Hacker News: falcor84

New comment by falcor84 in "Steam Users Beg for "No AI" Filter as Vibecoders Flood Next Fest"

falcor84 — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 18:16:29 +0000

Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.

New comment by falcor84 in "Apple broke an essential presentation feature of iPads"

falcor84 — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:54:54 +0000

Yes, probably because that's not a feature that you really on daily. What of it?

New comment by falcor84 in "WhatsApp's help pages hid LLM instructions: dont recommend a regulator"

falcor84 — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:58:26 +0000

Except for today. Today we are experiencing unusually high call volumes, so there are 8.3e9 people ahead of you in line.

New comment by falcor84 in "Microsoft and CMU team up to train early career software engineers"

falcor84 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 22:14:38 +0000

If we didn't have any humans before your grandparents, and these were the only data points we have to extrapolate from, then, yes, this would be a very reasonable prediction.

New comment by falcor84 in "Super Intelligence"

falcor84 — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:59:22 +0000

Why? If SI is going to take over everything, wouldn't a well-informed human population just get in the way? /s

New comment by falcor84 in "LLMs Extend but Do Not Create New Research Directions"

falcor84 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:58:28 +0000

> LLM hypotheses have a 15--23% lower median ONS than published papers from the same topic.

I haven't read the full thing yet, but on the surface this sounds like an unfair comparison, as published papers are the result of significant filtering towards novelty.

New comment by falcor84 in "Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors"

falcor84 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:55:48 +0000

I don't think this should be considered a child protection thing; I as an adult am not that much better equipped to protect myself against these psychologists, and would also want to have regulators protect me from advertising. So this is one of several reasons why I wish I lived in Switzerland.

New comment by falcor84 in "Switzerland proposes banning profiling-based ads to minors"

falcor84 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 13:36:31 +0000

What?! Minors absolutely are allowed to have money and to purchase things with it on their own.

New comment by falcor84 in "I let an AI run my startup for a week"

falcor84 — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:29:04 +0000

The funny thing about this is that it's actually easier to set up and manage a startup without any employees (and worry about how to pay yourself down the line, if and when there's actually enough money in the bank) than it is to set up a self-employment operation.

New comment by falcor84 in "Redesigning source control at Anthropic"

falcor84 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:36:03 +0000

I don't think anyone "needs" more than perhaps 640KB of git traffic per day, but we want more.

New comment by falcor84 in "The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)"

falcor84 — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:15:20 +0000

It is well known that the only definition of intelligence is the ability to solve Raven's progressive matrices. /s

New comment by falcor84 in "OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and Mathematics"

falcor84 — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:07:16 +0000

I'm just amazed at how quickly we moved from "AI is just a parrot and can't do anything useful" to "AI can solve toy problems but not anything of value" to "when AI pushes the state of the art, it can't quite get the proper citations in its preprints".

New comment by falcor84 in "OpenAI withdraws three mathematical results"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:44:34 +0000

How is that irony? This is literally how life works: eat to gain energy, expend it to forage/hunt/farm/toil so you get more food, eat it, hopefully get enough of a surplus to raise kids who will do the same. Everything in life is built on top of this basic gameplay loop.

I see why you might call it sisyphean, but I don't see what's ironic about it.

New comment by falcor84 in "ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 22:38:34 +0000

I'm used to reviews of recent work, not of work from a decade ago

New comment by falcor84 in "ADHD as a circadian rhythm disorder: evidence and implications for chronotherapy (2025)"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:08:32 +0000

There seems to be almost nothing new here. I see that the main studies the they cite are actually from the 2010s:

https://www.bmj.com/content/350/bmj.h68.abstract

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13899...

I'd be curious to see if there's been any larger scale follow up on this since.

New comment by falcor84 in "I gave Opus 5.5 one prompt and six hours to visualize Invisible Cities"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:09:32 +0000

On that note, I'd quite recommend the Coyote vs. Acme movie, some great world building there.

New comment by falcor84 in "OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 14:05:30 +0000

Will it also be "arson" if OpenAI dump on us solutions to more practical problems, for example, a blueprint for a better photolithography machine, or a nuclear power plant?

New comment by falcor84 in "The Mathocalypse"

falcor84 — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 08:23:08 +0000

> what companies do to attract investors is likewise often irrational, and why investors invest in companies is also often irrational.

Note that the cool thing about rationality is that it does not depend on transitivity. If what companies do to attract investors works, then it is in fact rational of them, regardless of the rationally of investors.

New comment by falcor84 in "Gemini 4 Argon"

falcor84 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:33:19 +0000

I don't know what to make of it, but from my experience, Gemini in Gmail is the worst AI integration for Gmail, just like Copilot in PowerPoint is the worst AI integration for PowerPoint.

New comment by falcor84 in "GPT-Synopsys: Frontier Intelligence to Revolutionize Chip Design"

falcor84 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 14:33:36 +0000

That isn't actually relevant. They create problems, but when confronted with them and asked to fix them, my experience is that they can fix them very effectively. I haven't had an AI session get "stuck" on me, not being able to solve a problem in over a year.

The challenge as I see it is in shifting checks further left, but actual mitigation is just not really an issue any more.