Hacker News: fastball

New comment by fastball in "Claude Fable 5"

fastball — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:56:17 +0000

What is your effort level?

New comment by fastball in "Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models"

fastball — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:00:39 +0000

Was Google Translate millions of lines of hand-rolled code? The Transformer architecture was invented for Google Translate, before it was used to build "LLMs".

New comment by fastball in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

fastball — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:44:24 +0000

Believing government should be big for some things and small for others is not intrinsically hypocrisy.

New comment by fastball in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

fastball — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 16:39:50 +0000

No, I am directly addressing the parent's implication that for things "we care about", small (central) government is somehow bad or a curious choice or hypocrisy.

I'd like to make a cleaner point, but the parent itself is very vague.

New comment by fastball in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

fastball — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 19:07:37 +0000

Right, but you didn't answer my question. How are you measuring impact of the DoEd?

New comment by fastball in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

fastball — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:50:30 +0000

Not sure I follow. What happened to student attainment after the DoEd was introduced?

New comment by fastball in "Gov.uk has replaced Stripe with Dutch provider Adyen"

fastball — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:51:28 +0000

Stripe processes like $2T in txns per year – how do they look bigger than that?

New comment by fastball in "Three of our worst VC stories"

fastball — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:35:09 +0000

Well he did retweet another tweet that kickstarted the convo, very possible he saw that tweet, said to himself "I have some of these to share!" and then proceeded to... do so.

New comment by fastball in "What happens if Japan takes in zero immigrants?"

fastball — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:39:37 +0000

How do you define insignificant? From 1950 to 2000 (50 years), the foreign born percentage of the UK doubled from 4% to 8%. In the 20 years after that, the percentage doubled again to 16%. In the five years since 2020, the percentage has increased another 4 points to ~20%.

Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.

New comment by fastball in "MacBook Neo Is So Popular That Apple Doubled Production"

fastball — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 18:38:03 +0000

Seems to be right on time. Hard to justify putting a mobile chip in your laptop until performance has reached a certain threshold.

New comment by fastball in "If AI data centers are so great, why are they being built in secret?"

fastball — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:49:56 +0000

Is "keeping your mouth shut" dishonesty?

New comment by fastball in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

fastball — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:17:19 +0000

Would you really be surprised to discover that Americans in general might be more inclined to assume that American intentions are better?

New comment by fastball in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

fastball — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 05:15:57 +0000

Americans wanted to beat the Soviets to the moon the first time around, and I don't think it was because they'd "been propagandized into the position that they alone are exceptional".

New comment by fastball in "EV Stupidity Checklist"

fastball — Fri, 29 May 2026 22:33:31 +0000

I think this desire is reasonable, but also completely misses two of the main reasons Tesla did their "everything mediated thru the touch screen" in the first place (besides cost, which TFA mentions).

1. It allows for having "presets" for everything configurable in the car. If you've ever shared a Tesla, you understand this: the driver's seat adjusts itself to the right position, as does the HVAC, etc. Everything being digitally mediated means I can loan my car to someone and when I get it back, all of my settings will be exactly as I left them.

2. It paves the way for "robotaxi". You don't need physical buttons geared towards maximum ergonomics of the driver if there is no driver. Obviously Tesla hasn't quite achieved that goal yet, but that is what they are aiming for so it makes sense they wouldn't invest much at all in driver ergonomics.

Similarly, the doorhandles being flush is not entirely about "looking futuristic", but is instead another way to squeeze every last drop of aerodynamics out of the vehicle, which is incredibly important for EVs.

New comment by fastball in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

fastball — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:58:23 +0000

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't this more criminal?

BAM / new franchisee claims that any consignment deal is null and void after their takeover. If they knowingly possess items that therefore do not belong to them legally (because they were never owned by the previous franchisee), is that not theft (and therefore criminal behavior)?

Like imagine the previous franchisee left their phone in the store. Then the new owners say "nah, it doesn't belong to me". But actually it does. That is theft.

New comment by fastball in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

fastball — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:56:05 +0000

TIL that morality is actually objective, glad we finally cleared that up.

New comment by fastball in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

fastball — Fri, 29 May 2026 05:42:33 +0000

Fairly certain it was actually someone affiliated with corporate who took over the franchise, but it is still a franchisee.

New comment by fastball in "Claude Opus 4.8"

fastball — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:53:55 +0000

Not sure I follow. Anthropic included benchmarks where GPT 5.5 outperforms Claude 4.8. Sure maybe that is a strategic error, but that doesn't seems to indicate benchmarks can't be trusted (I personally don't trust them, but not because of this).

New comment by fastball in "Claude Opus 4.8"

fastball — Thu, 28 May 2026 19:45:21 +0000

Seems reasonable? Presumably Claude also performs better under the Claude Code harness.

New comment by fastball in "Cloudflare Flagship"

fastball — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:49:27 +0000

That is actually their SDK / provider agnostic library. The better parallel to this new Cloudflare offering is Vercel Flags[1] (confusing I know)

[1] https://vercel.com/docs/flags/vercel-flags