Hacker News: nroets

New comment by nroets in "Hyundai buys Boston Dynamics"

nroets — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:08:38 +0000

Wikipedia shuns primary sources, such as personal websites and company registration documents. They prefer reliable secondary sources such as mainstream news media.

New comment by nroets in "They’re made out of weights"

nroets — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:09:38 +0000

You can even replace "weights" with "gates". It can be build with NAND gates.

New comment by nroets in "Gmail thinks I'm stupid, so I left"

nroets — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 06:50:17 +0000

There's like 1 spam message in my Gmail inbox every day. Some of it is so obvious that an LLM running on a Raspberry Pi can correctly classify it. For example car insurance ads.

(My email address is on my home page. It's also my username on over 100 sites that I signed up for over 20 odd years.)

New comment by nroets in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

nroets — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:54:53 +0000

Do you have any proof it's "white supremacy and the exploitation of labor under capitalism." ? Why can't it just be xenophobia ?

There's xenophobia almost everywhere: Just look at South Africa this year.

New comment by nroets in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

nroets — Sun, 24 May 2026 12:41:22 +0000

And my theory is that the US only looked good because there were no competitors: Break up of the Soviet Union left the constituents without economies of scale. Similarly European markets were still desperately fragmented. China was growing, but from a low base.

So capital flooded to the US.

So we all have our own theories.

The real question remains "What's best for America right now ?"

New comment by nroets in "Anthropic is expanding to Colossus2. Will use GB200"

nroets — Thu, 21 May 2026 10:04:04 +0000

Theft of trade secrets. And so many people will have to be involved that evidence of the crime is bound to leak out.

New comment by nroets in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

nroets — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:21:04 +0000

An "account" which is somehow linked to enough of your browsing history to determine if you're a scraper or a spammer. Then the company(s) administrating these accounts will be able to collect a lot of info on the account holders over decades.

Google hardware attestation idea won't give them that much data: All Google will know is which phones visited which websites and only when the website asks the phone for hardware attestation. If the website gives the phone a cookie for bypassing subsequent attestations, then Google will know only of the first visit.

New comment by nroets in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

nroets — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:32:53 +0000

The board members will be lobbied, wined and dined by billion or even trillion dollar companies. If politicians can be bought then so can non-profits.

Having said that, there may well be a room for a niche recaptcha-like service run by a non-profit. Perhaps one that uses a non-profit social graph or something.

New comment by nroets in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

nroets — Mon, 11 May 2026 17:27:35 +0000

It will certainly make some bot farms unprofitable: Remember that they are now paying for a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software licenses, branding, distribution and customer support for which they have no use.

Also consider this: While bot farms may be able to buy millions of Android devices, they will certainly attract a lot of scrutiny as they approach the billion mark. So bot farms will never own more Android devices than humans.

New comment by nroets in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

nroets — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:55:08 +0000

I think you miss my point: When bots can "give" more money/computing power, then the transaction is no longer a good test of being human.

New comment by nroets in "Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler"

nroets — Mon, 11 May 2026 10:20:23 +0000

If proof of work is the "payment" to prove that you're human, many AI startups will outbid poor people living third world countries. They will even outbid some Americans.

Yes, those AI startups can also buy cheap Android phones at scale, but it's a bit harder because they'll pay for stuff that their bots have no use for (a screen, a battery, a 5G radio, software, branding, distribution, customer support etc).

New comment by nroets in "Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents"

nroets — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:46:10 +0000

The De Beers cartel was able to avoid anti trust scrutiny because the best reserves are outside (Africa/Canada/Russia) of the most lucrative markets (US/Europe/Asia).

Corporations control only a small faction of housing supply.

New comment by nroets in "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?"

nroets — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 08:46:35 +0000

You can pattern match on the prompt (input) then (a) stuff the context with helpful hints to the LLM e.g. "Remember that a car is too heavy for a person to carry" or (b) upgrade to "thinking".

New comment by nroets in "11.8M EU citizens pay taxes to governments they cannot vote for"

nroets — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 20:21:28 +0000

He says nothing about the language barrier that migrants face in the EU.

He went to The Netherlands where it's extremely easy for migrants to integrate: Not only is English widely spoken, but Dutch is also one of the easiest languages to read if you know English and/or German.

So it's unsurprising that he felt he understood enough of politics that he wanted to vote there.

New comment by nroets in "Iran's internet blackout may become permanent, with access for elites only"

nroets — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:58:17 +0000

Here's crazy idea: Instead of the US spending all this money on restraining the Iranian government through military build ups and sanctions, rather drop hundreds of thousands of Starlink kits by drones.

Firstly the protesters will be able to communicate in private.

And secondly, Iranians will continue to be reminded of the freedoms most other Muslims enjoy: As in free speech and free trade.

One of the reasons the Berlin wall fell was that East Europeans saw on TV that how prosperous Western Europe became.

New comment by nroets in "Nvidia Stock Crash Prediction"

nroets — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 06:36:39 +0000

Some changes to the algorithms and implementations will allow cheaper commodity hardware to be used.

New comment by nroets in "I stayed in a $40 capsule hotel (London)"

nroets — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 12:57:42 +0000

In 2023 I stayed in a capsule hotel in Bilbao. There I was told at check in that no talking or loudspeakers of any kind is allow in the capsules. That can only be done in the lounge area.

I spent 3 nights and got much better sleep than I would have at a hostel.

New comment by nroets in "Day laborers protest noise machines installed at Home Depot"

nroets — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 19:26:24 +0000

Could there be a motif unrelated to ICE ? That Home Depot does not like that day labourers are loitering and approaching customers entering and leaving the store.

New comment by nroets in "Twins reared apart do not exist"

nroets — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 17:39:46 +0000

Your comment mentioned "studies" plural.

There are many studies of twins that try to determine if genes influence intelligence.

Some look at twins who are raised together. One [1] concludes that "MZ (identical) twins differ on average by 6 IQ points, while DZ (fraternal) twins differ on average by 10 IQ points".

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6202166/

New comment by nroets in "Twins reared apart do not exist"

nroets — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:16:53 +0000

What studies ? What data ? David Bessis basically says that there are so few twins reared apart that scientists can't make definitive conclusions.