Hacker News: ruffrey

New comment by ruffrey in "Miscellanea: The War in Iran"

ruffrey — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:30:14 +0000

China is a primary adversary for the US. Oil is a major resource for both countries, supporting economics and defense.

First, observe the top 10 oil reserve countries:

1. Venezuela: ~303–304 billion barrels (mostly heavy crude) 2. Saudi Arabia: ~267 billion barrels 3. Iran: ~208–209 billion barrels 4. Canada: ~163–170 billion barrels (mostly oil sands) 5. Iraq: ~145–147 billion barrels 6. United Arab Emirates (UAE): ~111–113 billion barrels 7. Kuwait: ~101 billion barrels 8. Russia: ~80–110 billion barrels (estimates vary) 9. United States: ~40–70 billion barrels (reserves fluctuate with prices/technology) 10. Libya: ~48 billion barrels

China is the world's largest oil importer. Stats are hard, things get mislabeled due to sanctions, but somewhere between 15%-20% of China's oil is-or-was from Iran+Venezuela.

In my view, this partially explains the move in Iran, considering a 3-10 year strategic timeline.

New comment by ruffrey in "Man accidentally gains control of 7k robot vacuums"

ruffrey — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 16:40:27 +0000

At what point do these security flaws come with a criminal level of negligence? This isn't intended to be an inflammatory or angry comment. It is a genuine question.

New comment by ruffrey in "The United States withdraws from UNESCO"

ruffrey — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 15:20:54 +0000

I've been toying with the following attempt to explain all this:

- Information bubbles (this is the top issue, and it's really incredibly persuasive)

- Geographic location and social environment

- Lack of time to deeply evaluate truth vs noise and consider multiple sides of an issue

- Conviction of values - how much does a person believe their values are tied to the political view (leads to subtly drawing emotional conclusions and implicitly trusting a political party)

- Belief that due to one's own intelligence, one is not subject to propaganda (a clearly false belief that many smart people fall into)

Deep emotional awareness is not as strongly related to intelligence as people think.

New comment by ruffrey in "Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge"

ruffrey — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 15:29:35 +0000

Two of the top AI companies flouted ethics with regard to training data. In OpenAI's case, the whistleblower probably got whacked for exposing it.

Can anyone make a compelling argument that any of these AI companies have the public's best interest in mind (alignment/superalignment)?

New comment by ruffrey in "Gemini CLI"

ruffrey — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 14:54:04 +0000

Thanks, Google. A bit of feedback - integration with `gcloud` CLI auth would have been appreciated.

New comment by ruffrey in "Ground control to Major Trial"

ruffrey — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:44:52 +0000

I have a theory this happens because for individual contributors, the effort to buy SaaS software in the era of "vendor risk assessment" is a nightmare. So you end up with grassroots avoidance of that process, at all costs, inside the company.

New comment by ruffrey in "Ground control to Major Trial"

ruffrey — Fri, 16 May 2025 13:41:08 +0000

As a solo-founder I have experienced this on a massive scale over nearly 15 years. It's really strange how happy people are with unethical behavior, yet on my end it just doesn't feel right to cut off peoples systems. After multiple attempts to contact them, we will often disable their accounts. It is against the social contract. It is stealing. In many cases companies may have 15+ free trial accounts, the company itself absolutely dwarfs our 3-person company. The cost is beans for them. But they just don't care.

New comment by ruffrey in "AI Avatars Escape the Uncanny Valley"

ruffrey — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 14:57:57 +0000

As exciting as the last couple years have been in the AI space, I totally agree.

There was an advertisement on Twitter a few years ago for Google Home. It was a video where a parent was putting their child to bed, and they said, "Ok Google, read Goodnight Moon."

It felt like a window into a viscerally dystopian future where we outsource human interaction to an AI.

New comment by ruffrey in "Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)"

ruffrey — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:25:11 +0000

As I recall, many of his early stories involved "U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men" which was a huge conglomerate owning a lot of the market on AI (called "robots" by Asimov, it included "Multivac" and other interfaces besides humanoid robots).

New comment by ruffrey in "Show HN: I made a C program to create a vanity SHA-1 hash for a text file"

ruffrey — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:07:13 +0000

"scalable"

Interview with Mother of OpenAI Whistleblower

ruffrey — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 17:21:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kev_-HyuI9Y

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42728128

Points: 14

# Comments: 0

New comment by ruffrey in "After 30 years, FDA overhauls guideline for the claim "healthy" on food packages"

ruffrey — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 16:46:35 +0000

If you look at the table and do the math to convert obfuscated units, a 3/4 ounce serving of “whole grains” may have 5g of added sugar, which is 5/21.26 g or 23.5% added sugar.

This seems like an obvious problem to me. Despite some progress with adding nuts and salmon.

US LLCs must file new report with Treasury FinCEN or risk prison

ruffrey — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 16:53:41 +0000

Article URL: https://fincen.gov/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42329925

Points: 35

# Comments: 42

New comment by ruffrey in "Pushing the frontiers of audio generation"

ruffrey — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 18:02:56 +0000

> This means it generates audio over 40-times faster than real time.

Astounding

New comment by ruffrey in "Microsoft said it lost weeks of security logs for its customers' cloud products"

ruffrey — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 16:18:26 +0000

Let's to forget this long article from just over a month ago, outlining Microsoft's failings and seemingly willful neglect regarding cybersecurity overseas. https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/bombshell-allegations-th...

New comment by ruffrey in "I've built my first successful side project, and I hate it"

ruffrey — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 16:39:12 +0000

I strongly relate to this post. Having grown mailsac.com to above average side project revenue, the admin overhead isn't crazy, but it's exceptionally repetitive and boring. So much time is spent on fraud and normal "running the business" really sucks the enjoyment out of a side project (for me as an engineer). I think that having a side project co-founder who is a relentless business operator is more important than having a decent technologist.

New comment by ruffrey in "Kim Dotcom's extradition to the U.S. given green light by New Zealand"

ruffrey — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 15:42:01 +0000

I believe it could be surprising because a person's government has turned them over to a foreign government where they have no representation. The foreign government is not governed by the same Constitution, Bill of Rights, laws, or checks and balances. A core cultural understanding in the US is the rule of law and right of representation in a government by-and-for the people. It could seem like a loophole where the US government can forcibly remove a person's rights.

New comment by ruffrey in "Ask HN: Has anyone successfully pivoted from web dev to AI/ML development?"

ruffrey — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 17:00:58 +0000

I pivoted from "full stack" to a software and infra engineer on an AI team. There was some luck involved, but I believe it helped that I'd taken some courses. I am not one of the data scientists, but work very closely with them. This seems like a good path to full time data science.

New comment by ruffrey in "Researchers invent 100% biodegradable 'barley plastic'"

ruffrey — Wed, 26 Jun 2024 01:04:24 +0000

There is a company called Genomatica that is working on this problem specifically for 20 years, and has started to gain ground. Turning waste sugar into nylon plastic and other products.

New comment by ruffrey in "Email.ml – Minimalist Temporary Email"

ruffrey — Sat, 25 May 2024 15:24:34 +0000

The temp email services which support custom domains help. For example, Mailsac.com. But it has pivoted to more focus as a dev and qa platform.