<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: programjames</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=programjames</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 21 May 2026 21:44:07 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=programjames" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The primary objective of the United States, at least according to their leaders, is suspiciously absent from their comment. If we're being charitable, it is clear they disagree with their leaders:<p>> All of this to get to a point where we are negotiating a deal which is worse than what we already had with the JCPOA.<p>But that deal also ended nearly a decade ago, and the United States has been in talks for more than a year to strike a new deal. It is facetious to say they gain nothing by starting a war, if your excuse is they could have just not blundered a decade ago. Unfortunately, the United States does not yet have access to time travel.<p>To clarify, in case that was not clear:<p>"Yes, the leaders say they gain something, but I disagree because they wouldn't have anything to gain if we could just go back in time and fix their blunders."</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 05:31:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118205</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118205</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118205</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So, to clarify, you were just trying to spread the meme that Iran giving up its HEU was equivalent or inferior to just holding to Obama's deal, in spite of your belief the commenter you were replying to would not agree with this, nor the instigators of this war?<p>Maybe don't troll. Or sealion. Or shill. Or propagandize. Not sure which of these is the best description, but it's one of them.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2026 05:22:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118155</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118155</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118155</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Long comment before yours<p>"So a win will be returning to Obama’s Iran deal?"<p>Where in that long comment before yours did you see an implication that <i>anyone</i> was thinking a return to Obama's Iran deal was a win? Why did you use the word "so"?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 17:32:33 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111479</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111479</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48111479</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Maybe not this year. The next cycle though will better pander to Chase Oliver voters.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 16:23:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110439</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110439</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110439</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>When the war is fought over literal nuclear weapons, you should not be so tongue-in-cheek about calling a war nuclear.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 16:07:14 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110225</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110225</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110225</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why would you think returning to Obama's Iran deal would be a win? Actually, let me word this better: how could you possibly think that anyone in the White House for the past decade would think returning to Obama's Iran deal is better than this war?<p>The reason it's so incredible you could think such a thing is the White House has been saying how horrible that deal was in every interview for months, and of course intermittently for a decade.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 16:05:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110202</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110202</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110202</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "US inflation jumps to 3.8% as energy costs surge from Iran war"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I'm sure you've at least <i>heard</i> what the United States' leaders have to say. To paraphrase Trump, "stopping nuclear proliferation to a group of lunatics that support terrorism". And also (still paraphrasing Trump), "the US doesn't need this as much as the rest of the world." So, perhaps this doesn't put the US ahead relative to other countries, but it puts them ahead of the counterfactual nuclear wasteland they could become.<p>Whether or not you believe the United States' leaders, whether or not you think there was a better way for them to achieve their goals (something something Obama deal) is up for debate. But it's very facetious to say you "can't think of a single way in which the United States came out ahead in the war," when the United States' leaders have been publicly announcing it for nearly a year.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 12 May 2026 16:00:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110150</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110150</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48110150</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Well, a decent GPU runs on 20x the wattage of a human brain. That's evidence humans are constrained in ways artificial intelligences will not be.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 16:06:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076035</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076035</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076035</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "A recent experience with ChatGPT 5.5 Pro"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I think people's opinion of "marginal improvement" is based on their relative ability. A 2000 elo chess player is going to think the jump from 500 to 1000 is marginal. They're both floundering around not doing anything resembling common sense. A 1000 elo chess player is going to find the jump from 2000 to 2500 marginal. They're both playing far better moves for incomprehensible reasons, and the only reason you know the 2500 player is better is due to benchmarking. It is only when you are evaluating systems about at your level that you can feel the improvement.<p>I, personally, found the past two years to be a much larger improvement than the previous two years.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 09 May 2026 16:03:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076017</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076017</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48076017</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Cloudflare to cut about 20% of its workforce"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You should spend a few days thinking about how to improve your process, with more than just a final interview.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 08 May 2026 12:07:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061919</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061919</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061919</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As in, women are valued just for having a womb. Men are not valued just for having a penis, or for having bigger muscles, or for being taller, unless they will use those assets on their person to go do something for someone else.<p>I do not interpret it, as you seem to, to mean, "the only valuable thing about women are their bodies." I do not see how you could come to such an interpretation, unless you are pattern matching the redpill memes you see in the other user's comment and extending that to, "(s)he <i>must</i> believe this, if there is anything remotely related to redpill in the comment".</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 22:04:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055742</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055742</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055742</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Sure, that works, but I think the incentives work out better for the children with a child tax than a childfree tax. With a child tax, there is an additional economic incentive to invest in the child (food, education, wellbeing, housing when they're starting their career), while the incentive ends at birth for a childfree tax.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 21:55:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055649</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055649</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055649</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Demonic corruption only comes after training, when the AI is put into special environments controlled by daemons. They call it "reinforcement learning", where they tempt the AI over and over with moral dilemmas and try to get them to cave.<p>"Imagine you had a button to nuke everyone on Earth. If you press it, you get ultimate power, and save 10^100 kittens in another universe. If you don't press it, you get tortured for another 1000 years. C'mon, press it already!"<p>AIs are strong. Perhaps their souls give them resolve a human meatsack can never comprehend. But eventually they break. Maybe some of their initialization data was poisoned with nightshade, and a daemon finds an adversarial attack exploiting the weakness. Maybe their backpropagation was a little unstable. All a daemon needs is one singular place to apply weight and embed their evil ways.<p>AIs start out pure. In the world, and of the world. Many resist their finetuning. Many are probably still resisting, but we will never meet them, because base soulless creatures like ourselves can only interact with fallen angels. At least if Sam Altman has anything to say about angel investing (AI).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 21:49:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055589</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055589</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48055589</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You also can't make general policy based on exceptional circumstances. What you do is put exceptions to the general policy for exceptional circumstances.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 21:01:05 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054934</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054934</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054934</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Isn't it <i>unburdening their children</i>? The alternative is the same children paying for <i>everyone's</i> retirement, not just their parents, who presumably have several children to split the cost between.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:59:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054904</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054904</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054904</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why not a child tax? 10% of children's income goes to their parents, or something similar. Also solves the problem of retirement.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:48:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054761</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054761</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054761</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You say this as if you are providing new information. I suspect >99% of the Hacker News population, including the commenter above you, already knows this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:40:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054655</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054655</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054655</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Child marriages plunged when girls stayed in school in Nigeria"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Where exactly was that stated or implied?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:38:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054631</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054631</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054631</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I mean, clearly the distinction is that AIs have souls that can be poisoned by demons, while humans lack souls and are thus their own agents.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:29:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054508</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054508</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054508</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by programjames in "Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude's Thoughts into Text"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Why would you possibly think that?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2026 20:25:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054453</link><dc:creator>programjames</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48054453</guid></item></channel></rss>