Hacker News: nightsd01

New comment by nightsd01 in "Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope"

nightsd01 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 02:01:18 +0000

I will never understand why NASA doesn't build at least two copies of expensive space telescopes like this. One single launch failure and boom (literally), the entire project is a failure?

It wouldn't double the cost assuming they do it with even a modicum of efficiency and intelligence. And hey - assuming that the launch goes smoothly, you can get double the benefit

New comment by nightsd01 in "Tether: iMessage, SMS, etc. on Linux"

nightsd01 — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 01:56:54 +0000

> Since then I've done Opus and then Fable bug / security sweeps regularly.

This part surprises me a bit. Fable always falls back to opus for me the instant 'security' is involved (thanks for that, Anthropic)

New comment by nightsd01 in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

nightsd01 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:52:56 +0000

I was a bit triggered by your China comment, if only given the fact that there is a very specific institution that drove many formerly prosperous cities and communities into abject poverty (the CCP in Mao's era) and then tries to claim all the credit for the market driving how many people they've lifted out of poverty.

And nowadays with Hong Kong (and probably soon Taiwan) they are proving they are perfectly happy to destroy economic growth as long as it benefits The Party

New comment by nightsd01 in "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science"

nightsd01 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 03:48:51 +0000

Plenty of people are making money from AI? And I am not sure I've seen it "making things worse for most people" yet, do you have a source behind this?

If your source is AI layoffs, there were plenty of layoffs with the invention of the horseless carriage, but that doesn't mean it made humans worse off overall.

There are reasons to be skeptical about progress and AI and all that but the 'making things worse for most people' thing you mentioned seems yet to be based in any reality

New comment by nightsd01 in "Ask HN: Are you still using a Vision Pro?"

nightsd01 — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:41:46 +0000

Got mine on launch day. It's been sitting in the case for over a year. It's frankly just not comfortable to use for more than 10 minutes.

New comment by nightsd01 in "Apocalypse Early Warning System"

nightsd01 — Sun, 03 May 2026 02:09:56 +0000

The sad truth is - getting on a private jet would be just about the single worst thing you could do during a nuclear war. Most modern private jets are largely based on flight control systems based on computers and electronics that would be quickly fried by the EMP flash from nuclear weapons even a large distance away. If you wanna die - get on a non-military aircraft during a nuclear exchange

New comment by nightsd01 in "Many African families spend fortunes burying their dead"

nightsd01 — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 04:53:19 +0000

It's doubled because it practically couldn't get any worse. Let's see what happens (sadly) now that USAID has been dismantled

New comment by nightsd01 in "Understanding the Kalman filter with a simple radar example"

nightsd01 — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 23:26:01 +0000

I recently built a drone from the ground up - learned how to build PCB's with the ESP32, wrote all of the flight firmware, etc. and built a controller iOS app.

Extended Kalman Filters are even more interesting because they let you do sensor fusion and such

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 :)