Hacker News: ralph84

New comment by ralph84 in "Big Tech's Capex Is Half of Wall Street's Profit Growth"

ralph84 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:54:57 +0000

> valuations become increasingly dependent on future expectations

Valuations are always dependent on future expectations. What else would they be based on? That's one of the main functions of a stock market: providing price discovery via competing buyers and sellers placing bets on the expected future economic prospects of companies. Of course fraud interferes with price discovery, but again, where is the evidence of fraud?

New comment by ralph84 in "Big Tech's Capex Is Half of Wall Street's Profit Growth"

ralph84 — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:34:57 +0000

Enron was massive accounting fraud. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is your evidence of accounting fraud? "Lots of companies investing lots of money into AI and it might not work out" isn't fraud.

New comment by ralph84 in "Winning the visa lottery"

ralph84 — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 05:28:50 +0000

> Cmd-F housing

> not found

Yet another chamber of commerce article clamoring for more cheap labor without addressing where all of these people are supposed to live.

New comment by ralph84 in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

ralph84 — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:23:57 +0000

People working multiple jobs in the western world have some reason beyond "basic survival". Supporting other people, living in a desirable location, or like the vast majority of people they want to make enough money to go beyond basic survival because basic survival is low status. Which is why the idea that all we have to do is give people enough money for a basic survival lifestyle and they'll be happy and spend the rest of their time on things with perceived aesthetic value like math research is the insane take.

New comment by ralph84 in "Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter"

ralph84 — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 20:14:07 +0000

It's very unlikely anyone with the intelligence to contribute to math research can't already find a non-hectic job that provides for their basic survival. People choose hectic jobs because they want to do better than basic survival.

New comment by ralph84 in "We got admin access to Baseten's production GitHub in 25 minutes"

ralph84 — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 21:58:59 +0000

The researcher in this case was doing a security review for their company who was a potential customer. Sending potential customers more than a token amount of cash is usually prohibited by corporate ethics rules for obvious reasons.

New comment by ralph84 in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

ralph84 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:57:20 +0000

I see how it can be devastating to their ego, but no, I don't see a particular difference in a company spending money for clout vs. a person spending time for clout. The underlying motivation is the same.

New comment by ralph84 in "A misalignment of AI in mathematics"

ralph84 — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 22:13:38 +0000

> primarily as a marketing exercise

Like the mathematicians working on famous problems in private until they could claim full credit for something interesting wasn't also a marketing exercise for their own careers. The commercial value (or lack thereof) of a proof doesn't depend on whether it was done by a human or a machine.

New comment by ralph84 in "iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max"

ralph84 — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 06:12:41 +0000

It could be as simple as Apple committed to a certain volume with Qualcomm before they were certain they could get mmWave working so they have to keep using Qualcomm modems somewhere while they burn down the commitment.

New comment by ralph84 in "Tao: Open math problems being non-renewably mined by AI"

ralph84 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 01:55:50 +0000

Nobody owns math and it is ridiculous to suggest someone should.

New comment by ralph84 in "Reasons robotics is hard"

ralph84 — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 03:41:07 +0000

Not sure about that. Labor costs are lower in China and the CCP is strongly incentivized to keep enough jobs around for humans to maintain their own hold on power.

New comment by ralph84 in "Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX"

ralph84 — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 08:44:58 +0000

5% of traffic. OpenAI models are a much higher percentage of revenue.

New comment by ralph84 in "Bye, Bye GitHub"

ralph84 — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:59:53 +0000

What frontier model did GitHub train? All of the frontier labs scraped GitHub like they scraped everything else. While GitHub has certainly tried to profit from AI, directing ire at GitHub for frontier labs training on public code seems misplaced.

New comment by ralph84 in "I teach calculus at Berkeley. Some of my students can't do middle school math"

ralph84 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 02:02:52 +0000

This does not align at all with what is happening in public California high schools and colleges, which is what TFA is about.

New comment by ralph84 in "The AI Credit Resale Economy"

ralph84 — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 17:51:07 +0000

Or API rates are their way of doing price discrimination and it's all profitable. Make sure Enterprises(tm) pay the Enterprise(tm) rate, but mop up the rest of the demand too at lower price points. This has been part of the software playbook for decades.

New comment by ralph84 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

ralph84 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:16:45 +0000

No one? Mutual funds have managed to attract $33 trillion trading once a day. The demand for millisecond-level trading is almost entirely from a very small group of firms profiting from it.

New comment by ralph84 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

ralph84 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 06:15:43 +0000

Or you could just hold auctions a few times per day and eliminate the billions of dollars spent trying to win a pointless race.

New comment by ralph84 in "Jane Street suffers $15B hit after meltdown at Situational Awareness"

ralph84 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 05:27:57 +0000

Yeah, the stock market may be positive sum over the long-term, but it's certainly zero sum over the millisecond-term. Whether it's "retail" or "institutional" that is paying for HFT profits, it's all retail in the end.

New comment by ralph84 in "Grok Bot"

ralph84 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 06:14:39 +0000

How does per-seat pricing work against bots? If anything it's a great deal because SaaS providers set per-seat pricing with the expectation that on average most seats are idle. Bots working 24x7 can get a lot more value out of a seat than humans working 9-5.

New comment by ralph84 in "What Happened to HackerOne?"

ralph84 — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 04:25:13 +0000

Presidents club is a standard way to reward top performing sales reps across many industries. It doesn't indicate anything other than the company is trying to reward and retain their top sales reps. Engineers who find it distasteful should be happy to know engineers typically get way more equity than sales reps.