Hacker News: matthewdgreen

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Severance"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:27:03 +0000

"we will provide up to two weeks’ worth of tokens to facilitate your continued operation during the job search. We also partnered with ThriveFlow to furnish, as an option, a collection of expertly-crafted grief counseling prompts" seems like it.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

matthewdgreen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 22:11:22 +0000

I don't know what a vibe coder is to you, but I expect there are dozens of experienced software developers on HN who are willing to throw a month of work over the course of a year (and a few hundred dollars of Codex and Claude Code subscriptions/tokens they're already paying for) to write customized software for their friends and loved ones to use. And that while many of these tools will be mediocre or won't get maintained, a non-trivial number will be open sourced and will form a new layer of competition with existing SaaS businesses. (And even if I'm wrong, we're barely a year into the era of coding agents. Wait til 2027 to make big predictions.)

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Why a $154B CEO just endorsed stripping most Americans of voting rights"

matthewdgreen — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:46:27 +0000

I’ve spent the last three days writing an inventory management system for a small store, using Codex and Claude Code. I realize that fully replacing online tools like Shopify is a lot more work than that (the payment integrations particularly), but: I sure wouldn’t want to be in the SaaS business right now.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Wind turbine is being used to produce zero-carbon "green ammonia" fertilizer"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:15:53 +0000

With desalinization, in most places that is the case.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "SpaceX Starship Flight 13 livestream [video]"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 02:52:49 +0000

The graveyards are full of blockchain companies who said something similar.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "China's open-weights AI strategy is winning"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 19:45:22 +0000

They can't do this at the same margins. Cloud compute traditionally has <= 30% margins, and that's the very generous profit margin that folks like AWS are able to squeeze out of it with lock-in and proprietary tooling (something that will probably go away as software becomes more commoditized.) Frontier model companies (e.g., SpaceX) have been promising profit margins in the 75%+ range.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:18:35 +0000

I love "vibes in a trenchcoat" and I don't care if it makes me sound like an LLM.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Fable extended until 19 July"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 01:09:52 +0000

Subagents are a godsend. Frontier models for initial planning and spec writing, cheaper models for implementing from the spec, frontier models for review. Frontier models to help with research. The availability of cheaper models is great, since it gives more price points for different tasks.

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

matthewdgreen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:26:22 +0000

A lot of this is downstream of compensation schemes that explicitly reward dumb metrics, like raw paper-count without subjective evaluation of contribution or quality. I don't want to generalize, but this seems to be more common in countries that are not the US or Europe.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study"

matthewdgreen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:21:14 +0000

It's a little more complicated than that. If all you're interested in disovery, you can wander off into rabbit holes or disappear into areas that are only interesting to you. Publishability is useful because it gives you useful external feedback into whether a community thinks what you're doing is "worth discovering". Like any metric, you can find yourself gaming it (intentionally or unintentionally) and it has a slew of other failure modes. Still, you can prize discovery and also care about what other people think.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Grok 4.5"

matthewdgreen — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:16:41 +0000

Wouldn't be bad if the product hadn't been paid for in advance. If it can't be delivered in working form for this car, that's not the end of the world. Tesla can just refund the undelivered product, with interest.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Grok 4.5"

matthewdgreen — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 14:12:47 +0000

I paid for a car that drives itself in 2018 and I haven’t received it. Any updates?

New comment by matthewdgreen in "EU now one step away from reviving private message scanning rules"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:28:39 +0000

I know a number of people who have gone down this route, including Senators. For example, here's Senator Wyden's proposal to add $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target sexual abusers [1]. The problem with these efforts is that they're expensive: fighting child exploitation requires enormous amounts of funding.

Guess what doesn't require billions of dollars? Mandatory scanning paid for by tech companies, followed by dumping the billions of hits they produce [2] on overworked police and clearinghouses that mostly ignore them.

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...

New comment by matthewdgreen in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:21:04 +0000

As a related note: The only way a consumer can get ZDR protections for Claude or OpenAI is to use Amazon Bedrock. But as you say, doesn't work for Fable. I think it even requires approval for anything past Opus 4.6.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Fable is not a useful model"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:19:22 +0000

We don't need top-end frontier models to write simple applications. Opus works very well for that and it's cheaper. We need them to write things that are at the frontier.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "The classifiers Anthropic puts in front of Fable are too zealous"

matthewdgreen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:15:30 +0000

I'm working on cryptography, all from academic research papers. Started well, but it eventually got some word into its context that is on the banlist. I found that if you tell it to fire off clean Fable subagents and you instruct it to check the Claude Code billing data to check for downgrades, you can get most high-sensitivity spec/review tasks done with Fable. Most.

I figure that once GPT 5.6 comes out, Anthropic will become interested in making the safety gate non-destructive.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes"

matthewdgreen — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 18:06:02 +0000

We improve it by ensuring the same people don't dominate the justice system and that prosecutions still happen whenever they don't. It was Biden's and his AG's job to do something about this and he fumbled.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "Solar rail could become common in Europe after successful trial in Switzerland"

matthewdgreen — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:48:13 +0000

What specs do you require for long-distance train electrification vs. the specs you need for electrical delivery to the grid?

New comment by matthewdgreen in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:21:17 +0000

Even Star Trek admits that there are horrible events that lie between our world and the utopia.

New comment by matthewdgreen in "“Beyond the limit”: Satellites and mirrors in space pose threat to the night sky"

matthewdgreen — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 19:17:37 +0000

I didn't understand what these satellites were really like until I visited Zion National Park two weeks ago. Zion is an International Dark Sky park, and so I was really looking forward to seeing the stars. Instead we sat outside and watched dozens and dozens of fast-moving stars zip around on all sorts of trajectories. I'm not saying it ruined the experience (I'm not an astronomer, and it was kind of fun.) But it really brought home how fundamentally we've changed the sky. I also hope we're able to lay enough fiber in developing countries that this many satellites don't need to stay up there forever.