Hacker News: potamic

New comment by potamic in "Over 97% of the 'Linux' Foundation's Budget Goes Not to Linux"

potamic — Sat, 09 May 2026 06:27:02 +0000

A wealth tax than caps one's inflow to something like a million a year makes a lot of sense. To all the billionaire sympathizers who worry about incentives and technological progress, this here is a perfect (and not the only) example of how intrinsic motivation can beat extrinsic motivation by a huge margin.

There will always be people who value intrinsic incentives and even more so when there is a lack or limitation of extrinsic ones. Society will do well to structure itself primarily around such people. Such people are also less likely to cause damage to others because it's very rare that damage to others fulfills one's intrinsic needs. Linus is arguably a net positive to human society than the top 20 billionaires combined. We need more of him and less of the others.

New comment by potamic in "Brazil's Pix payment system faces pressure from Visa and Mastercard"

potamic — Fri, 08 May 2026 08:29:07 +0000

As long as the foreign companies operate within the country under the country's laws, it shouldn't be a big problem. But being dependent on only one vendor and not having redundancy in the system is a problem though. This is why cash is important to provide the ultimate redundancy against all technological and infrastructural failures.

New comment by potamic in "Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race"

potamic — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:20:10 +0000

There is the silver medal syndrome.

New comment by potamic in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

potamic — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:12:05 +0000

What's the average cost per interaction?

New comment by potamic in "Website streamed live directly from a model"

potamic — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 06:11:28 +0000

Cool concept! What's the idea behind draft version and higher version?

New comment by potamic in "OpenAI ad partner now selling ChatGPT ad placements based on “prompt relevance”"

potamic — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 05:17:30 +0000

For every investor who has made money, there is another who has lost an equal amount. Money cannot be created, it can only change hands!

New comment by potamic in "Israel escalates attacks on medics in Lebanon with deadly 'quadruple tap'"

potamic — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:26:02 +0000

> The logic is to cause difficulties for the civilian population so much that they will then turn against the militants

The beatings will continue until morale improves!

New comment by potamic in "Reflecting on my own strange year at Uber"

potamic — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 05:20:16 +0000

> During this period, I was instructed to delete her contact and the text messages between me and her from my phone. I complied, as I was scared to lose my job. Those messages, which would have been favorable to me on the question of who initiated what, are now gone.

This is so weird. I can't imagine a company instructing their employee to delete their personal correspondence. It's such an overreach, it doesn't comprehend.

New comment by potamic in "DIY Soft Drinks"

potamic — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 08:38:40 +0000

> In some countries (like Canada), soft-drink manufacturers are required to disclose the exact amount of each artificial sweetener they use in the drink

Can you share some links? Neither amazon.ca nor walmart.ca seem to show this.

New comment by potamic in "Newly created Polymarket accounts win big on well-timed Iran ceasefire bets"

potamic — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:39:09 +0000

Institutions do not stake their own money and are somewhat averse to the direction of the market. As for common people, they're generally not known to do the most rational thing.

New comment by potamic in "Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset"

potamic — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:25:38 +0000

Dated Jan 9. When the headlines is in present tense, it is kinda misleading to post as-is at a later time.

New comment by potamic in "Tinybox – Offline AI device 120B parameters"

potamic — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 04:20:48 +0000

Can't see replies, what did they say?

New comment by potamic in "The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran"

potamic — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 07:45:10 +0000

They didn't have any natural resources that could be exploited.

New comment by potamic in "Large US company came after me for releasing a free open-source alternative"

potamic — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 07:13:47 +0000

CEOs turning civil when backlash on their company goes viral is a trope as old as time. I guarantee the CEO green-lighted this entire thing in the first place.

New comment by potamic in "I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure"

potamic — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:11:23 +0000

> You can do local AI inference and get Claude Opus-level performance (Kimi K2.5) over a cluster of Mac Studios with Exo.Labs

Does it do distributed inference? What kinda token speeds do you get?

New comment by potamic in "Physicists Make Electrons Flow Like Water"

potamic — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 06:11:42 +0000

Off topic, but selecting text and right clicking does not work on this site. I'm finding more and more sites of late where this is the case. Wondering if this is intentional or some issue with a popular framework everyone's using.

New comment by potamic in "I’m joining OpenAI"

potamic — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:52:52 +0000

Most things that go viral actually have a concerted marketing push behind them. I suspect that was the case here. Something about the way people talked about it didn't come across as very genuine.

New comment by potamic in "Babylon 5 is now free to watch on YouTube"

potamic — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:20:35 +0000

Can someone who is new to Star trek start with DS9 or need to watch earlier series for context?

New comment by potamic in "CERN accepts $1B in private cash towards Future Circular Collider"

potamic — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 09:01:36 +0000

The people looking at invisible gamma farts at the edge of our universe is what led to understanding of supernovas, and the research on supernovas is what enabled ASML to build an EUV light source for their machines. EUV machines are arguably the most important machines on earth right now, responsible for modern GPUs and the recent growth of AI. If somebody told all those researchers in the 20th century to "focus on something of importance" instead, we may easily be a couple of decades behind with the state of semi-conductor technology today.

New comment by potamic in "Is particle physics dead, dying, or just hard?"

potamic — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 07:33:43 +0000

You're right. If you were educated, you would have learnt about the numerous applications of particle physics in modern technologies.