Hacker News: hiddencost

New comment by hiddencost in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

hiddencost — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 22:11:33 +0000

I'm skeptical that we will have an exchange of power in the next 40 years.

The USSR is a great example: it took 65 years to fall, and the collapse didn't bring it to anything particularly good.

New comment by hiddencost in "Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities"

hiddencost — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:11:47 +0000

Linear scaling doesn't make sense, no.

There are three ways it's wrong:

* better to measure relative reduction in error, which gives you a 30% improvement

* improvement tends to become significantly more difficult the closer you come to saturation.

* Risk doesn't scale linearly with capabilities.

New comment by hiddencost in "Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco"

hiddencost — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:38:23 +0000

The big tobacco lawsuits hinges on the same things these will:

(1) Did they know they were hurting users? (2) Can the harm be shown.

The big tobacco companies intentionally suppressed studies that showed harm, and promoted their product while knowing that. Facebook appears to have done the same.

New comment by hiddencost in "US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide"

hiddencost — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 23:45:56 +0000

US military standard for "did we kill civilians" with drone attacks is "do these appear to be combat aged males, based on satellite photos".

It's monstrous.

New comment by hiddencost in "Discovery Loop"

hiddencost — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:11:10 +0000

You're looking for this paper:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4053

New comment by hiddencost in "Discovery Loop"

hiddencost — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:10:24 +0000

These people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.

New comment by hiddencost in "Discovery Loop"

hiddencost — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:09:20 +0000

Idk, they never struck me as being into eugenics.

What the fuck man? I really don't want some tech startup trying to "fix" my neurodivergence.

New comment by hiddencost in "After Losses, Retail Investors Flock to 3x Leverage as 2x Product Are Restricted"

hiddencost — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 03:18:40 +0000

Auatralians are a great case study. Once you control for pensions and similar indirect exposure, Australians have very high stock market exposure.

New comment by hiddencost in "When AI Benchmarks Plateau: A Systematic Study of Benchmark Saturation"

hiddencost — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:19:34 +0000

Weird moment for this take. We're seeing some of the fastest and most impressive progress ever right now.

Frontier labs have categorically different & better set ups for evaluation, they're fine. It's work but it's not a crisis.

New comment by hiddencost in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

hiddencost — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:37:50 +0000

Inflation over a long time horizon is about 3%. Especially if it's going to be a decade or more, just put it in an index fund.

New comment by hiddencost in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

hiddencost — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:36:51 +0000

3% is roughly inflation.

New comment by hiddencost in "AI financial advice is surprisingly good, especially if you ask right questions"

hiddencost — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:36:08 +0000

VTSAX, ASAP.

Inflation is usually estimated at 3% + annually over a long enough time horizon. You're losing money.

New comment by hiddencost in "Google Discloses $94.1B in SpaceX Stock, Marking 6% Stake"

hiddencost — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:48:25 +0000

(1) there's a lock out, they can't legally (2) Moving that kind of volume at market price is extremely difficult (3) This disclosure was required by law as part of their earnings. They would rather have said nothing and quietly offloaded it.

One consequence of booking the revenue is that they're going to have to report a loss when they sell it.

It's possible there's some tax shenanigans at play (idk): report the profit, mark it against their massive AI capex, sell later when they can book a loss. (I'm not sure if it works that way, it wouldn't for an individual, but maybe they can find a way to trigger a stepped up basis.)

New comment by hiddencost in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

hiddencost — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:19:21 +0000

Where the misbehaving misfits are the aggressors, i.e Russia, the USA, and Israel?

New comment by hiddencost in "Did They Ghost You?"

hiddencost — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 04:00:39 +0000

Have you ever done the math on how much that cost you? I'm guessing at least $20M?

New comment by hiddencost in "Human mathematicians are being outcounterexampled"

hiddencost — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:14:28 +0000

That's why the author refused to read a proof from someone he knew until it was formalized in Lean.

New comment by hiddencost in "AI Boosts Research Careers but Flattens Scientific Discovery"

hiddencost — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:06:09 +0000

The entire article seems to rest on their use of an embedding model for clustering garbage science.

New comment by hiddencost in "An American Privacy Emergency"

hiddencost — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:31:31 +0000

"Differential privacy" is the technology they are referring to. Their English is fine, you're the one missing something.

New comment by hiddencost in "45°C cooling design cuts data center water use to near zero"

hiddencost — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 23:09:35 +0000

Companies will never price in externalities unless they are forced to.

New comment by hiddencost in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

hiddencost — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 16:57:30 +0000

This was just a long winded way of insulting Sandy but making it look professional, from what I can see. He is saying directly that Sandy was a bad designer with a poor sense of visual aesthetics.

Seems pretty gross and catty to me.