Hacker News: owkman

New comment by owkman in "Gemini 4 Carbon"

owkman — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:51:36 +0000

No, it's not. The naming is just bad. It's the next iteration of Argon

New comment by owkman in "Gemini 4 Carbon"

owkman — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:51:10 +0000

Yes.. very confusing names. Carbon is the next iteration of Argon.

New comment by owkman in "Gemini 4 Carbon"

owkman — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:22:13 +0000

Other comments on this already, so this is more of a confirmation.

I'm not going to comment on others use of Carbon except to say some article that came out before Argon's external launch saying Googlers hate it was nonsense. Not to say everyone loved it all the time.

I use Carbon heavily and am quite happy with it. For complex designs I may have it and Opus iterate back and forth on the design. They have their own strengths and Opus 5.5 is great, but I use Gemini far more than I do Opus at this point. I know a lot of the jagged edges of Gemini better than Opus though, so take that as you will.

New comment by owkman in "Andrej Karpathy – It will take a decade to work through the issues with agents"

owkman — Sun, 19 Oct 2025 14:09:41 +0000

Karpathy is biased when it comes to self driving. Example: You can't both have humans teleoperating like he claimed, AND have cones disabling Waymos. Waymo's mistakes such as one where they were going around a parking lot honking at each other tells you they don't have humans in the loop except in the most extreme cases. He's likely correct that it's not self driving 100% of the time, but what if it's 99.999% and in the 0.001% the humans have to tell the Waymo how to get out of a very tricky situation?

New comment by owkman in "Microsoft CTO says he wants to swap most AMD and Nvidia GPUs for homemade chips"

owkman — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 19:13:58 +0000

That's a strange position to take with such high certainty. Google has been talking about training on TPUs for a long time. Many ex and current employees have been on the record talking about how much nicer the Google internal training infra using TPUs is. GPU is an afterthought for Google's inference and non-existent in training.

New comment by owkman in "ADHD drug treatment and risk of negative events and outcomes"

owkman — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:55:36 +0000

What do you mean by POTS in this context? Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome? Would love to hear more

New comment by owkman in "Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds"

owkman — Thu, 01 May 2025 10:57:43 +0000

> Android is built from the ground up to provide surveillance data to Google-controlled adtech

I've always read this and it seems well accepted. But I'm curious what exactly does it mean? What's Android sending to Google? Surely it's not logging what I click on apps? It's not logging what I click on my browser since the websites themselves send this info for ad purposes. So what's Android doing that let's say my Linux laptop isn't?

Edit: Answering my own question. There is a cross-app unique identifier (ignoring any privacy sandbox stuff) so developers and ad networks can get a consistent id across apps.

New comment by owkman in "Why Clojure?"

owkman — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 15:16:59 +0000

Do you have any resources showing what this type of coding works in the real world? I keep running into this same types issue when I use languages without types specified everywhere, where the cognitive load gets too much for non-trivial projects. I would be pretty unhappy writing python without type hints and tools that check these for correctness built into my workflow for example.

New comment by owkman in "Coping with dumb LLMs using classic ML"

owkman — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 14:39:30 +0000

I think people have had success with using PaliGemma for this. The computer use type use cases probably use fine tuned versions of LLMs for their use cases rather than the base ones.

New comment by owkman in "Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep"

owkman — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:29:43 +0000

Norepinephrine increases alertness, especially when it's targeted towards the prefrontal cortex (like straterra is)

New comment by owkman in "Norepinephrine-mediated slow vasomotion drives glymphatic clearance during sleep"

owkman — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 18:10:00 +0000

I was wondering the same thing. I couldn't find any research on what increased baseline norepinephrine does to the pulses. I can see it being detrimental (pulses don't work as well) or neutral (brain adjusts to the new baseline).

New comment by owkman in "Mojo might be the biggest thing to happen in programming for decades"

owkman — Thu, 04 May 2023 03:19:45 +0000

Jeremy has a lot of cache with me with his amazing work in education and his excitement on this is a great sign in Mojo's favor. Solving the two language problem would be pretty amazing.

New comment by owkman in "Facebook LLAMA is being openly distributed via torrents"

owkman — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 13:26:54 +0000

Assume you got source for a game written in a proprietary game engine. If you don't have access to the game engine itself, nor the API documentation, etc, how long will it take to get this game running in your manner of choosing?

The infrastructure in these companies is a huge amount of scaffolding that's non-trivial to replicate.

New comment by owkman in "Google employees are free to speak up, except on antitrust"

owkman — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 22:19:18 +0000

Googler here. This is pure and simple click-bait. We are asked not to speculate on legal matters precisely so that it doesn't get misrepresented in the media or in lawsuits. I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

Since the NYT is denied the option of misrepresenting employee comments, it has settled for an alternate spin. What a great deal they have. Its a win-win.