Hacker News: hacknat

New comment by hacknat in "Bugs Apple loves"

hacknat — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:03:31 +0000

Syncing on Apple devices across the board is pretty bad. A great example is the Notes app. It took me a year to convince my wife to migrate our grocery list away from the Notes app. So many arguments about missed grocery items that never synced.

New comment by hacknat in "Does anyone know how much VC firms contributes to wealth inequality?"

hacknat — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 14:20:33 +0000

Wealth inequality is not an important thing to worry about by itself. The Gini coefficient undergoes a U-shape growth curve in economies as they move from under-developed, to developing, to developed. A better thing to worry about is wage growth and wealth growth among the bottom 50% of the population. Correlating that metric to the Gini coefficient seems like an exercise for an ideologue not a rigorous thinker.

Speaking to your point about VCs. They represent a minuscule amount of capital investment in the US economy. Of course, on this website, they predominate thought and discussion. However, the simple fact is that VC money is a rounding error in overall capital investment.

New comment by hacknat in "Cisco to acquire Isovalent"

hacknat — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 20:45:22 +0000

Yes.

New comment by hacknat in "Cisco to acquire Isovalent"

hacknat — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 20:33:06 +0000

Daniel Borkmann is at Isovalent, he is definitely co-creator of eBPF.

New comment by hacknat in "Overhyping hydrogen as a fuel"

hacknat — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 17:01:55 +0000

"nature.com" made me look because I assumed there was a paper behind this. There isn't. This is an editorial. No thanks.

Would the submitter care to put "Editorial:" as a prefix on this submission?

New comment by hacknat in "4th leak reported on Nord Stream pipelines in Baltic Sea"

hacknat — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 11:43:49 +0000

Germany screwed itself by ending natural gas exploration and shutting down its nuclear plants. They’re about to burn more coal and wood this year than they have in years.

New comment by hacknat in "4th leak reported on Nord Stream pipelines in Baltic Sea"

hacknat — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:23:50 +0000

Iraq made some sense if you see it as a war to make sure no major energy-capital flows went through the Euro (Iraq started selling their oil in Euros in the late 90s). The US war machine wants to go to war with everyone, from time to time American economic interests lets them.

New comment by hacknat in "4th leak reported on Nord Stream pipelines in Baltic Sea"

hacknat — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:44:20 +0000

It locks Germany into its geopolitical position.

New comment by hacknat in "Ask HN: Are we building a tech dystopia?"

hacknat — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 17:04:09 +0000

I meant users/customers, not employees.

New comment by hacknat in "Ask HN: Are we building a tech dystopia?"

hacknat — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 16:38:05 +0000

I'm not saying that there aren't dystopian problems in our future, but my bias is that we're actually probably not doing enough, not that we're doing too much. Measuring technology progress is actually very difficult to do, most of the actors have massive incentives to lie and exaggerate.

> a VR metaverse dominated by super sophisticated ad tech

No one is joining Meta (in fact they're losing people now), it's going to fail. Actually VR in general has been unable to gain market traction for years. More and more signs point to people exiting social media (TikTok is still a concern though).

> all controlled by super intelligent AGI

Don't believe the AI hype. We've actually made very little progress on theoretical AI, the breakthroughs have all been in engineering (mostly just adding stacks to NNs that hyperscalar cloud architectures have made easy). We don't actually know what General Intelligence is yet or how to implement it. The engineering progress is making people think there is crazy progress in AI when there isn't.

> think DALL E and where that's headed.

DALL E is just cobbling together two AI innovations, semantic association and image creation. AI has been able to "combine" two types of image styles together for a while. Now there's a semantic addon that does the heavy lifting of looking up the styles for you based on the words you said/wrote.

New comment by hacknat in "Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)"

hacknat — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 15:40:03 +0000

I get that Tolkien was a staunch Catholic, but he was also a preeminent philologist trained in a way that few people today are. He was deeply familiar with all forms of human myth. To blindly assume that all characters in LotR must have a Biblical corollary is lazy. Tom Bombadil "rapes" Goldberry (in the ancient sense of the word[1]) in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil that comports nicely with other myth cycles and not very well with the idea of the "first Man" or "Adam" (it's not even clear that Bombadil is Eru's direct creation). I think if you actually read the secondary Tolkien texts you might see it differently. They are almost all worth it.

But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter,

in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes,

singing old water-songs to birds upon the bushes.

He caught her, held her fast! Water rats went scuttering

reeds hissed, herons cried, and her heart was fluttering.

Said Tom Bombadil: "Here's my pretty maiden!

You shall come home with me! The table is laden...

[1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/rape#:~:text=rape%20(v.),abd....

New comment by hacknat in "Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil (2011)"

hacknat — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 15:27:27 +0000

This has always been my understanding of Bombadil as well. The most popular/accepted view of who he is among Tolkien-dom that I've heard is that he represents the lands of the West themselves (or perhaps all of Middle-Earth?). In the Tolkien legendarium power comes from knowing the right names for things and the right words to say to them. Tom Bombadil is the most powerful being in Middle-Earth because he is so old that he knows the proper name for everything and how to address them (he chastises Old Man Willow to release the Hobbits like he is a child).

I do want to credit the author of this post with the observation that the rulers of lands in Tolkien's legendarium have influence over how those lands express themselves, but I think this letter is the answer to that. Tom is the exception; he eschews power. One of Gandalf's reasons for saying that they wouldn't want to give the ring to Tom is that he would probably lose the ring, not thinking it very important. Tom only cares of eating and drinking and making merry. In that regard he is a Dionysian figure. If you read the Adventures of Tom Bombadil (which this author surprisingly doesn't reference) he is clearly modeled on the Dionysus cycle of myths.

New comment by hacknat in "Yes, the 8086 wanted to be mechanically translatable from the 8080, but"

hacknat — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 20:38:45 +0000

My favorite Chen article:

Why do Windows functions all begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110921-00/?p=95...

New comment by hacknat in "Major crypto lender Celsius freezes withdrawals as markets tumble"

hacknat — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 22:02:02 +0000

That is not the only thing that has backed the value of money in the history of humanity. It (violence) is arguably the most inferior social mechanism for enforcing value that has been tried.

New comment by hacknat in "Major crypto lender Celsius freezes withdrawals as markets tumble"

hacknat — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 21:55:25 +0000

So gold’s day in the sun from the 15th century to the 1970s was what?

New comment by hacknat in "Major crypto lender Celsius freezes withdrawals as markets tumble"

hacknat — Mon, 13 Jun 2022 14:50:15 +0000

You've just described money. Is BTC good at being money? No. But your argument isn't the reason.

New comment by hacknat in "Ancient DNA may reveal origin of the Philistines"

hacknat — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 20:48:36 +0000

This was pretty much settled long ago according to pot sherd, architectural, and textual analysis. DNA is just the final nail in the coffin.

New comment by hacknat in "Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors"

hacknat — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 17:08:05 +0000

Not if you're able to influence the market in a meaningful way from your Twitter handle. How is anyone underestimating Twitter's power at this point?

New comment by hacknat in "The singularity is close?"

hacknat — Fri, 01 Apr 2022 01:26:51 +0000

I believe AGI is possible, but the more I study ML the more convinced I am that we don’t know what it (AGI) is. I also, don’t know if I agree that humans have GI (humanity as a whole does). I think we’re actually copycats more than anything else. Neural nets are the atoms of GI, but it’s not clear what the superstructure of GI is. We all assume that we understand what general intelligence is, but I don’t think we actually have the goods yet. We understand optimization, but we don’t understand the thing that chooses what to optimize. There is some notion of “values” in order for intelligence to be legible, and we don’t know what that is either.

New comment by hacknat in "Heuristics that almost always work"

hacknat — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 01:18:57 +0000

Are you reading the deeper lesson though? The individual examples aren't meant to be authoritative. He was trying to illustrate the very thing you are bringing up. Namely that lazy heuristics create information cascades. The information cascades can have positive effects, as you point out, but they can have profoundly negative consequences, which is the point of the whole article.

We shouldn't use or intellectually tolerate lazy heuristics because they can create immense amounts of counter-productive sense-making, and consequent negative social outcomes (a poorly managed pandemic, for example). The reason this article is hitting a nerve is because he is basically describing the current state of sense-making in the US (and maybe even the West more broadly?), which is quite poor — worse in some areas than others, but still quite degraded all around.

On your doctor take, you do know that the other author of this post is a licensed and practicing Physician, right?