Hacker News: rancar2

New comment by rancar2 in "How we learned to stop worrying and love campus surveillance"

rancar2 — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 01:35:39 +0000

I respect that the bling protest. I’d respect the writing to another level if they touch on some of the very public incidents that have happened in/around and associated with MIT, where this level of cost/security was even considered in the first place. This would open more dialog around better approaches as well.

New comment by rancar2 in "How we made claude.ai 3x faster in two weeks"

rancar2 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 20:48:52 +0000

Since I didn’t love the technical approach here (once one takes the humans out of the loop, there’s more ambitious things that can be done), I do appreciate the process. It’s not until the last sentence when process inspiration is revealed: “Special thanks to Boris Cherny for encouraging us to be more ambitious.”

New comment by rancar2 in "OpenAI is enlisting an influencer army to make it look 'good for the world'"

rancar2 — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:47:56 +0000

OpenAI is trying to level up their growth marketing to match Anthropic’s. Tactics in growth marketing (speaking from my experience leading in this space) are not public knowledge as it’s a cat-and-mouse game on multiple fronts (ie CAC goes up and changes the economics when a high ROI source is found, etc. etc. etc.), which makes hiring the right person vital as information asymmetries are where the ROI is (ie more revenue per dollar spent on marketing). Anthropic hired the right person for strategy and execution long ago in LLM-years, and there is a good podcast on the story here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/anthropics-1b-to-19b-grow...

New comment by rancar2 in "We must pace the frontier"

rancar2 — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 19:35:20 +0000

I think Dario is writing with much of these things in mind, but using this as a specific framed opportunity to enable a better interim and long-term outcome for this planet with us still on it. When the internal motives for Dario are fully shared on the other side of the hill, I think we will find his writing to be more about influencing and shaping policy to steer the world in the best way possible within his ability, control, and knowledge. It’s a commonly held believe with the effective altruism community, which Anthropic team was formed under, to use the policy levers to positively influence the world. If I read this latest writing from Dario through that lens, there are deeper concerns with the AI tooling that go well beyond what’s noted in this singular post and are likely the motivations for re-attempting a slowdown or pacing. I too generally agree with for many reasons like allowing the young OpenAI engineers to make mistakes like the Hugging Face incident in July and put better processes in place (ie where is your decent multi-level fencing controls and harness best practices when disabling security features and where is your energy/spend limits for achieving the mission objective in scope and not warming the world for no reason!) and more time to engineer and deploy better hardware to not warm the world instead of burning through fossil fuels since now data centers in the US can isolate pollution from the grid to exempt themselves from federal regulation.

New comment by rancar2 in "Gemini 3.8 Flash"

rancar2 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:56:38 +0000

That was sunset and replaced by Antigravity. FWIW until I abandoned it knowing the sunsetting, I was able to get good behavior out of Gemini CLI with overriding the system prompt. The default prompt crippled the harness with very poor instructions, but there was a hidden ENV to override it. Replacing it with Claude Code like prompts based on the model selected, it ran at a much higher intelligence level full stack with significantly less errors.

New comment by rancar2 in "We are rebuilding Monica"

rancar2 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 11:30:29 +0000

It may be a comforting idea to believe that our affection should require no assistance at all, and expect from all others that it should flow quite effortlessly from a caring mind. But human capacity, I have come to realize with both age, health, and genetic variations is rarely so simple a matter. When a person admits quite vulnerably that their memory falls short as the author has, yet their desire to care for their relationships remains entirely intact, there is something very moving in that alone. But to spend ten years quietly building as the author has is an act of love for people they care for are not lost to memory and forgotten in time.

New comment by rancar2 in "Controversial creators are benefiting from monetization programs run by Meta"

rancar2 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:22:22 +0000

It runs that global marketplace enabling this kind of trade per their internal 2024 documents quoted in the following article:

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

“Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.”

New comment by rancar2 in "Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation"

rancar2 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:33:18 +0000

Thanks for the clarification. I’m very happily wrong here, and I appreciate the correction. This does emphasize from an editorial review that the double meaning can be distracting for someone who isn’t very deep in the terminology of this particular area, so it may still be worth rewording the subheading for a broader audience which will be interested in this model.

New comment by rancar2 in "Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation"

rancar2 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:27:33 +0000

A bit of editorial and cultural note from a US native, the subsection of the original article “Teach discrimination, not memorization” is better worded as something like 'Differentiation' or 'Distinction' instead of ‘Discrimination’. In English, the word 'discrimination' can (and in this social context may) imply social prejudice or unfair treatment. I think this may have been a bit of carry over from the rather benign French translation of “Enseigner la discrimination" which I also see awkwardly translated in the paper as well.

New comment by rancar2 in "Mistral's Shieldstral: 3B open-weights model for multimodal moderation"

rancar2 — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:17:57 +0000

Having grown a large healthcare review platform, I can attest to the success we had mapping specific policy violations to natural language is incredibly useful. At scale, patients having terrible situations and/days can write about in ways that can be deeply unhealthy for the community or the doctors reading/receiving the feedback and sometimes very threatening beyond that purposes for the community. We built a custom ML engine to handle our levels of traffic for reviews, which was among the largest in the US typical ranking top 3 on Google for the domain keywords. Back when BERT was the edge, a policy-adaptive model like this one from Mistral would have been an incredible cold-start solution. Most sites never have the massive volume nor budget needed nor skillset needed before you can train domain-specific models that outperform OOTB solutions. Generally, most people and site mean well and try to do well, so empowering those people with models like this can help the collective in my opinion, so I’m happy to see this released in this manner myself.

New comment by rancar2 in "Apple targets dozens of OpenAI employees with legal letters"

rancar2 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:07:09 +0000

Oh the irony if Apple can get a larger OpenAI stake than Microsoft.

New comment by rancar2 in "Apple to increase spend with Broadcom to produce billions more U.S. chips"

rancar2 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 14:37:17 +0000

This is specifically finance language for budgeting and one of the better ways to speak about this given the public disclosure of this information is substantial for their publicly traded stock.

New comment by rancar2 in "Claude-real-video － any LLM can watch a video"

rancar2 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:59:02 +0000

It’s unclear if that’s intentional since it’s listed also under open source on the main company site: https://www.vlm.run/open-source/mm

New comment by rancar2 in "Show HN: Adrafinil – keep a lid-closed Mac awake only while agents work"

rancar2 — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 21:38:57 +0000

For MacOS, keep awake with:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 1

Reset back:

sudo pmset -a disablesleep 0

New comment by rancar2 in "Launch HN: BitBoard (YC P25) – Analytics Workspace for Agents"

rancar2 — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:25:55 +0000

I do exactly this (and more since my role is much broader and so is my approach) as a fractional head of product, data, and operations for multiple companies all in healthcare (fast growing self-funded to series D/IPOing soon). I saw your initial launch and felt validated by you all working on it, and now I’m further validated by the pivot. I have more work than I can handle, so I’m happy to share tips. You can find me via a bit of googling my HN handle or just adding a dot com to the end.

New comment by rancar2 in "The ways we contain Claude across products"

rancar2 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:03:24 +0000

From inspecting the Cowork VM, the pollution is not documented and not controllable (publicly known - I have workarounds). It creates a lot of waste and frustration in the process.

CLAUDE_CODE_ADDITIONAL_DIRECTORIES_CLAUDE_MD=1 means claude finds and loads all the CLAUDE.md of all the mounted repos overtime (and by settings). As such, working on multiple unrelated repos at the same time isn’t a pleasant experience out of the box.

A few other interesting VM ENVs: CLAUDE_CODE_IS_COWORK=1 CLAUDE_CODE_BRIEF=1 CLAUDE_CODE_BRIEF_UPLOAD=1 CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_AUTO_MEMORY=1 CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_BACKGROUND_TASKS=1 CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_CRON=1 CLAUDE_CODE_ENTRYPOINT=local-agent CLAUDE_CODE_EXECPATH=/usr/local/bin/claude CLAUDE_CODE_HOST_HTTP_PROXY_PORT=36543 CLAUDE_CODE_HOST_PLATFORM=darwin CLAUDE_CODE_HOST_SOCKS_PROXY_PORT=46673 USE_STAGING_OAUTH= _=/usr/bin/env all_proxy=socks5h://localhost:1080 ftp_proxy=socks5h://localhost:1080 grpc_proxy=socks5h://localhost:1080 http_proxy=http://localhost:3128 https_proxy=http://localhost:3128 no_proxy=localhost,127.0.0.1,::1,.local,.local,169.254.0.0/16,10.0.0.0/8,172.16.0.0/12,192.168.0.0/16

New comment by rancar2 in "Benchmarking SurrealDB 3.x vs. Postgres, Mongo, Neo4j and Redis (With Fsync)"

rancar2 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 15:42:08 +0000

Can you push the results in a benchmark repo under the GitHub account linked from the parent Readme of the project?

The full transparency would be very helpful to know where these strengths are coming from which at a glance look to be multi-threaded in-memory processing.

New comment by rancar2 in "I am retiring from tech to live offline"

rancar2 — Fri, 29 May 2026 15:22:09 +0000

Hi Fellow HN tech community, I’ve had the honor to digitally interact with Chad Whitacre, and from the first exchange to the subsequent ones over the months, he’s a good human. Chad provided a healthy, human-first approach to the most fundamental areas of free software. He possesses a deep understanding of how we all do better together. He is a person to celebrate for all the ways he was and is. Chad made our online lives richer by his ways of being. Cheers to Chad and his continued living as a good human!

New comment by rancar2 in "How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers"

rancar2 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:19:25 +0000

Ivan worked at Align and was CTO of European DTC competitor. I agree with Ivan that both technologies have their sweet spot. I disagree with the scale piece and the frequency of visits as there are practices doing both those things differently using the placement and remote monitoring technology.

For younger patients that haven’t had braces before which is the majority of historical patient populations and future ones, 3D printed personalized braces systems are better as the tooth movement needed is more clinically substantial at tougher angles. Many younger patients forget and lose their plastic aligners.

That said: what is chosen should be what for the whole person at multiple levels.

New comment by rancar2 in "How Invisalign became the biggest user of 3D printers"

rancar2 — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:40:07 +0000

This isn’t the case with 3D printed bracket systems. Studies have shown that the 3D personalized bracket system from LightForce will cut down treatment time over 40%. The refinement phase is also spot on and finishes much faster, and recent studies have shown further improvements. Also, the more complex the case, the larger the delta on the performance. Not all orthos are practicing this way but this is where the future is going whether it is LightForce or another company. The physics just works out better than the best plastics.

Disclaimer: I’m a health nerd and was an employee a couple years ago.