Hacker News: rexer

New comment by rexer in "There Goes the American Muscle Car"

rexer — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 22:19:05 +0000

What would an EV muscle car look like? Tesla Model 3 seems to check a lot of boxes. Definitely not noise or muscle car power delivery, but those seems like unrealistic goals for an EV

New comment by rexer in "Building AI products in the probabilistic era"

rexer — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 04:09:54 +0000

Truly appreciate the perspective. Any pointers to previous work on dealing with stochastic systems from the past? Part of my work is securing AI workloads, and it seems like losing determinism throws out a lot of assumptions in previously accepted approaches.

New comment by rexer in "Building AI products in the probabilistic era"

rexer — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 21:08:43 +0000

I read the full article (really resonated with it, fwiw), and I'm struggling to understand the issues you're describing.

> Yes of course relationship questions don’t have a “correct” answer. But physics questions do. Code vulnerability questions do. Math questions do. I mean seriously?

Can you say more? It seems to me the article says the same thing you are.

> I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me? “Instead of planning we observe and hypothesize”?

I think the author is drawing a connection to the world of science, specifically quantum mechanics, where the best way to make progress has been to describe and test theories (as opposed to math where we have proofs). Though it's not a great analog since LLMs are not probabilistic in the same way quantum mechanics is.

In any case, I appreciated the article because it talks through a shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems that I've been seeing in my work.

New comment by rexer in "Vendors that treat single sign-on as a luxury feature"

rexer — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 22:51:28 +0000

Framing is everything, though. See complaints around Tesla pricing for the same battery hardware with different software.

New comment by rexer in "Facial recognition vans to be rolled out across police forces in England"

rexer — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 01:37:39 +0000

I think they agree with you. Did you read the second paragraph?

New comment by rexer in "Global hack on Microsoft Sharepoint hits U.S., state agencies, researchers say"

rexer — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:42:24 +0000

You’re implying any real system can have a single top priority, which is equally false. There are always multiple priorities, and the one sitting at the top changes based on the context

New comment by rexer in "Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase"

rexer — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 15:24:35 +0000

Some of the unemployment metrics do include folks not actively looking for work: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

> We really need better ways of measuring economic health.

What would that look like to you? It seems to me no single, measurable metric is going to tell you economic health. They're a bunch of indicators that need to be interpreted.

New comment by rexer in "The Journey of Bypassing Ubuntu's Unprivileged Namespace Restriction"

rexer — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 03:03:29 +0000

> I've never not edited or scrapped it the next day.

There's definitely a balance. Showing a little emotion can be a good thing, necessary even

New comment by rexer in "U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites"

rexer — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 04:15:33 +0000

Do you think Iran will have nukes in the near (20 years, just to put a number) term? Your position really only makes sense if that's not the case. By whatever means, the goal now seems to be to prevent that.

> I don't think we have a better option

I'd love help getting on board with this

New comment by rexer in "If you are useful, it doesn't mean you are valued"

rexer — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:51:14 +0000

Certainly there’s a feedback loop, impossible to say which came first

New comment by rexer in "From OpenAPI spec to MCP: How we built Xata's MCP server"

rexer — Wed, 28 May 2025 02:34:20 +0000

I think this downplays the security issue. It's true that scoping the token correctly would prevent this exploit, but it's not a reasonable solution under the assumptions that are taken by the designers of MCP. LLM+MCP is intended to be ultra flexible, and requiring a new (differently scoped) token for each input is not flexible.

Perhaps you could have an allow/deny popup whenever the LLM wanted to interact with a service. But I think the end state there is presenting the user a bunch of metadata about the operation, which the user then needs to reason about. I don't know that's much better; those OAuth prompts are generally click throughs for users.

New comment by rexer in "MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0"

rexer — Sat, 24 May 2025 01:03:05 +0000

It’s at least restricted to http servers. Certainly more once you include domain specific conventions

New comment by rexer in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

rexer — Wed, 21 May 2025 19:46:55 +0000

Odd. Your take is the one I see most common on HN. My experience has been that Reddit has gone mainstream and most people find it quite valuable

New comment by rexer in "The Wright brothers invented the airplane, right? Not if you're in Brazil"

rexer — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 20:16:17 +0000

> being aware of that is crucial in having the right perspective on inventors.

Can you go a step further on why the right perspective here is important?

Feels like you’re telling a kid Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Why kill the magic?

New comment by rexer in "Made a scroll bar buddy that walks down the page when you scroll"

rexer — Mon, 03 Mar 2025 02:38:21 +0000

Maybe a raindrop? Anyone else cheer for raindrop races as a kid on long drives?

An apple falling on to Newton's head.

Fun to think about!

New comment by rexer in "Mexico issues legal threat to Google"

rexer — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 05:33:14 +0000

> name more commonly accepted internationally

How do you determine this?

Does each country get one vote? One vote per citizen? Who's responsible for making that determination?

New comment by rexer in "The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago"

rexer — Sun, 12 Jan 2025 16:43:35 +0000

This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?

The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

New comment by rexer in "Performance improvement plans are on the rise"

rexer — Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:05:55 +0000

I think the trouble is that most teams don’t need this level of performance. They don’t need the top .0001%. Those teams are the edge cases not even worth talking about.

And more importantly, not the ones you want to model your team after.

New comment by rexer in "Gladiator Style Interviewing"

rexer — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 23:28:58 +0000

> Measured against what

Nothing I don’t think. The average is of the two scores: attitude and aptitude. The average of the two must be at least 7.

Unless you’re taking about how each interviewer calibrates. In which case it’s common for interviewers to be coached on how to rate candidates. Your calibration indeed seems too harsh for this parents system

New comment by rexer in "Is the Shoplifting "Crisis" Over?"

rexer — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 20:46:38 +0000

Some qualifiers would be helpful to engage with you. Certainly threat of punishment shouldn’t be the only motivator in a healthy society, but it probably needs to be one.