Hacker News: n2d4

New comment by n2d4 in "Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments"

n2d4 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 01:15:35 +0000

This was interesting to do on my own profile. It got a bunch of personality attributes about me right that I haven't directly mentioned on here, which is impressive.

I then followed it up with "Given my chat history, how do they compare to me?", and it started making comparisons of myself to myself. Very fun experience.

New comment by n2d4 in "Show HN: Cook – A portable terminal AI agent (OSS, MIT)"

n2d4 — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 05:10:37 +0000

This looks really useful — occasionally I run into the issue that I'm on an odd machine with minimal packages installed, and want to use AI to do some stuff without setting up a full Node/Python environment. This seems like the perfect solution for that.

Is it possible to download just the binary itself, without needing to run the install script which installs it globally?

New comment by n2d4 in "The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ"

n2d4 — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 10:34:46 +0000

It's easy to address the limitations of AI by simply not using AI for those. No one forces you to use AI for tasks where its capabilities are limited; regardless, there are plenty of tasks where they aren't.

AI is very good at some things and very bad at others. Early on, many thought chess would be one of the last things mastered by computers, but they were wrong. It makes no sense to take the statement "AI is extremely bad at this task compared to humans" and conclude that AI must be useless or a waste of time.

In this case, the AI DJ is bad at picking out classical music. Okay, sure, whatever. But that doesn't automatically mean the AI DJ is bad at everything.

    > Like they created a full blown C compiler that "could compile linux" but in reality didn't pass its own tests?

You are strawmanning hard here. Who is "they"? You are putting all "AI evangelists" into the same blob here, and instead of answering the questions at-hand you ignore them and respond in an ad-hominem style by attacking a project that someone else made, completely unrelated to this entire thread. That is not good faith discourse!

New comment by n2d4 in "The purpose of Continuous Integration is to fail"

n2d4 — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:48:29 +0000

True, but you can't have complete tests without 100% coverage. It's a necessary, but not a sufficient condition; as long as it doesn't become the sole goal, it's still a useful metric.

New comment by n2d4 in "Layoffs at Block"

n2d4 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 22:32:01 +0000

In what sense did CashApp not pan out? $16b revenue. Too early to say whether Afterpay will work out but looking good so far

New comment by n2d4 in "Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight"

n2d4 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:14:52 +0000

Does this question really warrant the downvotes? I'm genuinely curious. Why not just answer it instead?

New comment by n2d4 in "Flock cameras gifted by Horowitz Foundation, avoiding public oversight"

n2d4 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:59:57 +0000

Genuine question, why does Flock get so much bad press in the US compared to other, much more infringing surveillance tech?

Your mobile provider knows your exact location at any point in time, and the NSA probably has access to most big tech data. Those tell you much more than a license plate reader.

In much of Europe, it is quite normal to see cameras everywhere both for traffic enforcement and for crime prevention. They are generally popular with the public, eg. in the UK with a >80% approval rate. In many cities, essentially every corner has CCTV.

Is it because Flock Safety also markets to private businesses, whereas in Europe CCTV and ANPR are state-run? Or is it a cultural thing, eg. because Americans value freedom or prefer driving over the speed limit, and Flock may end that?

New comment by n2d4 in "A Botnet Accidentally Destroyed I2P"

n2d4 — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 07:36:56 +0000

Likely it's just a coincidence — there were other Sybil attacks that are not in February too, so the chance that you'd get 3 in Feb isn't all that low.

New comment by n2d4 in "US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere"

n2d4 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 01:23:56 +0000

He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo...

New comment by n2d4 in "Show HN: Rebrain.gg – Doom learn, don't doom scroll"

n2d4 — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:57:42 +0000

    > why do you think that this is worth sharing with the world yet?

It's worth sharing because it's cool, even if it's not perfect yet!

You'll never make every single person on HN happy. But if you share your stuff early and make one person happy at the very least that means you should keep working on it!

Don't let perfectionism get in the way of good enough :]

New comment by n2d4 in "I’m joining OpenAI"

n2d4 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:37:46 +0000

My mum is not gonna use a product named like that

New comment by n2d4 in "I’m joining OpenAI"

n2d4 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:18:21 +0000

Yes

New comment by n2d4 in "I’m joining OpenAI"

n2d4 — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:17:34 +0000

This is a picture of OpenClawCon in Vienna, not OpenAI.

https://x.com/andreasklinger/status/2021299260784882044

New comment by n2d4 in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

n2d4 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:55:09 +0000

Which video was that? Garry has been an outspoken Trump-critic and moderate Democrat on Twitter.

Either way, my point is it's an extreme stretch to believe their departure, Trump, and crypto stablecoins are somehow related.

New comment by n2d4 in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

n2d4 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:51:49 +0000

What's the context here? When, where and for what did they recommend SVB?

(FWIW, it did end well, as going with a relatively large federally insured bank meant that no one lost any money during the crash)

New comment by n2d4 in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

n2d4 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:47:59 +0000

50 crypto scams? Why do you link the same one thrice, then?

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5mghcxCabxuaK4WTs/...

New comment by n2d4 in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

n2d4 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:44:43 +0000

That's a very misleading way to say that Flock is a YC company [0]!

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety

New comment by n2d4 in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

n2d4 — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 19:39:25 +0000

> Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell were publicly anti-Trump

Neither of these were "publicly anti-Trump" as much as Garry Tan has been.

Actually, where'd you even get that from? I cannot with my life imagine that Dalton would publicly post about politics. I've googled around a bit and found nothing either.

New comment by n2d4 in "Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings"

n2d4 — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:05:24 +0000

That doesn't pass the sniff test, many other pages on knowyourmeme correctly attribute memes to 4chan.

If you were right that would be easily verifiable. Do you have an example of a post dated before 2018? Maybe you're getting tricked by the fact that 2018 was 8 years ago?

New comment by n2d4 in "AI’s impact on engineering jobs may be different than expected"

n2d4 — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 19:53:39 +0000

I think I'm the opposite! The key is to ignore any language that sounds too determined and treat it as an opinion piece on what could happen. There's no way of knowing what will, but I find the theories very interesting.