Hacker News: skm

New comment by skm in "Recursive Superintelligence – 6 months old and valued at $4 billion"

skm — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:14:38 +0000

> Many of the world’s leading researchers believe that A.I. will soon be powerful enough to improve itself with little or no help from human developers.

> “A.I. is code. And now, A.I. can code,” a veteran researcher, Richard Socher, said. “The ingredients are there.”

> Dr. Socher recently founded, with seven other researchers, a company to pursue this mind-bending goal, which is often called “recursive self-improvement.”

> His start-up, Recursive Superintelligence, has raised more than $650 million from venture capital firms including Google Ventures and Greycroft and the chip-making giants Nvidia and AMD. The six-month-old company, which has offices in San Francisco and London, has fewer than 30 employees. But it is now valued at more than $4 billion.

Recursive Superintelligence – 6 months old and valued at $4 billion

skm — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:13:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/notable-researchers-join-4-billion-effort-to-build-self-improving-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48120431

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Toxicity on Social Media

skm — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:31:38 +0000

Article URL: https://thenoisyroom.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105297

Points: 162

# Comments: 129

New comment by skm in "Developers, don't despair, big tech and AI hype is off the rails again"

skm — Wed, 14 May 2025 15:19:15 +0000

Marc Andreessen would beg to differ :)

On a recent a16z podcast, Andreessen said:

“It's possible that [being a VC] is quite literally timeless, and when the AIs are doing everything else, that may be one of the last remaining fields that people are still doing."

Interestingly, his justification is not that VCs are measurably good at what they do, but rather that they appear to be so bad at what they do:

“Every great venture capitalist in the last 70 years has missed most of the great companies of his generation... if it was a science, you could eventually dial it in and have somebody who gets 8 out of 10 [right]. There's an intangibility to it, there's a taste aspect, the human relationship aspect, the psychology — by the way a lot of it is psychological analysis."

The podcast in question: https://youtu.be/qpBDB2NjaWY

(Personally, I’m not quite sure he actually believes this - but watching him is a certain kind of masterclass in using spicy takes to generate publicity / awareness / buzz. And by talking about him I’m participating in his clever scheme.)

Schools spending billions on tech caused worsening social skills and test scores

skm — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 15:54:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-19/michael-bloomberg-kids-are-spending-too-much-class-time-on-laptops

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424958

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by skm in "The Deaths of Effective Altruism"

skm — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 22:35:49 +0000

The author is Leif Wenar, Professor of Philosophy (as well as Humanities, Political Science, and Law) at Stanford.

He’s the author of the book Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World (about which Peter Singer wrote: “Philosophers rarely write big books that could change the world, but Blood Oil is such a book.”)

Wenar studied philosophy at Harvard with John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and was Karl Popper’s research assistant.

The Deaths of Effective Altruism

skm — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 21:49:49 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/deaths-of-effective-altruism/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39899800

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)

skm — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 19:47:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39620422

Points: 110

# Comments: 85

Khan Academy's AI tutor Khanmigo struggles with basic math

skm — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:56:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-tutoring-students-but-still-struggles-with-basic-math-694e76d3

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39423858

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Children spent a global average of 112 minutes daily on TikTok in 2023

skm — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 20:36:51 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/25/kids-spent-60-more-time-on-tiktok-than-youtube-last-year-20-tried-openais-chatgpt/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39134907

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by skm in "Startup Playbook"

skm — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 23:01:49 +0000

(2015)

According to web.archive.org this is from Nov 2015:

https://web.archive.org/web/20151108010026/https://playbook....

Aaron Swartz: 7 Essays on Getting Better at Life (2012)

skm — Sat, 05 Jun 2021 05:43:31 +0000

Article URL: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/rawnerve

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27402548

Points: 35

# Comments: 1

Software Engineer Career Paths

skm — Fri, 02 Oct 2020 12:14:21 +0000

Article URL: https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/software-engineer-career-paths/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24661814

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds (2017)

skm — Tue, 07 Jul 2020 09:06:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23757135

Points: 116

# Comments: 122

America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms

skm — Sun, 31 May 2020 10:33:52 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-eating-worms-disease-containment-america-panama/611026/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368585

Points: 227

# Comments: 39

Google search only has 60% of my content from 2006

skm — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 00:22:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/02/google_index_coverage/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19762907

Points: 396

# Comments: 161

A short history of Facebook's privacy practices (2017)

skm — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 23:56:02 +0000

Article URL: http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16683872

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by skm in "Intel Skylake/Kaby Lake processors: broken hyper-threading"

skm — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 18:07:54 +0000

If you're on a Mac, you can find the exact processor model number by opening Terminal.app and entering

  sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string

this will return something like

  Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4650U CPU @ 1.70GHz

(Found on http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/15/get-cpu-info-via-command-line... )

New comment by skm in "Learning Real Haskell Incrementally [video]"

skm — Sun, 25 Oct 2015 15:25:39 +0000

Don Stewart has given possibly the best answer to this question on StackOverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6398996/good-haskell-sour...

New comment by skm in "Ccv 0.7, with a sub-10% image classifier and a decent face detector"

skm — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 11:51:36 +0000

@liuliu - in the last graph, there's quite a jump from epoch 26 to 27. I'm curious to find out what might be causing this.