Hacker News: heisenbit

New comment by heisenbit in "Patterns and problems in emerging multi-agent systems"

heisenbit — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 10:48:44 +0000

Any performance comparison not putting GPU cost at its center is marketing for waste.

Secondhand booksellers in UK and Ireland suspect AI firms 'strange' bulk orders

heisenbit — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 19:59:41 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-ireland-booksellers-suspect-ai-companies-bulk-orders-data-acquisition

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49313772

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by heisenbit in "“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers"

heisenbit — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:24:11 +0000

These waves where someone found a new way to focus on the valuable part and leave the grunt work to lowly others comes again and again. As always the truth remains that each step in the process is relatively trivial and is is the overall complexity e2e and scale and handling edge cases that are where value is created. But that won‘t stop groups trying to differentiate themselves by looking down on others even when it is clearly failing. As long as there is a benefit to the group driving it.

New comment by heisenbit in "We finally learned to center a div, then browsers added sidebars"

heisenbit — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 06:26:06 +0000

Unless you have e.g. a kiosk with physical buttons below the screen an the labels on the screen.

New comment by heisenbit in "US Treasury undertakes historic intervention in yen market"

heisenbit — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:18:55 +0000

Propping up the yen may be more helpful for the US than if Japan hikes interest rates which is on the table (Google ’bring money home‘). The carry trade buying treasuries with debts incurred in yen has been a steady source for US funding. Eventually it will happen with collateral impact on treasury rates but this ‚supportive‘ move may just shift it past November.

New comment by heisenbit in "Tell HN: I hate your fuzzy search"

heisenbit — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 19:55:47 +0000

Google hard at work to catch up with MS Teams search.

New comment by heisenbit in "Twenty-five years ago it was cryptography, today it's model weights"

heisenbit — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 06:37:33 +0000

The difference with weights is that unlike in the past one can not fit the secrets on a T shirt print.

Amazon identifies North Korean group behind open-source supply chain attacks

heisenbit — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:11:42 +0000

Article URL: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/amazon-identifies-north-korean-hacker-group-behind-open-source-supply-chain-attacks/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114340

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by heisenbit in "Kimi K3 exploited the latest Redis server"

heisenbit — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:46:24 +0000

Tired seeing them is one thing the real problem is tired updating your software stack with a frequency the team & tooling was never designed to sustain. Worse: You are not tired enough to forget the real security issues that would need some calm period to fix.

New comment by heisenbit in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

heisenbit — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:38:25 +0000

Ultimately the market will balance demand and supply. From a strategic perspective big players want to get to a level playing field as soon as possible as then their market reach and capital wins the game. Pesky nimble small closed upstarts are in the best case a costly distraction and in the worst case a threat - Antropic and Openai did not sign the letter.

Predictable power play by corporate strategy and legal departments.

New comment by heisenbit in "Google's AI and Economy Atlas v1.0: Mapping Gemini Usage in the Economy [pdf]"

heisenbit — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:48:12 +0000

AI seems to help with tasks that should have been simplified and have accidental complexity, at least that's how I read:

AI usage outside of work appears particularly high for high-friction adminis- trative tasks. ATLAS data covers a broad set of activities outside of work, and we find that a handful of high-friction professional and bureaucratic activities exhibit significant over-representation in the data relative to the actual time spent on them. These activities include interactions related to government services, legal topics, finance, and education.

New comment by heisenbit in "You only need the frontier model for one single edit"

heisenbit — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 10:20:21 +0000

I‘m really wondering about plan and then agent mode switch in Copilot even with the same model. The switch swaps the prompt so all the learnings during planning which are in the cache will get invalidated.

New comment by heisenbit in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

heisenbit — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:36:46 +0000

It was also the rise of Github and the importance of the software hosted there. More consistent documentation and transparent issue trackers/PRs helped a lot dealing with evolving software.

New comment by heisenbit in "Painting the sides of railroad rails white to reduce derailment"

heisenbit — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:46:03 +0000

If we are in the long run stabilising that would be already a win. Until the temperatures go down it will be a long, long, long time if ever. So temperatures will go up and we have to adjust. The scale of required adjustments is not understood yet and the increasing number of surprising needs to adjust is scary.

New comment by heisenbit in "Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper"

heisenbit — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:05:27 +0000

Plus the power needed for cooling adding maybe 50%.

New comment by heisenbit in "The Return of Aspect Oriented Programming"

heisenbit — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 21:20:30 +0000

Not necessarily. By handling certain aspects orthogonal to the main flow it reduces the context the llm has to keep track of and should enable deeper reasoning of the main functional logic.

New comment by heisenbit in "The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision"

heisenbit — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 06:17:04 +0000

Reproducibly through measurements has a lot of value if you do not have a coach like the author for his mother. Yes a lot of recipes can be handed down but the space of recipes is so much larger. We don‘t need books as we can tell stories and this bring out the feel so much better is true but where would we be without the encyclopedia.

New comment by heisenbit in "The worthlessness of Vitamin D is mildly exaggerated"

heisenbit — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:59:23 +0000

In December by chance I put a pack of Vitamin D into my shopping basket. I did not think much, thought to take 1000IE but then decided that for the first week I take 3000 to catch up. Muscle pain went and control over eating improved. I did not expect any changes based on past experience with 1000 but this time I could not ignore it (age can play a role) and I stayed on 3000. Tests a month later showed I was just not deficient any-more. I continued on the regime and started having improvements in long running skin issues to the extent my dentist noticed. It may not be a miracle drug but one should not underestimate cumulative impact individual factors, age and lifestyle changes (less sun) that may change levels and demand.

New comment by heisenbit in "Code duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction (2016)"

heisenbit — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 17:24:53 +0000

Changing abstraction is a high risk unlike agents refactoring scores of almost identical code.

New comment by heisenbit in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

heisenbit — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 08:03:13 +0000

Looking at actual combat robots in Ukraine Boston Dynamics robots are conceptually different and not necessarily in a convincing manner.