Hacker News: names_are_hard

New comment by names_are_hard in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

names_are_hard — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:56:50 +0000

The article mentions tang repeatedly as if it's a positive thing. Maybe I don't know what tang is, but shouldn't pancakes be sweet and not tangy?

New comment by names_are_hard in "Show HN: I Derived a Pancake"

names_are_hard — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 10:52:45 +0000

Claude is a tool in the hands of the person using it. If you built a cabinet using power tools would you say the drill and saw built the cabinet? Or that you did?

I find it irritating when people send me a code review and say that Claude wrote the code. No, you wrote the code, you are responsible for the code. You can't blame Claude if it's crap and you don't have to credit Claude if it's genius. Claude is not a person.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Robinhood now lets your AI agents trade stocks"

names_are_hard — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:29:16 +0000

Robinhood (and retail in general) order flow is valuable precisely because there's already no information in it. It's assumed to be more or less random.

Institutional order flow can move the market, or be an indicator that the market is going to move in that direction. So executing against it a worse bet than executing against retail flow.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Nothing Ever Happens: Polymarket bot that always buys No on non-sports markets"

names_are_hard — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:24:48 +0000

Yes. And indeed, when aggregated and averaged across all betters, nobody makes any money.

The question isn't what percentage of bets resolve to no, but whether there is a consistent bias in the prices away from the fair price, which has an expected value of 0, and what direction that bias is in.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

names_are_hard — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:23:56 +0000

Yes, Silicon Valley has some bits that don't quite match real life. But every now and then there's some true insight in it.

Like the bit where the crazy VC tells them that the last thing they need is revenue.

https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=fU3Y3-ucHqgoBDLU

New comment by names_are_hard in "Are We Idiocracy Yet?"

names_are_hard — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 12:17:11 +0000

> If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.

Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?

New comment by names_are_hard in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

names_are_hard — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 11:35:20 +0000

The Arab parties are potential "kingmakers" in the coalition arithmetic. In particular, it was Mansour Abbas that made the "change government" (Lapid-Bennett) and if there's any chance of unseating Bibi again it'll come down to him. And to my knowledge he hasn't ruled out joining Bibi either, if there's a deal to be made.

A lot also depends on whether the Arab parties run together in the coming elections or not.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

names_are_hard — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 09:04:39 +0000

But it's still described as a $2M toll, not a 13.81M CNY toll. So I guess we're not there yet.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Nasdaq's Shame"

names_are_hard — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:02:45 +0000

When a stock drops in value, the dollars don't flow anywhere, they just disappear. Think about this: For every buyer ("putting money in a stock") there is a seller ("taking money out of a stock') at exactly the same price. So dollars aren't "in" a stock at all - the shares exist and are said to have some dollar value based on the recent trading price or open orders in the market. When the price drops, it's because the collective consensus on how much those shares are worth changed, and the dollars assumed to have exist prior are just gone.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

names_are_hard — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 22:21:09 +0000

I live here, I don't need Polymarket to know that there will be missiles tomorrow. In fact, that's why I'm on HN now even though it's just past midnight here. Because it's a well known law of nature that just as I drift off to sleep my phone will violently alert me with this horrid bzzhhh-bzzhhh sound that missiles are incoming. Then I'll turn on the TV, any news channel, and see the "polygon of uncertainty" overlaid on a map of the country, updating in real time, and I'll decide how fast to put my shoes on. Polymarket odds ain't got nothing on that.

More seriously - I used to think this was a good argument. But the night before the war broke out, I checked Polymarket and the odds were under 20%. I also checked the news and listened to my gut, and I'm glad I made the call to fill up my car's tank and prepare my go-bag. Came in handy when we woke up to sirens and had to move fast to get closer to shelter.

Yes, it's anecdata, etc etc

New comment by names_are_hard in "Nasdaq's Shame"

names_are_hard — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:56:23 +0000

It means holding the actual stocks in the underlying index, as opposed to synthetic replication, which aims to achieve returns matching the index via derivatives or other techniques.

It's physical in the sense that literal means not literal nowadays.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Iran-backed hackers claim wiper attack on medtech firm Stryker"

names_are_hard — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 09:14:49 +0000

Or he's just a manchild who likes doing things that he thinks will make him look strong.

New comment by names_are_hard in "War prediction markets are a national-security threat"

names_are_hard — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 06:10:58 +0000

It really wasn't rocket science. Even I packed my go bag and loaded up the car on Friday night, and I have no information they don't share on the news. (I live in Israel, and when the first siren woke me at ~8 on Saturday morning I jumped in the car and evacuated to a family member who lives in a building with a bomb shelter)

I could've been wrong, but it was a reasonable guess. The local Israeli news anchors were in the newsroom broadcasting within minutes of the attack going public, I guess they slept in the office with their clothes on too.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Will vibe coding end like the maker movement?"

names_are_hard — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:38:32 +0000

I found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Uncovering insiders and alpha on Polymarket with AI"

names_are_hard — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 05:30:10 +0000

I'm in Israel. If you turn on the TV lately, you will inevitably hear a bunch of talking heads endlessly analyzing every word Trump said, and the movement of various US military apparatus, and then sharing "expert" insights into when there's going to be an escalation.

I can't do anything about this, except decide when it's time to pack my go-bag and leave it near the door so I'm ready to go to the bomb shelter in middle of the night. To that end, polymarket odds are helpful. I'd never bet any money myself, of course.

In related news, I read recently that the IDF is currently investigating some personnel who evidently made money predicting the last Israel-Iran flare up using inside information. Naturally this is quite unlawful.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Opus 4.5 is not the normal AI agent experience that I have had thus far"

names_are_hard — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 06:46:34 +0000

> When the printing press came out, I bet there were scribes who thought, "holy shit, there goes my job!" But I bet there were other scribes who thought, "holy shit, I don't have to do this by hand any more?!"

I don't understand this argument. Surely the skill set involved in being a scribe isn't the same as being a printer, and possibly the the personality that makes a good scribe doesn't translate to being a good printer.

So I imagine many of the scribes lost their income, and other people made money on printing. Good for the folks who make it in the new profession, sucks for those who got shafted. How many scribes transitioned successfully to printers?

Genuinely asking, I don't know.

New comment by names_are_hard in "What an unprocessed photo looks like"

names_are_hard — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 10:42:49 +0000

I would argue that there's a qualitative difference between processing that aims to get the image to the point where it's a closer rendition of how the human eye would have perceived the subject (the stuff described in TFA) vs processing that explicitly tries to make the image further from the in-person experience (removing power lines, people from the background, etc)

New comment by names_are_hard in "A graph explorer of the Epstein emails"

names_are_hard — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 09:12:51 +0000

Eternal shame and public oppobrium. At minimum, elected officials connected with impropriety should step down, and the public should be so disgusted that they have no hope of ever serving in public office again.

New comment by names_are_hard in "Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit"

names_are_hard — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:00:01 +0000

It's confusing. Various vendors sell products they call ATPs [0] to defend yourself from APTs...

[0] Advanced Threat Protection

New comment by names_are_hard in "The Programmer Identity Crisis"

names_are_hard — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:54:49 +0000

The thing is... All those people were right. We no longer need the kinds of people we used to call programmers. There exists a new job, only semi related, that now goes by the name programmer. I don't know how many of the original programming professionals managed to make the transition to this new progression.