Hacker News: ip26

New comment by ip26 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

ip26 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:25:04 +0000

Regardless his actual private beliefs, one of his "jobs" is to create new unicorns ycombinator can invest in. So evangelizing startups in general and spurring new entrepreneurs is very much in his interest, and spreading this kind of mythology seems like a useful step to that end. He only needs a small number of people to buy into it.

New comment by ip26 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

ip26 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:17:05 +0000

You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.

New comment by ip26 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

ip26 — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:04:05 +0000

Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.

It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.

Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.

New comment by ip26 in "Apple Core AI Framework"

ip26 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 04:40:28 +0000

Infinite tokens rate-limited to 10 tok/s is 26MTok per month.

New comment by ip26 in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

ip26 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:03:56 +0000

A never had the authority to contract the land as a park indefinitely ... once C owns it they own it

That's not what a deed restriction is.

are you stuck with passing that obligation forward

Generally yes. Which is why the deed restriction can affect the market value of the property.

New comment by ip26 in "India's surprise baby bust"

ip26 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 23:26:26 +0000

Hard to assign that a value before you are a parent though. You can only understand it in the abstract.

New comment by ip26 in "Do the Hardest Thing"

ip26 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:15:25 +0000

I probably interpret the message incorrectly, because to me "the hardest thing" is usually some class of some famous unsolved problem. The thing is, to be famously unsolved, many of the world's most brilliant people must have already tried and failed to solve it. There's a chance I have an edge they don't, but it's probably not wise to track your career path to the darkest of dead ends purely on the merits of it being particularly dark.

Example: you know what would be harder than anything we're talking about here? Quadrupling the performance of the best compression algorithms. It's hard. In fact, maybe there's some information theory that even says it's mathematically impossible. That makes it really hard, which makes it what all of us should immediately start working on.

The author writes elsewhere that you also have to have an edge, but that's frequently omitted from this "hardest thing" advice.

New comment by ip26 in "Alphabet announces $80B equity capital raise to expand AI infra and compute"

ip26 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:30:11 +0000

You’d think Berkshire would be at least passingly aware of that principle, though.

New comment by ip26 in "Backpressure is all you need"

ip26 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:04:27 +0000

Depends on the quality of your validation loop. Can the agent find the bug in a five second unit test, or does it have to run the full deployment test?

It also presents tradeoffs in compute budget. Cycles spent executing large arrays of tests could mean less tokens spent debugging.

New comment by ip26 in "'Backrooms' Stuns with $81M Debut"

ip26 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 03:01:48 +0000

That's the exactly the role talent scouts fill - spot the ones that show glimmers of promise before it's obvious, and offer them opportunity.

New comment by ip26 in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

ip26 — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:41:41 +0000

We went through exactly this with Google. People argued that once they were the only way anyone found websites, they were merely collecting undue economic rent.

New comment by ip26 in "Project Glasswing: what Mythos showed us"

ip26 — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:48:18 +0000

They specifically describe that exploits are usually multiple small vulnerabilities chained together. With that understanding, it sounds like closing vulnerabilities isn't the same as discovering an exploit. Instead, you're leaving fewer small gaps behind, to make it harder & harder to put together a working exploit.

New comment by ip26 in "Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI"

ip26 — Mon, 11 May 2026 04:27:09 +0000

Are you familiar with why movie theaters offer matinee tickets at a lower price?

New comment by ip26 in "Task Paralysis and AI"

ip26 — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:31:50 +0000

The counterweight has been, after using it for a bunch of projects, I have internalized that it will very, very quickly get me to maybe 60% and then I'll have to take it the rest of the way mostly by myself (or handholding it tightly for the remaining 40% at a much slower pace).

In other words, the initial implementation is practically already there, already done. So there's no rush left in generating it - it's only worth bothering if I'm prepared to see it through to 100%.

When it is worth pushing through to 100%, it's pretty great for getting the inertia going though.

New comment by ip26 in "Little Magazines Are Back"

ip26 — Sun, 03 May 2026 02:44:14 +0000

On the other hand, I have paperback books I loved as a kid that were my father's when he was a kid. I carefully saved them for decades. One more generation and they could be considered family relics or something. I quickly realized the flaw with this plan as I tried to share them with my kids, who cannot be expected to treat brittle middle-grade and young-adult novels as museum pieces.

I am not entirely ready to part with the books, but I'm also unable to bear watching them get thoughtlessly destroyed by my kids. Digital has made it very easy to get copies of all of them; plus others I didn't manage to hold on to.

New comment by ip26 in "The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it"

ip26 — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 22:28:13 +0000

If companies are faced with the choice between:

- employ you at 60k/yr

- replace you with a machine that costs a lot of money, and also send you UBI of 60k/yr

It should be obvious the latter is not an option that is ever going to happen.

New comment by ip26 in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

ip26 — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 06:45:43 +0000

all risk comes with some small chance of tragedy

This part. I’m not going to assume what that person meant, but there’s always a few people about in these conversations lamenting that when they were six, they were certainly never hit by a car, and really you have to let your children take a few risks etc…

New comment by ip26 in "The quiet disappearance of the free-range childhood"

ip26 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:10:33 +0000

Totally onboard with some managed risk of injury being ok. Very much not onboard with the parents who trust their six year olds to face mortal peril alone and make good choices.

New comment by ip26 in "Layoff Thinking"

ip26 — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 21:19:29 +0000

So what do you recommend instead, a dice roll?

New comment by ip26 in "Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics"

ip26 — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 22:59:23 +0000

Good when the damage is done, bad as a method of approving new chemicals.