Hacker News: paulmist

New comment by paulmist in "Our eighth generation TPUs: two chips for the agentic era"

paulmist — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:11:47 +0000

At $15/GB of HBM4 the 331.8TB of HBM4 per pod is 5 million...

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

paulmist — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:57:45 +0000

I think author's point is that wealth drives investment which drives economic growth. In the case of lavish funerals - warranted in kinship societies - the wealth is spent on relatively unproductive investments bearing high opportunity cost. The corollary and author's secondary point is the ineffective resource allocation e.g. through nepotism.

My main (oversimplified!) takeaway from the article is that kinship societies prioritize inherently local processes that inhibit global processes. For example, they prefer keeping internal cohesion through ritual celebration rather than maximizing economic upside through education and specialization. This makes sense - the latter requires a higher degree of trust and stability. Increasing the degree of trust and stability seems to be an evolutionary process. I found Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel [1] to give some amazing insights about this.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Stee...

New comment by paulmist in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

paulmist — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:35:47 +0000

In the Netherlands dental service prices are set by the government [1]. Under 18 are universally covered by basic health insurance; for adults average dental for regular work + emergency is 30/month.

[1] https://puc.overheid.nl/nza/doc/PUC_789284_22/1/

New comment by paulmist in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

paulmist — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:30:27 +0000

This! I flew from Madrid to SF last year and I can't begin to describe the difference in the quality of food. The scale of agricultural industrialization is terrifying - I wish you luck but I don't think anything short of this becoming a major campaign issue will help you.

New comment by paulmist in "The American Healthcare Conundrum"

paulmist — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:26:12 +0000

As a European I would think a large part of the problem is that Americans are just sick more seriously and often. Your car culture, quality of food, and general preventative healthcare accessibility seem all terrible there. The prevalence of obesity in younger population is staggering. In my (engineering) programme I see one very obese person and a couple fairly overweight, but that's about it.

A New Way to Synthesize Peptides (2024)

paulmist — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 22:04:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/new-way-synthesize-peptides

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47281719

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by paulmist in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

paulmist — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:35:09 +0000

> The best engineers can visualize the whole architecture in their head, and describe exactly what they want to an AI

I'd go a step further and say the engineers who, unprompted, discover requirements and discuss their own designs with others have an even better time. You need to effectively communicate your thoughts to coding agents, but perhaps more crucially you need to fit your ever-growing backyard of responsibilities into the larger picture. Being that bridge requires a great level of confidence and clear-headedness and will be increasingly valued.

State of VLA Research at ICLR 2026

paulmist — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 23:57:56 +0000

Article URL: https://mbreuss.github.io/blog_post_iclr_26_vla.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47174160

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by paulmist in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

paulmist — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:56:51 +0000

No wonder. At an early stage startup and every single person here/we talk to has the $200 CC.

New comment by paulmist in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

paulmist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:12:21 +0000

And that timeline only grows with the complexity of the field in question. I think this is inherently a function of the complexity of the study, and rather than harshly penalizing such shortcomings we should develop tools that address them and improve productivity. AI can speed up the verification of requirements like proper citations, both on the author's and reviewer's side.

New comment by paulmist in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

paulmist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:07:08 +0000

> When your entire job is confirming that science is valid, I expect a little more humility when it turns out you've missed a critical aspect.

I wouldn't call a misformed reference a critical issue, it happens. That's why we have peer reviews. I would contend drawing superficially valid conclusions from studies through use of AI is a much more burning problem that speaks more to the integrity of the author.

> It will serve as a reminder not to cut any corners.

Or yet another reason to ditch academic work for industry. I doubt the rise of scientific AI tools like AlphaXiv [1], whether you consider them beneficial or detrimental, can be avoided - calling for a level pragmatism.

New comment by paulmist in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

paulmist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:22:20 +0000

Isn't disqualifying X months of potentially great research due to a misformed, but existing reference harsh? I don't think they'd be okay with references that are actually made up.

New comment by paulmist in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

paulmist — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 16:17:31 +0000

I'm surprised the conference doesn't provide tooling to validate all references automatically.

New comment by paulmist in "Level S4 solar radiation event"

paulmist — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:19:43 +0000

Also seen in the Netherlands!

New comment by paulmist in "Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage"

paulmist — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:43:19 +0000

> Apple is one of the very few companies at their size that seems to have the political environment to make, and more importantly succeed, at decade investments.

Definitely! But I'd recon they would want to bootstrap that part of their supply chain as soon as possible? Say China does invade Taiwan, suddenly their main supplier is gone and the Intel capacity mostly goes to military and other high margin segments. If they instead own Intel they not only control the narrative but also capitalize on the increase in Intel's value.

New comment by paulmist in "Apple is fighting for TSMC capacity as Nvidia takes center stage"

paulmist — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 19:09:02 +0000

Would it be feasible for them to buy Intel instead? Starting your own foundry would likely take over a decade.

New comment by paulmist in "TPUs vs. GPUs and why Google is positioned to win AI race in the long term"

paulmist — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:42:03 +0000

> The GPUs were designed for graphics [...] However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” [...] A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping.

With simulations becoming key to training models doesn't this seem like a huge problem for Google?

New comment by paulmist in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

paulmist — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:51:42 +0000

It is! Their biggest solar farms are also in the Inner Mongolia where the irradiance is twice what you get in Germany. That said the sheer scale is crazy!

New comment by paulmist in "Germany outfitted half a million balconies with solar panels"

paulmist — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:34:39 +0000

Meanwhile China projected to add ~300GW of solar capacity in 2025. Germany renewables capacity for 2023 was 165GW.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/chinas...

Nvidia H100 Price Guide 2025: Detailed Costs, Comparisons and Expert Insights

paulmist — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 14:54:22 +0000

Article URL: https://docs.jarvislabs.ai/blog/h100-price

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44825293

Points: 1

# Comments: 0