Hacker News: recursivecaveat

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Seven Perfect Shuffles Randomize a Deck of Cards. But How Many Sloppy Ones?"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:35:45 +0000

Magic the gathering has this problem. You have 2 types of cards, and drawing an imbalanced mixture is pretty detrimental. During play you tend to sort them into 2 piles though. Consequently it's a not uncommon sight to see people manually interweaving their cards after a match, then shuffling. Logically, this is either pointless or cheating depending on the quality of that shuffle, but people do it anyways haha.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Semiclassical Gravity Efficiently Solves NP-Complete Problems"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 04:22:49 +0000

I feel like there's some hidden complexity there. For any finite flat surface there's a point where not all the spaghetti will fit on it simultaneously. So you have to do O(N) compression steps to find the bundle with the long strand. Locating the strand within the bundle also seems non-trivial if it's big enough. Both are easier to see if you start thinking about scaling to sorting like, square miles of spaghetti at a time.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Ask HN: Do you remember when you gained consciousness? What was it like?"

recursivecaveat — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 05:58:55 +0000

"Childhood amnesia" its called. Around 3 is usually when people start to be able to remember anything at all, and then 4.5-5 years your memory becomes more normal. I definitely have at least one memory verifiable from before 4, possibly a few more if I did some sleuthing with people who knew toddler me, but all of them are attached to pretty major life events.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "US Air Force B-52 bomber crashes after takeoff, Edwards Air Force Base says"

recursivecaveat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 23:20:08 +0000

I would guess that when you are training you are still doing activities that are not as safe as just traveling from point A to B: flying low, pointing the nose at the ground, landing a helicopter in a less than ideal spot (it seems like half of those are helicopters), etc. That hypothesis doesn't really apply well to transport planes or B52s though. Military pilots probably spend a higher overall fraction of their flying career as trainees?

New comment by recursivecaveat in "The rich aren't your role models"

recursivecaveat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 06:09:13 +0000

It's usually not that different from just amount * marginal market value, such that its not generally worth worrying about the distinction. The main reasons you can't dump 1 trillion dollars of stock at once is it would be difficult to find enough buyer capital quickly, and announcing your intention to do that is going to drop the price as you're implying an overvaluation.

Both of those problems can be solved if you just do it slowly in a pre-announced manner. A trillion is a thousand billions, so you could cash out 1 billion dollars annually until the 30th century assuming zero growth/inflation. So unless you're really worried about the optics of selling 0.1% of your holdings, or plan to spend more than 1 billion a year outside your business, you're not really constrained.

Everything is liquid in a long enough time horizon. It just depends on what you mean by liquidating. Like do I have to sell my house today? In a week? Months? More flexibility = more value.

For Musk the situation is definitely more extreme though. Since a significant part of that valuation is attached to him owning it, he would definitely take an abnormal level of haircut. Probably an unknowable investor sentiment question though.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed"

recursivecaveat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:10:56 +0000

I think it was a pretty common pre-modern (not by any means extinct today) academic view that the arc of history was generally towards the decline of civilizations. Like our ancestors were great and amazing and we're just kindof pale imitations of them. It probably doesn't hurt that when the two most important sources of authority in your society are noble title/blood and religion, your ancestors are much closer connected to the source of those.

Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware"

recursivecaveat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:17:52 +0000

In particular: *all the knowledge that AI has of nuclear weapons is freely available on the internet*. It's not superhuman, and there's no secret sauce data. If you just study the same PDFs and blog posts it has, you will acquire the same abilities. I cannot imagine anyone with the intent and immense financial and political resources to actually build a weapon would say that some study time is the only thing stopping them from detonating a nuke.

It is pretty convenient for the labs to frame the conversation around this though, since it is easy to address, very few paying customers are rejected, and sounds scary (so surely the less scary sounding stuff must be solved right?)

New comment by recursivecaveat in "AI agent bankrupted their operator while trying to scan DN42"

recursivecaveat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:47:30 +0000

Yeah I'm less sympathetic when you are bothering other humans by spamming them and asking them to do legwork for you.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "OpenAI mulls slashing prices as it competes with Anthropic for users"

recursivecaveat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:43:25 +0000

Yeah they can probably be almost entirely depreciated within 2-3 years, and pretty substantially front-loaded within that. Like, the expensive part of being a CPU company is making new ones, but Intel can't exactly just rest on their laurels and sell Pentiums for the rest of time.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "'8647' etched into grass on the National Mall"

recursivecaveat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 01:31:50 +0000

Wow, the parks police, the secret service, and the national guard. They must have consulted with the department of government efficiency on how to cost effectively investigate dead grass.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "US-Canada border library gets new Quebec-only entrance"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 21:03:10 +0000

You realize that the library is not like a portal right? It's just a building that happens to be on the invisible line. If you wanted to cross the border you could just travel to any point along the countless miles of uninhabited wilderness outside the town and walk across.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:22:13 +0000

Part of it is just expectations btw. If the value of money is jumping up and down rapidly it is bad for business. Like if I'm going to sell you a 30 year fixed rate mortgage we require an accurate expectation of future inflation for one of us not to effectively lose their shirt on the deal. Imagine shops shuffling their prices up and down constantly, unions renegotiating contracts all the time, you sign up for 12 months of netflix but the price implicitly assumes that money will be worth N% less by month 12, etc. (imo a lot of these things should already be pegged, but people don't like doing that) It's basically just much more annoying to transact using a currency whose future value is unpredictable. So given that 2% is the stated target, which expectations are presumably largely built around, significant deviation is a failure to manage that process.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:04:37 +0000

The dollars going into your account are worth less than before. The ultimate destiny of all money is to be spent on goods/services eventually, and the amount of goods/services your salary can purchase is net (5-3)% less than the year before. Invested, spent, willed, donated, it doesn't matter, the money is already worth 2% less when it enters your hands. (Worth noting that CoL increase is not exactly equal to inflation, you could experience a local CoL increase without inflation if say your town becomes a popular destination which raises rents)

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

recursivecaveat — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:22:20 +0000

Letter dated Feb 28th 2000, NASDAQ would hit the peak of the bubble March 10th.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Police in England and Wales told to halt AI use in court statements"

recursivecaveat — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:24:57 +0000

Yeah, suppose a self-driving car is say twice as likely to crash as the average human (which could already be considered unfair since that includes like drunk humans and people who should've already lost their license). That means to monitor it's driving you will need to wait 25,000 hours until an accident occurs. That's ~ 12 straight years of a 9-5 spent sitting, doing absolutely nothing, just watching in a state of theoretical vigilance.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "The Case for Space Datacenters"

recursivecaveat — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:01:50 +0000

Even if you limit yourself to the 48 states, it's hard to believe there's 0 counties happy to take you. Just about anywhere terrestrial is cheaper to transport to than riding a giant bottle of explosives at $1500/kg. Politicians are generally pretty cheap actually, and so far they've been willing to make some pretty generous tax concessions to attract data centers.

How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture's Traditions (2015)

recursivecaveat — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:53:26 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150130-ebola-virus-outbreak-epidemic-sierra-leone-funerals-1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48426746

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by recursivecaveat in "AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford"

recursivecaveat — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:16:51 +0000

I don't think you will achieve much that way. Suppose you pair me with a plumber, an area I know almost nothing about. The plumber is not able to finish anything 'trickier' because they have an ignoramus looking over their shoulder. Maybe I can learn some things by watching, having things explained to me as they work. On the other hand if I just walk away there's no way to tell from the final product. You gotta learn the fundamentals to at least a comparable level to be able to contribute. Same reason you couldn't just google everything on your phone in calculus.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Why _Am_ I Interested in Your Company?"

recursivecaveat — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 21:52:46 +0000

Many times I have seen people's answers to this question be a factor in which projects they are targeted for by the way. Not every question is necessarily a 'filter' per se. That said I think in truth a lot of this genre of questions fulfill a similar kind of purpose to the 'waiter rule' of dating. Anybody who can't spin together 30s of polite smalltalk about how they're interested in the role to get a job may be very difficult to work with.

New comment by recursivecaveat in "Warm up your MacBook (2019)"

recursivecaveat — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:57:12 +0000

My Intel MBP would noticeably raise the whole room's temperature, while the fans ran so loud. We had some corporate security software that would occasionally go haywire and lock up 100% of a core until you rebooted. If you got that at the same time as a video call it would become too physically painful to touch any part of the metal body with bare skin.