desks worth it?"

epwr — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 15:17:39 +0000

+1 for uplift. I’ve had mine for two years and love it.

New comment by epwr in "Why TSA's Implementation of Facial Recognition Is More Dangerous Than You Think"

epwr — Mon, 20 Nov 2023 21:46:32 +0000

This statement seems pretty poorly thought out. I think the argument that's being made is actually that there should be comprehensive privacy legislation, not that the TSA's use of facial recognition is bad/dangerous.

I see three risks being pointed out:

1. "the potential privacy and bias risks" -> however it doesn't expand or explain these risks. I'm on team privacy in general, so I definitely worry about this, but I think it's almost comical that any description of this risk is absent.

2. While facial ID is currently optional, "there is no guarantee that will remain the case" -> this is a textbook slippery slope argument, which means they're arguing not that the current practice is bad but that someday they might start doing something bad.

3. "the very real possibility that our face eventually becomes our default ID" -> another slippery slope argument that has even less to do with the TSA. This would require a major effort by the rest of government, so this is more a "watch out for that big cliff over there" argument than a slippery slope argument.

After all that, I think the topic sentence of this statement should be" > This is [bad] because the United States lacks an overarching law to regulate the use of facial recognition to ensure the necessary transparency, accountability, and oversight to protect our privacy, civil liberties, and civil rights.

New comment by epwr in "We Thought Marriage Made Us Healthier, and Why We Were Wrong"

epwr — Tue, 07 Nov 2023 15:39:22 +0000

I haven’t read the underlying paper, but from the article it seems the paper looks at if a person gets healthier when they get married.

This seems flawed because you get older as you get married, which is generally something that makes you less healthy.

This does not seem to compare health between a cohort that stayed single and a cohort that got married, so I don’t place a lot of value on the conclusions.

New comment by epwr in "All programming philosophies are about state"

epwr — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 06:25:35 +0000

You might want to look a bit more closely before you write functional programming off like this.

Eg. Clojure is a modern functional language that is used for a lot of things & happens to be dynamic.

New comment by epwr in "Tell HN: Coinbase now requires physical address of recipient in crypto transfers"

epwr — Fri, 24 Jun 2022 14:55:17 +0000

> Is it black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.

No, but it is illegal for financial institutions (and many industries) to provide services without knowing who they are serving. Not sure how anyone is surprised that KYC requirements are coming for crypto..

New comment by epwr in "Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings"

epwr — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 14:38:41 +0000

This article [1] seems to state pretty clearly that the law applies to all job posting by a company in Washington state. Any sources saying it's only about jobs open to Washington residents?

[1] https://www.dwt.com/blogs/employment-labor-and-benefits/2022...

New comment by epwr in "Microsoft will include pay ranges in all U.S. job postings"

epwr — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 14:26:46 +0000

> Microsoft said it would disclose salary ranges in all internal and external U.S. job postings no later than January 2023. That date is when Washington state, where Microsoft’s headquarters are located, will start requiring employers with at least 15 employees to disclose salary ranges for each position.

In other news, Microsoft to comply with a new law.

New comment by epwr in "Google Analytics 4"

epwr — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 03:18:16 +0000

I really like usefathom.com

New comment by epwr in "Coding error at Santander Bank put millions into random accounts on Christmas"

epwr — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 06:45:22 +0000

What is going on with the denial of responsibility? Do you really get to say "oops, don't sue me" in advance?

New comment by epwr in "Haystack 1.0 – open-source NLP framework to build NLProc back end applications"

epwr — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 06:22:30 +0000

It's a little more complicated. Project Haystack is big. Like the main way building IoT data is tagged around the English speaking world. And it's a semantic vocabulary & ontology, so there's a lot of overlapping search results.

New comment by epwr in "Android and iOS data collection"

epwr — Sun, 03 Oct 2021 23:26:54 +0000

And what exactly is the difference? The framing? None of the facts in the two articles seem to contradict each other.

New comment by epwr in "Ask HN: Are you colour blind? If so, how does this affect your work?"

epwr — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 19:26:05 +0000

I super relate to your second line here. Sometimes I have to pick colours for websites I work on, so I'll either find someone to help pick or the website will be white, black, and maybe one accent colour.

Ask HN: Are AWS Certifications worth it?

epwr — Thu, 30 Sep 2021 16:56:03 +0000

I'm a junior software developer looking to move into devOps and I'm wondering if anyone thinks that AWS Certifications are worth it. Specifically the 'Foundational' certificate, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner [1].

The sample questions [2] for the certification seem too easy for the certificate to be meaningful (you can get 100% by picking the name of the service that seems vaguely connected) but sometimes certifications are valued just to show that you're actually interested in an area.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/

[2] https://d1.awsstatic.com/training-and-certification/docs-cloud-practitioner/AWS-Certified-Cloud-Practitioner_Sample-Questions.pdf

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28708472

Points: 4

# Comments: 0