Hacker News: nightsd01

New comment by nightsd01 in "NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks?"

nightsd01 — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 04:18:04 +0000

Why is it exactly, that mobile providers can’t catch this…? Just like with SMS fraud. It might cost them a few cents per subscriber to do effective anti-spam measures, but now society has to pay the cost

New comment by nightsd01 in "The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood"

nightsd01 — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 03:15:33 +0000

I am not an expert in AI by any means but I think I know enough about it to comment on one thing: there was an interesting paper not too long ago that showed if you train a randomly-initialized model from scratch on questions, like a bank of physics questions & answers, models will end up with much higher quality if you teach it the simple physics questions first, and then move up to more complex physics questions. This shows that in some ways, these large language models really do learn like we do.

I think the next steps will be more along this vain of thinking. Treating all training data the same is a mistake. Some data is significantly more valuable to developing an intelligent model than most other training data, even when you pass quality filters. I think we need to revisit how we 'train' these models in the first place, and come up with a more intelligent/interactive system of doing so

New comment by nightsd01 in "Amazon has mostly sat out the AI talent war"

nightsd01 — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 02:56:33 +0000

Apple’s biggest problem is their commitment to privacy. Delivering effective AI requires a substantial amount of user data that Apple doesn’t collect.

Their other problem is they value designers and product managers more than engineers (especially top tier AI engineers).

Both problems are basically the death knell of any hope for Apple to have good AI, but combined? It’s never gonna happen. Which is sad because Apple’s on-device hardware is quite good.

New comment by nightsd01 in "Do not download the app, use the website"

nightsd01 — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 02:58:25 +0000

Thanks to the EU for ruining the web by forcing everyone to show the ridiculous "Accept Cookies!" agreement. No wonder people prefer native apps. They’re better - for a lot of reasons, both because they can interface more cleanly with OS specific features and also for performance.

And 'privacy' is a horrible argument to prefer websites over apps. For the average person (not a privacy obsessed techie) - the web is just as bad if not worse from a privacy perspective than native apps.

I do agree that not everything needs an app - websites have their place. But when I go to browse HN on my phone, I don't do it through the web, I do it through Octal (which is open source).

Frankly I am tired of privacy-obsessed techies ruining tech for everyone else. Let's face it - 99% of the things you're worried about are simply going to let companies....show you ads that are more relevant to your life. The horror!

New comment by nightsd01 in "LLMs, Theory of Mind, and Cheryl's Birthday"

nightsd01 — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 03:33:08 +0000

I think you are right here - the ability to test theory of mind in an LLM would be more like testing how well it can distinguish its own motivations/ideas from that of a separate entity.

I would agree that this question is more of a logic puzzle and less of a real test of 'theory of mind'

In fact, just to have a theory of mind, it kind of assumes you have a mind, with your own ideas/motivations/etc

New comment by nightsd01 in "Gemini AI"

nightsd01 — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 02:53:20 +0000

Yep, there is a big reason why Europe has so few successful big tech companies, it is a regulatory hellscape. They have so many pointless privacy regulations that only the “big” companies can even hope to compete in many markets like ad tech.

New comment by nightsd01 in "GPT-4 details leaked?"

nightsd01 — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 08:09:00 +0000

“Leaked” seems like a strong clickbait claim from whoever wrote this, along with the “it’s over” part….

New comment by nightsd01 in "OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm"

nightsd01 — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:05:06 +0000

The bird and the airplane is such an excellent analogy!

New comment by nightsd01 in "OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm"

nightsd01 — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:04:37 +0000

The same way we can simulate the movements of the planets - it will never be exact, but the better we understand it, the more precisely we can simulate it

New comment by nightsd01 in "OpenWorm – A computational model of C. elegans worm"

nightsd01 — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 08:03:12 +0000

302 neurons doesn’t sound impressive to people who may be used to working with 7B+ parameter neural networks. But those neural networks have about as much in common with a biological neuron as a bicycle had with a horse. They can both travel pretty fast but one evolved naturally through over a billion years of harsh natural selection, and the other is a precisely tuned metal machine with a single purpose.

Neurons are similar, they are incredibly sophisticated biological machines, with billions of DNA base pairs controlling their behavior. The emergent behavior of neurons in both biological and AI systems are pretty fascinating

New comment by nightsd01 in "Show HN: Most mentioned people on Lex Fridman Podcast"

nightsd01 — Mon, 03 Oct 2022 01:42:18 +0000

Why would you say that?

New comment by nightsd01 in "Ask HN: I'm disabled and out of money. Now what?"

nightsd01 — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 01:51:48 +0000

You have big problems. How do big problems get solved? The best approach is to take the big problems and break them up into smaller problems, divide and conquer. Get out a whiteboard and go over your problems logically, as if you were a different person looking at your life from the outside. The key problem in your case seems to be a lack of money. My best advice is to solve it and quickly by finding a job. You don’t have to find the perfect job, just find a job and then work on improving things step by step. It might not even be in tech, there are call center type jobs you can easily do from home. But my advice would be to find a coding job. Don’t try to completely switch fields right now, you’re not in a good place to do that, try sticking with what you already know and build up from there. Take a course in modern web development maybe and brush up that resume. Getting your life together is hard and it takes a lot of work. But luckily you have a lot of options. Try taking things step by step, day by day. It doesn’t need to be the perfect job, just a job that pays the bills. Once you have your basic needs met, then you can begin to focus on finding an even better job, learning more skills, becoming healthier. Ultimately, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The one thing you shouldn’t do is give up, even if things seem hopeless, it’s just because you haven’t found the right plan yet :)

New comment by nightsd01 in "Mastodon: A free, open-source, and decentralized Twitter not owned by anybody"

nightsd01 — Wed, 06 Apr 2022 04:04:57 +0000

This is an old failing site, it’s gonna fail for the same reason that Diaspora and app.net failed, and it’s the same reason web3 is going to fail.

Real world users don’t care if their social network is on a “distributed” platform. And they definitely don’t want to pay for it. Relying on some tiny minority to donate….just to avoid the horrifying, almost indescribable pain of some social network using your data to show your better ads (the horror)…really?

Maybe we techies need to re-evaluate our priorities in life….

New comment by nightsd01 in "Ask HN: As you get older, do you see programming as merely a means to an end?"

nightsd01 — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 23:08:55 +0000

I guess I am lucky since I enjoy coding itself so immensely. Whether I’m coding on a side project or coding for work, I love it all. This has not really changed over the past 8 years.

The people I know who view programming purely as a means to get a high paycheck don’t tend to last very long or achieve much success especially in FANG, they burn out because it’s hard to excel in something you don’t have any passion for. Imagine trying to be an author but not caring about writing - good luck with that.

New comment by nightsd01 in "I tested four NVMe SSDs from four vendors – half lose FLUSH’d data on power loss"

nightsd01 — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 07:03:50 +0000

In my opinion, as a consumer, this is up to you. If you need this, get a UPS battery backup (or a laptop which has its own battery). Or, you can get a super specialized SSD. Ultimately though, most consumer SSDs DON’T need this feature. And if they did include it by default, it would likely be environmentally questionable for a feature most people will never use (because most consumer SSDs these days go into laptops with their own batteries).

New comment by nightsd01 in "Train burglaries in LA"

nightsd01 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 07:35:10 +0000

What kinds of crime are you talking about? Loitering? Murder? Again, it’s all relative. How would increased police funding help with ANY of that…?

There are plenty of reasons to want to move out of the Bay Area. Christ, traffic on the 101 often makes me want to jump off the golden gate bridge - but I don’t see how snarky remarks about “defund the police” help one way or another without dramatically misunderstanding and oversimplifying the real causes of this city’s problems.

New comment by nightsd01 in "Train burglaries in LA"

nightsd01 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 07:31:40 +0000

I can imagine automatically aimed and fired machine guns, all powered by Alexa of course :)

New comment by nightsd01 in "Train burglaries in LA"

nightsd01 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 07:19:43 +0000

Dude, I literally live in the Bay Area. And crime here is no where even close to bad as it was where I used to live in Texas. It’s all relative. Especially when politics is involved.

I see absolutely no reason to believe that raising police budgets would somehow magically fix this. It wouldn’t. We have deeper societal issues at hand.

New comment by nightsd01 in "Train burglaries in LA"

nightsd01 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 07:17:05 +0000

Do you think the police in the jurisdiction where these train thefts occurred was underfunded? I’d be thrilled to hear your solution…

New comment by nightsd01 in "Train burglaries in LA"

nightsd01 — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 07:06:54 +0000

Very few people want to actually defund the police. But try being a black friend of mine, who got thrown out of his car without resisting and beaten so bad he had to go to an ICU, purely because he was driving a car that “matched the description” (that didn’t even match the color) of a crime in the area, and perhaps you can begin to understand why the “other side” is frustrated…

And let me guess. You think these train robberies happen because they defunded the police in their area…?