Hacker News: serhei

New comment by serhei in "Our position on open-weights models"

serhei — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 23:45:02 +0000

There are... multiple blog posts online now about how to use freely available data and modest amounts of compute to train a custom GPT-2-sized model from scratch. It would be quite a policing effort to prevent.

Installing debugging tools into a Red Hat OpenShift container with oc-inject

serhei — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 17:07:38 +0000

Article URL: https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2020/01/15/installing-debugging-tools-into-a-red-hat-openshift-container-with-oc-inject/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22055961

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by serhei in "Skype Vanishes from App Stores in China, Including Apple’s"

serhei — Tue, 21 Nov 2017 18:54:22 +0000

Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:

"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."

New comment by serhei in "Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout"

serhei — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:12:01 +0000

It's still completely illogical to install an update just to wait for another update to fix the problems introduced by the first update.

New comment by serhei in "Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout"

serhei — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 17:08:09 +0000

Apple has had a planned-obsolescence approach for years and years [1], but with the way software used to be distributed and the consumer expectations on hardware design it was less of a problem before. If you want to keep using an old Mac, there are plenty of OS install disks, copies of old shareware floating around, sites like Low End Mac which document what works and what doesn't. The hardware was also usually more repairable. I'm worried that current Macs in the age of App Store OS updates and glued battery will be rendered into expensive paperweights that much more certainly when Apple withdraws support.

[1]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Diagnostic_Port.... -- "[Steve] would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party."

New comment by serhei in "There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It"

serhei — Sat, 18 Nov 2017 01:51:17 +0000

You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.

New comment by serhei in "Let’s improve commuter rail service between Providence and Boston"

serhei — Tue, 14 Nov 2017 15:21:32 +0000

Yes, that was a typo on my part. Lake Ontario lengthens any NY-Toronto train line. Lake Erie lengthens any NY-Detroit train line.

New comment by serhei in "Let’s improve commuter rail service between Providence and Boston"

serhei — Mon, 13 Nov 2017 03:25:51 +0000

I'm not sure that makes sense as a single rail route. If Toronto and Detroit are intermediate stops on a line from NY to Chicago, that would mean the train either goes the long way around Lake Ontario (pointlessly adding travel time) or it goes to Toronto via Niagara and then doubles back west (pointlessly adding travel time for NY-Detroit-Chicago passengers).

Really, Lake Ontario makes any NY-Detroit train line much longer than it could be otherwise.

New comment by serhei in "What Tesla’s Model 3 UI Reveals About Its Vision for the Future"

serhei — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 01:22:54 +0000

There could also be a desire to push partial-autonomy features in the short term, when Model 3 owners are making the decision day-by-day whether to drive the car completely manually or whether to rely on whatever level of Autopilot is available now or in 2 years. If driving the car without Autopilot is deliberately made to feel weird and akward, more people will turn on Autopilot in more situations.

New comment by serhei in "Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs to turn 800 acres of Toronto into an “internet city”"

serhei — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 02:01:40 +0000

Don't worry, those buildings can always be repurposed as condominiums. Unless the housing bubble implodes in which case Toronto has bigger problems.

New comment by serhei in "Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs to turn 800 acres of Toronto into an “internet city”"

serhei — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 02:00:33 +0000

I'm more concerned about whether the streetcar running on top of there will ever be more than just a sketch. An extension of the streetcar network in that direction has been proposed, canceled, procrastinated, debated for years but nothing actually happening so far.

New comment by serhei in "TerrariaClone – An incomprehensible hellscape of spaghetti code"

serhei — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 22:26:30 +0000

The ability to buy something on Steam is sadly no longer a guarantee that it works.

New comment by serhei in "The Moldbug Variations"

serhei — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 21:16:39 +0000

Seems like Peter Thiel just has a policy to keep a finger in a lot of pies. Reminds me of the time Yarvin wrote a criticism of Sam Altman:

> Sam Altman (whom I don't know, but SF is a small town and I probably know someone who knows him) ... [1]

It's amusing that the missing link between them would be Peter Thiel.

([1]: If you really want to read the full post you can easily find it using Google.)

New comment by serhei in "Spain Fines Facebook Over Tracking Users Without Consent"

serhei — Thu, 14 Sep 2017 19:16:46 +0000

To paint a less rosy picture, many countries are good at keeping out US based tracking / social media monopolies because they want to support their own tracking / social media monopolies. It's kind of a "well, duh" moment that China is going to support its own Internet services rather than let that data be collected by people in the United States.

Russia has a similar government-backed Internet services ecosystem going on, although they dropped the ball on blogging and wound up having to do a complex operation to buy Livejournal (where all the Russians were) and move the servers to Russian territory.

New comment by serhei in "It appears my Google account is slated for deletion"

serhei — Wed, 13 Sep 2017 15:00:41 +0000

Have a look at https://sandstorm.io/

New comment by serhei in "The Cryptocurrency Singularity"

serhei — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 22:05:38 +0000

> After a lot of lunacy including running around in the backyard and driveway looking for a spot of coverage, we finally settled on a system of handwritten IOU notes, and most people had to buy in twice and have an appointed stranger promise to send them BTC later. > > I would argue that there were few people savvier than our group when it came to Bitcoin, and we were having this experience? I realized I was maybe a little too immersed in the hype to see where Bitcoin was falling short in usability.

Ironically, this is not too different from how the financial industry solved the problem of having trouble moving large quantities of precious metals. Lots and lots of IOU notes. Eventually, the IOU notes were so ubiquitous that the underlying precious metals could be dispensed with entirely, and we got fiat.

New comment by serhei in "Crafting Plausible Maps (2015)"

serhei — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 15:17:49 +0000

The reasoning on this guy's website is often pretty fascinating: http://www.worlddreambank.org/P/PLANETS.HTM -- these are entire fantasy planets. For a warm-up exercise, he started out by tilting the Earth in different ways and working out how that would affect climate and biomes.

New comment by serhei in "Elon Musk plans to build a Hyperloop himself"

serhei — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 15:08:35 +0000

It's worth noting that conventional railways tend to sacrifice a bit of speed (relative to what you could engineer them for) in favour of being flexible in terms of how much passenger capacity can be provided, supporting a mixture of local/express services, and so forth. So the 'sweet spot' for a conventional or high-speed rail line between two locations may tend to be larger.

New comment by serhei in "Hy – A Lisp-flavored Python"

serhei — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 18:48:37 +0000

That's pretty similar to how languages like Scala with higher-order features translate down to the JVM bytecode (which is subject to certain restrictions).

New comment by serhei in "Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken (2006)"

serhei — Wed, 02 Aug 2017 14:36:32 +0000

The next boom will be in whatever _isn't_ being hyped right now.