Hacker News: morley

New comment by morley in "Claude Fable 5"

morley — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:21:38 +0000

Can I ask how you gained preview access to Fable 5?

New comment by morley in "How much of Thermo Fisher's antibody data has been manipulated?"

morley — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 14:34:02 +0000

I didn't realize whistleblowers could recover part of fraud settlements:

> The civil settlement includes the resolution of claims brought under the qui tam or whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act by Sholto David. Under those provisions, a private party can file an action on behalf of the United States and receive a portion of any recovery. David will receive $2,625,000 under today’s settlement.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/dana-farber-cancer-institute-...

New comment by morley in "Americans don't know how to fight AI so they're fighting data centers"

morley — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:07:33 +0000

Is there actually a shortage of usable farmland? (If anything, I think the world would be better off if farmers used their land more efficiently and sustainably.)

If the cost of energy is a problem, I feel like we should fix that problem instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There's no reason residential customers should pay the same amount as data centers.

New comment by morley in "Claude Opus 4.8"

morley — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:27:48 +0000

I'm finding it a little hard to believe that GPT 5.5 is in 11th place for webdev, outranked by models like Kimi, Qwen, and Z.ai. I'm not saying it's not true (I have noticed GPT being less smart in recent weeks), but this is very different from my expectation.

New comment by morley in "Hershey Bets on Agentic AI to Rethink $2B in Marketing Spend"

morley — Mon, 18 May 2026 13:55:16 +0000

$2bn is their entire marketing spend, so it includes media buying, creative, in-store displays, PR, research, and anything else involved in the marketing mix.

FTA:

> The confectionery giant, home to brands like Reese’s and Skinny Pop, is working with the analytics platforms Mutinex and Tracer to automate marketing mix modeling — a statistical technique that measures how media spending and other variables drive sales — making it faster and more frequent.

So this system doesn't cost $2bn, it goes into the decision-making of where to spend the $2bn.

I agree that when you have a $2bn budget, it's hard to fathom tolerating a 6-mo analytics lead time, but I'm sure it's not alone, and I'm sure that's why this vendor lobbied Ad Age to cover this project.

New comment by morley in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

morley — Fri, 01 May 2026 21:25:39 +0000

For a more informed deep dive into data center water usage (albeit many months old): https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-dat...

New comment by morley in "Schizophrenia study finds new biomarker, drug candidate in mice"

morley — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 14:39:51 +0000

"Leave them alone" is easy to type into a comment textbox but is much more difficult when it's a neighbor, or a family member, or someone else you have to interact with at a regular interval.

I highly recommend the book Hidden Valley Road for anyone curious about how difficult schizophrenia is for families and the researchers trying to find treatments.

New comment by morley in "US Job Market Visualizer"

morley — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:47:37 +0000

Out of curiosity, what colors (or text treatments) do you personally prefer to confer "gain" and "loss"?

New comment by morley in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

morley — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 16:37:48 +0000

In some cultures, you signal respecting someone's time by not bothering them.

In other cultures, you signal respecting someone's time by making small-talk with them.

Advice about making small talk vs. not making small talk is not really useful unless it acknowledges this cultural divide and the percentage chance a stranger falls into one culture or another.

New comment by morley in "Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms"

morley — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 20:57:24 +0000

I personally don't want to trawl through Twitter to find the current state-of-the-art, so I read Zvi Mowshowitz's newsletter:

https://thezvi.substack.com/

His newsletter put me onto using Opus 4.5 exclusively on Dec 1, a little over a week after it was released. That's pretty good for a few minutes of reading a week.

New comment by morley in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

morley — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 15:45:53 +0000

I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.

There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.

You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.

A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."

New comment by morley in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

morley — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:51:50 +0000

I really miss gallo pinto. I went to Costa Rica in 2009, and since then, nothing has been the same (in NYC).

It's mind-boggling that such a simple recipe can be so good in CR but so bad over here! I hear there are some Costa Rican restaurants in Paterson, NJ, but I haven't had the chance to check yet.

New comment by morley in "The Jeff Dean Facts"

morley — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:04:59 +0000

Ah, I knew I recognized the friendship between Jeff and Sanjay -- they were the subject of a New Yorker article in 2018:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

EDIT: And HN at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18588697

New comment by morley in "Vitamin D reduces incidence and duration of colds in those with low levels"

morley — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 15:41:56 +0000

One number is not going to work for everyone. The only way to be sure is to get a blood test for Vitamin D levels. I get tested with my yearly physical, but if someone really cares they can get more frequent blood tests.

New comment by morley in "Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC"

morley — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 16:48:07 +0000

Privy just got purchased by Stripe: https://privy.io/blog/announcing-our-acquisition-by-stripe

New comment by morley in "Finding Shawn Mendes (2019)"

morley — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 21:05:04 +0000

By the way, if you liked this post, this taking-silly-things-way-to-seriously is the comedic wheelhouse of Nathan Fielder.

New comment by morley in "Wikipedia's Most Translated Articles"

morley — Mon, 19 May 2025 18:12:37 +0000

But the point still stands: if it's so straightforward, why give this person this treatment, instead of millions of other people?

New comment by morley in "Piranesi's Perspective Trick (2019)"

morley — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 15:09:05 +0000

I wonder how hard it is to change a game engine to render images like this, and if the effect would be preserved while panning.

New comment by morley in "WB offers replacements, but no refunds, for DVDs rotting prematurely"

morley — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 20:31:21 +0000

I don't know why you've been downvoted so much. I'd expect a company to issue replacements, not refunds, when they're not the end retailer.

New comment by morley in "Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model"

morley — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:43:14 +0000

I was under the impression that Community Notes were designed to be resistant to sybil attacks, but I could be wrong. Community Notes have been used at Twitter for a long time. Are there examples of state-influenced notes getting through the process?