Hacker News: giaour

New comment by giaour in "Incident with Github.com"

giaour — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:31:23 +0000

Was this reported and quantified somewhere, or does 95% reflect your experience? My experience was the opposite -- everybody I cared to follow left and never went back -- but I'd be willing to believe I'm in the 5%.

New comment by giaour in "Amazon circumvents Gilroy community vote for AI data center"

giaour — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:36:17 +0000

5G towers are typically much smaller and less conspicuous than the towers they are replacing. One of 5G's hallmarks is its "small cell" architecture.

New comment by giaour in "Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees"

giaour — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:49:36 +0000

The introduction of mechanical looms (is this what you mean by "modern"?) was famously terrible for workers. Weaving went from a high-skill, safe task to a dangerous, low-skill one and was largely responsible for the rise of factories. The original Luddites were weavers.

New comment by giaour in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

giaour — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 22:07:21 +0000

You may recall that the DMCA was originally written to protect music and movies. It does in fact apply to creative works. If you have ever purchased an MP3, eBook, or streaming movie, you will also be aware that you purchased a license to the underlying IP. This is also true of physical media, but the license agreement you have to accept when obtaining a digital work makes this explicit.

I agree that you can't patent a book, but I would point out that you can patent an idea, which may only appear in a book or journal article.

New comment by giaour in "“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”"

giaour — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:55:17 +0000

> I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright

Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.

New comment by giaour in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

giaour — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 21:06:35 +0000

Many are openly working to create AGI with the aim of harnessing it to solve humanity's problems. Do you really think being able to command an entity with human-level intelligence would be morally equivalent to using a tractor?

New comment by giaour in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

giaour — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:56:48 +0000

You could tell from tone and polish how much effort someone had put into writing an answer. That was a pretty good signal for some topics on forum sites like Stack Overflow. There were always nuts and cranks who would happily spend an hour writing well-formed prose about nonsense or something obviously wrong, but the eloquent ones were few and far between. Now every crank is equally eloquent and can spit out 1,500 words of passable prose in seconds.

New comment by giaour in "JSON-LD explained for personal websites"

giaour — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:25:14 +0000

> Also keep in mind if your site is better indexed by crawlers you can literally influence future LLMs

Ah, what a glorious fate to aspire to.

Most people I know who have maintained blogs do so to build their personal brand, normally because they make a living through writing or consulting. Gently influencing the pre-tuning weights of future models is just providing unpaid labor to hyperscalers.

New comment by giaour in "What if we legally required politicians to work regular jobs 2 months a year?"

giaour — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 11:48:49 +0000

Most state legislatures work under a similar model -- being a legislator is full time work for a couple months of the year, and the rest of the time, delegates/senators are expected to have other jobs. (This is "enforced" by legislator pay being something like ~$10K/year.)

It's not a perfect system. There are very few jobs that just let you take off a couple of months a year, so legislators tend to have specific careers. Constituent services are required year-round, so legislative staff are full-time, year-round employees. And legislating has to happen quickly, so it's harder for citizens to interact and follow along with the process when they want to advocate for a bill.

New comment by giaour in "No more JetBrains products for me"

giaour — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:32:46 +0000

I'm sure there is a way to use a step debugger with a specific unit test in Neovim or whatever, but it's one of the things heavyweight IDEs do with no setup or configuration.

New comment by giaour in "2026 HIPAA Security Rule Update"

giaour — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:22:41 +0000

It's been a few years since I worked in this space, but HIPAA doesn't really work under the same kind of legal framework. Oversimplifying here, but basically HIPAA defines what constitutes personal health information, how such information may be used, and establishes monetary penalties for improper use and unauthorized disclosure. The law doesn't have any certification standard, no more than the prohibition on stealing cars does.

Maybe there's some kind of third party certification system to support signing information sharing agreements ("BAAs") with other health information systems. I worked at CMS on first-party stuff so I'm not really familiar with how it works in the private sector.

New comment by giaour in "No more JetBrains products for me"

giaour — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:51:49 +0000

> - can run individual tests seamlessly

This is the main one for me. If I am working on a large project with decent unit test coverage, the feedback loop in IntelliJ or Visual Studio is just much quicker than the alternatives because you can run and debug the specific tests you need.

New comment by giaour in "Nonprofit hospitals spend billions on consultants with no clear effect"

giaour — Fri, 08 May 2026 11:53:30 +0000

By statute, an organization can only exist as a non-profit in the US if it is "organized and operated exclusively for exempt purposes"[0], and non-profit hospitals specifically must operate for charitable purposes.

It may not be wise to assume non-profits exist within the confines of the law that authorizes their continued existence, but I don't see how it's fallacious.

[0]: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

New comment by giaour in "Uber’s Anthropic AI push hits a wall"

giaour — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:07:41 +0000

I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hotdog today (if you want to get a circular investment bubble going)

New comment by giaour in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

giaour — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:15:08 +0000

> So what was valued? Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values.

This is a "noble savage" conception of the past. Thinking/cleverness/craftiness was highly rewarded even in preliterate societies. Even in war, "polytropos" Odysseus comes out ahead of the dumb brutes with bigger spears.

New comment by giaour in "The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs"

giaour — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 16:26:20 +0000

Data & Society put out a paper on this role back in 2019 but used the term "moral crumple zones" since they were focusing on how to assign blame in autonomous vehicle crashes: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351054898_Moral_Cru...

"Meat shields" has a nice physicality to it, though

New comment by giaour in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

giaour — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:45:02 +0000

Yep, that's why substitute teachers' interests are more zealously guarded by Congress than the interests of billionaires are. Teachers have wielded the enormous power they hold to get a <= $250 deduction for school supplies they purchase with their own money.

New comment by giaour in "AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It"

giaour — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:37:28 +0000

> consider how much lobbying money is coming from CEOs and companies who know the domain best and are agitating for better financial and social safeguards for all.

To hear Marc Andreessen tell it, the US tech industry's rightward turn in the 2024 campaign was specifically intended to head off any attempt to regulate AI [0]. So the blame rebounds to tech CEOs even if you believe that only the government should take a holistic view of a given technology's impact.

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-06-11/marc-andr...

New comment by giaour in "Treason in the Futures Markets"

giaour — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:14:21 +0000

There are more recent versions with better names, like the Restore Trust in Congress Act[0], and one introduced a few days ago to ban congresspeople and the president (as well as their immediate family members) from betting on prediction markets[1].

I can only imagine the GP mentioned the PELOSI act (which, as I recall, was cosponsored by Nancy Pelosi and blocked by Republicans) because it was designed to be partisan messaging.

[0]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/5106...

[1]: https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/25/congress/la...

New comment by giaour in "Treason in the Futures Markets"

giaour — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 11:28:58 +0000

The $580MM transaction described in the article is already 1,000 times larger than the alleged congressional insider trading by Paul Pelosi that caused Sen. Hawley to introduce the PELOSI act.