Hacker News: levocardia

New comment by levocardia in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

levocardia — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:51:46 +0000

There is a footnote discussing this point; he uses 5% as the risk-free rate.

New comment by levocardia in "Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25"

levocardia — Tue, 19 May 2026 01:23:17 +0000

The intentional parallels are hard to miss:

- Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum; current Pope Leo XIV chose his name as an explicit gesture to his nominative predecessor

- This encyclical is a return to the earlier tradition of latin names (Magnifica Humanitas) for encyclicals, as opposed to many of Pope Francis' which used Italian (Laudato si')

- The official date it was signed was 135 years to the day since Rerum Novarum

- The Pope is personally appearing and speaking at the presentation; usually these encyclicals are just released at a small press conference without the Pope himself being there

Rerum Novarum intentionally tracked a third path, rejecting both socialism and laissez faire capitalism at the end of the 19th century. Gesturing so overtly towards it suggests that this new encyclical will also try to establish a "third way," grounded (as the title suggests) in human dignity.

Leo XIV has not published any encyclicals yet; this will be his first, and an extremely ambitious one at that. I also am very eager to read it.

New comment by levocardia in "The AI zombification of universities"

levocardia — Thu, 14 May 2026 20:20:31 +0000

>As it turned out, the online version of MIT is not a substitute for the actual thing.

More precisely, the people motivated enough to actually do the online MIT version were often already on a high-performance trajectory, and for the people who were not, few people took the online credential seriously, despite whatever skills they acquired.

New comment by levocardia in "Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent"

levocardia — Thu, 14 May 2026 03:34:29 +0000

Not even prestigious ones. The school needs to sound like it has strong penalties against cheating, so there are really strict-sounding policies ("zero in the course"). But also, so many students cheat that actually enforcing these policies uniformly would hurt your graduation stats, make unhappy customers (students + parents), and hurt your revenue if you actually expel them. So the equilibrium is that the burden of reporting cheating is foisted upon professors, and it is understood -- though never explicitly communicated -- that academic integrity proceedings will be a huge administrative pain for you, the professor, and it is in your interest not to initiate them.

The outcome is predictable: unless there is a scandal of massive proportions, the issues just..."go away" on their own. With some discretion for the professor to either just look the other way, or ding the student enough to feel vindicated, but not so much as to actually hurt the university's interests.

New comment by levocardia in "YC's Biggest Scandals"

levocardia — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:49:51 +0000

Probably the worry that the jump from "we defend against slaughterbots" to "we built a better slaughterbot" is just around the corner

New comment by levocardia in "Pulitzer Prize Winners 2026"

levocardia — Tue, 05 May 2026 00:12:44 +0000

Who do you think would be deserving of an outside-the-window Pulitzer?

New comment by levocardia in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

levocardia — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:26:25 +0000

The actual "sharing" was using the Meta pixel and TikTok's equivalent, presumably so the healthcare exchanges could do retargeting or similarity-based marketing to get people to sign up for health care coverage. Which, narrowly, seems like a reasonable thing to do. But of course using the pixel automatically "shares" the data with Meta/ByteDance/whoever, and they get to use it for whatever nefarious purpose they want.

New comment by levocardia in "Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027"

levocardia — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:32:29 +0000

Would have been even more classic EU to not add the exception and have all Europeans stuck with a slower, bulkier, and more expensive "EU edition" of a phone.

New comment by levocardia in "First Tesla Semi Rolls Off High-Volume Production Line"

levocardia — Mon, 04 May 2026 05:15:42 +0000

(which electric cars and trucks also reduce, because of regenerative braking)

New comment by levocardia in "Ti-84 Evo"

levocardia — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:59:04 +0000

Agreed, it's insane to me that in an era of Google Colab (et al) schools still require students to shell out >$100 for one of these. I'm sure there is some backroom arrangement with schools of some kind.

New comment by levocardia in "Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey"

levocardia — Fri, 01 May 2026 18:16:19 +0000

I noticed this phenomenon a few months ago. I often "chat" with blog post excerpts that use language or references I don't understand, and while I'm waiting for the model to finish thinking, I like to read the reasoning traces. Spontaneously, without doing a web search, and without me saying who the author was or even mentioning that I wanted to know who it was, the model would drop an off-hand mention to the identify the blog post author in its reasoning trace. I then started doing "pop quiz" questions to see if the model could recognize a paragraph or two from a blog post (always a very recent one, often the very same day it was published) and it would nail the author almost every single time. Works for a very wide range of bloggers even when they are writing "off their normal beat."

New comment by levocardia in "HERMES.md: Anthropic bug causes $200 extra charge, refuses refund"

levocardia — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 21:30:56 +0000

Goes to show how much consumer surplus you're getting for that $200/mo subscription...

New comment by levocardia in "Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930"

levocardia — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:31:05 +0000

Indeed, I found this part extremely interesting. The more general vision of "testing a vintage model on something invented after its training data ended" seems like quite a strong test of "true cognition" (or training data contamination, if you haven't stopped up all the leakage...)

New comment by levocardia in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

levocardia — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 01:50:51 +0000

Elaborating a bit - brain is hard to study since you can't easily take a biopsy of it (from a living person at least), and various brain scans are not great at identifying the stuff we care about.

The slow acting nature of it means also you have to wait a long time to see results of clinical trials; also because early stages are easy to miss that also means you are stuck studying people who are already pretty senile and thus might be beyond the point where you can make a big difference.

Ruxandra has a nice piece, focused on cancer, but the reasoning is basically the same here: biology is just really hard. Sometimes we get lucky but in general it's a long, slow slog.

[1] https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/why-havent-biologists-c...

New comment by levocardia in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

levocardia — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 22:06:39 +0000

So you're looking forward to a $2000 iPhone 18e?

New comment by levocardia in "ggsql: A Grammar of Graphics for SQL"

levocardia — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:05:50 +0000

I share your pain. You might enjoy Plotnine for python, helps ease the pain. The only bad thing about ggplot is that once you learn it you start to hate every other plotting system. Iteration is so fast, and it is so easy to go from scrappy EDA plot to publication-quality plotting, it just blows everything else out of the water.

New comment by levocardia in "Measuring Claude 4.7's tokenizer costs"

levocardia — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:54:17 +0000

Depends a lot on the task demands. "Got 95% of the way to designing a successful drug" and "Got 100% of the way" is a huge difference in terms of value, and that small bump in intelligence would justify a few orders of magnitude more in cost.

New comment by levocardia in "Filing the corners off my MacBooks"

levocardia — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 02:36:02 +0000

Honestly that was the cherry on top for me -- the employee confident enough to just decide "this is my work computer, I need it to do work, I can't do work with my hands being irritated, so I will sand down the edge." Pure gold.

New comment by levocardia in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

levocardia — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:21:29 +0000

>Kinship societies are actively hostile to economic growth, because economic growth undermines the basis of kinship: that is why kinship societies demand constant, visible sacrifices of wealth—funerals being the most spectacular—that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital, reinvest their assets, and pull ahead. The funeral is a window into a system of wealth destruction that serves, above all else, to keep people poor

This reasoning is flawed. Consumer spending is not "wealth destruction" -- who makes the fantasy coffins? Who prints the banners? Local businesses!

Ghana is sitting at a 5.6% GDP growth rate; for reference developmental success India is at 6.5%. Ghana's GDP in 2000 was $5B, today it's $82.B. Its per-capita GDP has more than doubled in the same time period.

New comment by levocardia in "Reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection"

levocardia — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:18:11 +0000

Sure there is a solution, you are just looking at it the wrong way. Make non-AI images provably unaltered with signed keys from the device (e.g. the camera) that took it.