Hacker News: moab

New comment by moab in "Hormuz closure could trigger 'agrifood shock', price crisis within a year"

moab — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:35:57 +0000

I love it when people push back like this without suggesting the real reason. Can't think one can you? That too from a new sock puppet.

New comment by moab in "How to Build the Future: Demis Hassabis [video]"

moab — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:01:53 +0000

Bro, are we reading the same book? The book is totally uncritical of the subject and paints him like the second coming of christ. It feels like GDM wanted a canonization of Hassabis, and the writer simply obliged. Also, how does everything that GDM did keep coming back to some vague ideas in the guy's thesis? He is a great leader, no doubt, but him winning the Nobel Prize was just a huge joke.

Out of all the heads of AI orgs out there, Dennis is the best, but the book did him a disservice by painting an unrealistically sunny picture of him as some kind of visionary figure.

New comment by moab in "Oxford All Souls College General Examination (2025) [pdf]"

moab — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 05:24:58 +0000

I'm not sure I agree. They're just essay prompts. One could write a bad essay that takes itself too seriously given the prompts, but one could also write a powerful essay starting from any of these prompts. I don't really see where you get the conclusion that students matriculating from these places have recently begun to be smoke-blowers that while possessing detailed knowledge of various arcana fail to produce anything useful.

New comment by moab in "Does Gas Town 'steal' usage from users' LLM credits to improve itself?"

moab — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 21:11:14 +0000

Is anyone surprised? I'm reminded of how I felt during the NFT craze. LLMs are extremely powerful when used with deliberate care. Gas Town is the exact opposite of what is needed to actually do useful things in prod. I guess good on Steve for doing what he does so well, and getting so much hype around a vibe coded mess.

New comment by moab in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

moab — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:22:28 +0000

So to verify their claims and see how strong these models are, the answer is "believe us"?

Note: I'm expressing some skepticism here largely due to how recent rollouts from Meta flopped. Sincerely hoping that they do better this time around!

New comment by moab in "Muse Spark: Scaling towards personal superintelligence"

moab — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:04:20 +0000

"Muse Spark is available now, and Contemplating mode will be rolling out gradually in meta.ai."

How does one get their hands on these models? They are not open-source, right? I go to meta.ai, but it's just a chat interface---no equivalent to codex or claud code? Can you use this through OpenCode? Is meta charging for model access, or is the gathering of chat data a sufficiently large tithe?

New comment by moab in "Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom"

moab — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:38:15 +0000

No. Read the book "Careless People". Meta leadership tried to downplay it by saying the stories are exaggerated. It seems doubtful to me.

New comment by moab in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

moab — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:36:52 +0000

I hope "OpenAI" gets the proverbial sword in the nuts once we get a change of government in this country. Probably unrealistic to hope for. Can a company be more hypocritical after openly bribing the pedophile in charge of this country?

New comment by moab in "The whole thing was a scam"

moab — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 05:27:25 +0000

How does Brockman sleep at night? These guys used to seem like standup ethical guys. It seems no amount of intellectualism is enough to ward off the poison of wealth.

New comment by moab in "The Misuses of the University"

moab — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:42:53 +0000

Are you a professor at a R1 school? All the faculty I know at R1s (see CMU, MIT, etc) are doing quite a lot of teaching in addition to their research.

Recent Advances in LLMs for Mathematics [video]

moab — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 23:35:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH3lG7V7SuU

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46879007

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by moab in "Alien: Braun Aromaster KF 20 Coffee Makers (2012)"

moab — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 19:36:06 +0000

Let me use the discussion of coffee to plug what I believe is the most beautiful and long-lasting espresso machine currently out there (you'll hand it down to your grandkids): https://coffeegeek.com/reviews/firstlooks/cafelat-robot-espr...

I've pulled a few thousand cups of long espresso from this guy since we bought it two years ago. Much, much nicer and lower maintenance than a boiler machine. If one wants, you can go deep down the rabbit hole of heat control, etc. but even as a "just boil water and make espresso" machine it works great, with no fuss.

Unfortunately, after buying this thing I can't justify buying other coffee objects that are beautiful but would probably make worse coffee than the robot, e.g., the Moccamaster and other drip machines.

New comment by moab in "The Mammoth Pirates – In Russia's Arctic north, a new kind of gold rush"

moab — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 15:58:18 +0000

This is a bad take. The article makes it clear that most of them will lose money on the venture, and the reason the prices are high are due to status-mining chinese elites and traditional-medicine paranoiacs in vietnam. It's a pretty dismal situation.

New comment by moab in "How uv got so fast"

moab — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 02:42:43 +0000

The point stands that it's less about the language than doing said hard work in any reasonable programming language.

New comment by moab in "Reflections on AI at the End of 2025"

moab — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 21:09:11 +0000

This is a very real worry for the AI rollout for the general population. But are folks here using AI to blow smoke up their asses as a sibling comment stated? I'd like to believe we're using it to ask questions, prototype, and then measure... not just blow smoke up there...

New comment by moab in "Performance Hints"

moab — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 02:46:41 +0000

Napkin math is how you avoid spending several weeks of your life going down ultimately futile rabbit holes. Yes, it's approximations, often very coarse ones, but done right they do work.

Your question about what degree of parallelization is unfortunately too vague to really answer. SSDs offer some internal parallelism. Need more parallelism / IOPS? You can stick a lot more SSDs on your machine. Need many machines worth of SSDs? Disaggregate them, but now you need to think about your network bandwidth, NICs, cross-machine latency, and fault-tolerance.

The best engineers I've seen are usually excellent at napkin math.

New comment by moab in "Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication"

moab — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:49:50 +0000

You can do that by mowing, fyi.

New comment by moab in "Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication"

moab — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:49:21 +0000

You're entitled to your own opinion, but imo the point of posting anything on HN is to subject yourself to feedback. That's what I gave. Feedback.

New comment by moab in "Influential study on glyphosate safety retracted 25 years after publication"

moab — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 14:41:11 +0000

How about not killing the weeds? One doesn't need to live a perfectly manicured pesticide-ridden hellscape.

New comment by moab in "Cache-Friendly B+Tree Nodes with Dynamic Fanout"

moab — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:17:44 +0000

Do you know of important real-world use-cases where cache-oblivious data structures are used? They are frequently mentioned on HN when relevant discussions like this one pop up, but I would love to hear about places where they are actually used in production.