Hacker News: firejake308

New comment by firejake308 in "U.S. set to launch tariff refund system on April 20"

firejake308 — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 02:02:31 +0000

Right, this is what I remember seeing. Overall, inflation didn't increase much last year even after the tariffs because a lot of companies had stockpiled inventory and were able to postpone the price increase. Seems like that bet paid off, and now they should ideally be able to get their money back without increasing prices.

Obviously there were some companies who did raise prices because of tariffs, but I'm saying that on average, they must not have since inflation didn't go up by 15%

New comment by firejake308 in "Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction"

firejake308 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:41:39 +0000

I mean, we need all the electricity we can get to run all of these datacenters, right? So I think this might be one of those things that the Republicans quietly allow to continue so that the corporate interests can maximize electricity production

New comment by firejake308 in "Outsourcing thinking"

firejake308 — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 04:16:46 +0000

The LLMs are not uncorrelated, though, they're all trained on the same dataset (the Internet) and subject to most of the same biases

New comment by firejake308 in "My Mom and Dr. DeepSeek (2025)"

firejake308 — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 17:00:59 +0000

> “DeepSeek is more humane,” my mother told me in May. “Doctors are more like machines.”

Now there's a quote

New comment by firejake308 in "Iran Protest Death Toll Could Top 30k, According to Local Health Officials"

firejake308 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:46:15 +0000

> As of Saturday, the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said it had confirmed 5,459 deaths and is investigating 17,031 more.

The 30,000 number comes from the Ministry of Health. It seems the UN number also aligns with the new 30,000 number. This is much worse than the 3,000 that was reported earlier. But it also seems like the crackdown is over now, and we're still just counting deaths from Jan 8 and 9.

I compare this to the recent protests in Bangladesh, where Sheikh Hasina ordered the military to shoot the protesters and the military refused. The difference between these two countries is proof that people do have the ability to disobey orders from authoritarian leaders, and that decision can have a huge impact.

New comment by firejake308 in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

firejake308 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:41:53 +0000

If hallucinated citations are making it to top conferences, do we just have to accept that no one is willing to do the work to ensure that our research is grounded in reality? Perhaps the volunteer peer review system is broken and we need people who are paid to carefully check the citations

New comment by firejake308 in "[dead]"

firejake308 — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:37:51 +0000

If hallucinated citations are making it to a top conference, Is there anything we can do to stop this rampant abuse of AI? Or do we just have to accept that research is no longer going to be grounded in reality?

New comment by firejake308 in "The sword-wielding man hired to kick squatters out of empty Oakland homes"

firejake308 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:37:23 +0000

Not building enough housing? It seems like they've built 164,121 housing units too many. I think that the more correct explanation is that speculative investors are holding onto property indefinitely rather than selling or renting at a loss, preventing housing from falling back to its true equilibrium value.

New comment by firejake308 in "Non-Zero-Sum Games"

firejake308 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:39:04 +0000

The only way for cooperation to be a winning strategy in a prisoner's dilemma is if people have memory/reputation/trust. However, that is very difficult to build in the modern digital world where everyone is a faceless username.

https://nonzerosum.games/cooperationvsdefection.html

New comment by firejake308 in "Non-Zero-Sum Games"

firejake308 — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 16:31:12 +0000

I went to a school in the suburbs with kids from middle class families and lower-middle class families. Many of us wanted to get into the Ivy League schools, but what I saw was that, presumable because of AA, the middle class kids from over-represented minorities (Asian, white) did not get into the Ivies, and the 1 or 2 who did get in were middle class kids from under-represented minorities (Black, Hispanic). But their families were still pretty well-off. Under no circumstances did a kid from a lower-middle class family make it into an Ivy, regardless of race. I really don't get why AA has to be about race, if we just did AA based on parental income alone, I would support it 100%. I think most concervatives would be happy because it wouls support poor whites, and most liberals would also be happy because it would in actuality URMs would still be the most benefited because they are the majority of low-income families. My only assumption is that it doesn't leave any openings for the rich and powerful to game the system, so people with the power to make changes will never make that change.

New comment by firejake308 in "Low-dose radiation offers relief to people with knee osteoarthritis"

firejake308 — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 23:59:23 +0000

Two key caveats: 40% of people said their arthritis got better with the placebo treatment, while 70% got better with the radiation. Yes, that's clearly a difference, but it also means that 40% of people don't need to expose themselves to the side effects of radiation in order to get relief from their arthritis. Second, the realy number of people who don't need radiation is actually higher, because this study limited the use of NSAIDs like ibuprofen (Advil) or naproxen, which would probably have helped a lot of the other people. Granted, for people who can't take NSAIDs because of kidney disease or something, maybe this will be an option in the future, but I really want to see the long-term safety data before I go irradiating everyone's knees.

New comment by firejake308 in "Helium Browser"

firejake308 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:12:21 +0000

Slightly amusing, perhaps, but accurate and concise? Definitely.

New comment by firejake308 in "Everything that's wrong with Google Search in one image"

firejake308 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:08:16 +0000

> at least ChatGPT attempts to give a paid option. Again, I don't think that'll stop them...

Netflix also attempted to give a paid option, but now we have an "ad-supported" plan. I think that same logic of maximizing profit means that even if there are some people paying for ChatGPT, the amount of free money that is sitting on the table means that we will see "ad-supported" ChatGPT pretty soon once the low-hanging fruit for quality enhancement start to dry up, which is kind of already happening.

New comment by firejake308 in "How did sports betting become legal in the US?"

firejake308 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 01:03:23 +0000

But wasn't that also true in 1979 when the ban was first put in place? Obviously, yes, money is the main force driving this country toward sports betting, but I argue that there used to be a counteracting force called morals, and the loss of that counter-force is what led us to where we are now.

New comment by firejake308 in "US AI Action Plan"

firejake308 — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 03:42:41 +0000

I actually agree with your take, that a model trained on a dump of the Internet will be left-leaning on average, BUT I want to reiterate that obvious indoctrination (see the incident with Grok and South Africa, or Gemini with diverse Nazis) is also terrible and probably worse

New comment by firejake308 in "Context Rot: How increasing input tokens impacts LLM performance"

firejake308 — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 03:30:33 +0000

yeah, but they benefit from convincing people not to dump everything in context, because the alternative is to dump everything in a db (like Chroma) and then retrieve only the relevant parts (whether that's using vector search or regex search or full-text search or whatever). I still think their thesis is correct, but readers should be aware of the author's bias and make their own judgment.

New comment by firejake308 in "OpenFront: Realtime Risk-like multiplayer game in the browser"

firejake308 — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 11:28:08 +0000

IME, ports generate way more income than workers, so I go for pretty much fully soldiers

New comment by firejake308 in "LLMs should not replace therapists"

firejake308 — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:42:17 +0000

This addresses the key problem. The lack of access to therapists is due to lack of therapists, because the demand far outweighs supply. It is simply not possible to train the number of therapists that we need, so technological advancement is probably the correct answer.

New comment by firejake308 in "Should Boys Start Kindergarten a Year Later Than Girls?"

firejake308 — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 04:01:36 +0000

> The older students consistently scored higher on tests... The findings were true for children of all backgrounds, but especially for boys and for children from low-income families.

If redshirting benefits both boys and girls, it seems unfair to only offer it to boys, even if the boys benefit more than girls.

New comment by firejake308 in "The $11T gap between White House and economists on Trump's 'big, beautiful' bill"

firejake308 — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 15:47:24 +0000

White House doing girl math now. In the words of Two Minute Papers, what a time to be alive