Hacker News: jmcgough

New comment by jmcgough in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

jmcgough — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:00:18 +0000

When people do find an edge they tend not to share it ;)

New comment by jmcgough in "Newly created Polymarket accounts win big on well-timed Iran ceasefire bets"

jmcgough — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:56:25 +0000

Leaking classified information is a crime, and I don't see why foreign adversaries can't monitor Polymarket to get advanced warning of military actions. A less corrupt US government would ban betting on matters involving national security.

New comment by jmcgough in "ML promises to be profoundly weird"

jmcgough — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 10:30:41 +0000

Aphyr is unabashedly gay - I remember him repeatedly posting hardcore pornography on twitter at one point to remind people of this - so he probably just decided to block UK visitors rather than risk violating the law by having minors visit his site. Not sure if he has anything actually "harmful" on his site, but maybe he doesn't want his speech limited or need to aggressively police comments?

New comment by jmcgough in "Newly created Polymarket accounts win big on well-timed Iran ceasefire bets"

jmcgough — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:21:50 +0000

By this logic, wouldn't prediction markets be a national security threat?

New comment by jmcgough in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

jmcgough — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:31:44 +0000

Turns out you can't "fake it til you make it" with SOC2 compliance.

New comment by jmcgough in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

jmcgough — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:31:30 +0000

They've graduated 5,000+ companies, so some fraud is hard to avoid, especially with young hungry founders willing to do anything to succeed. Honestly, it's a pretty good track record that there's only been a handful of companies like this.

New comment by jmcgough in "A Message from the Ruby Central Board"

jmcgough — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 01:37:55 +0000

I get downvoted here when I call him a racist.

New comment by jmcgough in "A Message from the Ruby Central Board"

jmcgough — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 20:07:47 +0000

Not sure he's "on the outs", he on Shopify's board.

Sidekiq's solo dev (Mike Perham) has for many years made a generous donation to Ruby Central. He informed them that he didn't want his money to be spent platforming dhh at their conference, they ignored his request, he stopped his annual donations.

If you want to read about dhh's colorful blog posts and tweets: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/dhh-is-way-worse-than-i-thoug...

New comment by jmcgough in "A Message from the Ruby Central Board"

jmcgough — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:52:34 +0000

https://joel.drapper.me/p/rubygems-takeover/

Read the above, but tl;dr is that Shopify executed a hostile takeover of Ruby Central for its own benefit, at the expense of long-term maintainers and the general community. I'm not sure if there's been any real change since then, but there are many reasons not to trust anything that the board says at this point.

New comment by jmcgough in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

jmcgough — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 15:42:06 +0000

If you don't have a CS background, you might see intelligent-appearing responses to your queries and assume that this is actual intelligence. It's like a lifetime of Hollywood sci-fi has primed them for this type of thinking, I've seen it even from highly educated people in other fields.

New comment by jmcgough in "Two pilots dead after plane and ground vehicle collide at LaGuardia"

jmcgough — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 20:04:07 +0000

I thought it was the avocado toast that was keeping us from owning a house.

New comment by jmcgough in "Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control"

jmcgough — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 21:14:30 +0000

What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.

New comment by jmcgough in "Snowflake AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware"

jmcgough — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:41:32 +0000

LLMs are not "thinking" machines. The tech is not capable of that, as much as people want to think that reinforcement learning will lead to sentience.

New comment by jmcgough in "Sci-Fi Short Film “There Is No Antimemetics Division” [video]"

jmcgough — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 07:38:22 +0000

Read this as "antiemetics" (anti-nausea meds like Zofran) and was very confused for a moment.

New comment by jmcgough in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

jmcgough — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 03:37:48 +0000

Okay, I've learned a bit more about this - the motivation is COPPA fines, which cost Youtube $170M in 2019, Epic Games $275M in 2022, etc.

Meta is in the middle of a huge multi-state lawsuit (33 attorney generals), so they have a lot of incentive to do this.

New comment by jmcgough in "US SEC preparing to scrap quarterly reporting requirement"

jmcgough — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:43:29 +0000

Arguably better for everyone. Too much focus on short-term profits can harm long-term growth.

New comment by jmcgough in "Ageless Linux – Software for humans of indeterminate age"

jmcgough — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:58:35 +0000

I'm fairly skeptical of the findings, as the majority of the research and writing was done by Claude Opus. I'd be more likely to believe groups like AIPAC are behind this - they have poured a lot of money into online censorship legislation.

New comment by jmcgough in "Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down"

jmcgough — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:15:54 +0000

I think Jesse Singal is an awful person, but Jay responded appropriately there.

New comment by jmcgough in "Segagaga Has Been Translated into English"

jmcgough — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:40:59 +0000

So excited for this - have been dying to play it for at least a decade.

Now if we can just get a fan translation of London Seirei Tanteidan (PS1 RPG set in victorian England).

New comment by jmcgough in "Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]"

jmcgough — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:56:17 +0000

These are all largely unrelated technologies; how would they help us upload consciousness? We can't even map the human brain with complete accuracy.