Hacker News: stanfordkid

New comment by stanfordkid in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

stanfordkid — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:15:28 +0000

Not only is it no better, it is significantly worse.

New comment by stanfordkid in "US fired 1k JASSM cruise missiles in 37 days. Lockheed makes 396 per year"

stanfordkid — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:13:36 +0000

What's your source for this? There isn't really a lot of credible, publicly available information on what you're saying... just anecdotes. In the India v. Pakistan conflict recently a French produced Indian Rafale was downed via a Chinese long range air-to-air missle (PL-15) from a a Chinese produced J-10 jet. Even if they don't have the same hit rate, you can buy 10x for the same price.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/how-pakis...

New comment by stanfordkid in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

stanfordkid — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 03:26:29 +0000

No one wants to liberate Iran. Israel just wants to continue committing genocide and apartheid without any opposition. Iran arms Hezbollah and Hamas, the main forms of Palestinian resistance. The whole point of this operation is to decimate those groups so ethnic cleansing can continue without any resistance. Israel could care less about the Irani people.

You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.

I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.

Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.

I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Pretraining Language Models via Neural Cellular Automata"

stanfordkid — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:37:34 +0000

It's better than using randomly initialized weights. It's more of a theoretical exercise to explore biology. When an infant is born maybe the visual cortex already has some notion of edge detectors etc. through a system such as this one despite never having really opened it's eyes.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Pretraining Language Models via Neural Cellular Automata"

stanfordkid — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:30:56 +0000

I did a similar project but using 3D fractals I found on shadertoy feeding into ViTs. They are extremely simple iterative functions that produce a ton of scene like complexity.

I have a pet theory that the visual cortex when developing is linked to some kind of mechanism such as this. You just need proteins that create some sort of resonating signal that feed into the neurons as they grow (obviously this is hand-wavy) but similar feedback loops guide nervous system growth in Zebra fish for example.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"

stanfordkid — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:54:24 +0000

It's pretty simple... the word circle and what you can correlate to it via english language description has somewhat less to do with reality than a physical 3D model of a circle and what it would do in an environment. You can't just add more linguistic description via training data to change that. It doesn't really matter that you can keep back propagating because what you are back propagating over is fundamentally and qualitatively less rich.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Show HN: µJS, a 5KB alternative to Htmx and Turbo with zero dependencies"

stanfordkid — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 23:23:47 +0000

I'm curious to understand, why would you build your website this way vs. say jQuery. I've never really understood the HTMX ecosystem. Is this just to avoid javascript and replace that with html pages, id's and attributes? It feels like the DOM is a very clear abstraction and scripting is a more powerful way to manipulate it. What do people like or prefer about this approach and paradigm?

New comment by stanfordkid in "Shannon Got AI This Far. Kolmogorov Shows Where It Stops"

stanfordkid — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 22:38:36 +0000

I'm not sure I totally buy the "no plasticity" argument. If you are allowed to write to context in an agentic fashion, certainly the LLM can record intermediate answers, go back and re-rank it's memory. The "plasticity" is in the form of data that can be looked up and referenced as a shortcut. I would think this forms a Turing complete system so theoretically it can represent pretty much anything.

New comment by stanfordkid in "We do not think Anthropic should be designated as a supply chain risk"

stanfordkid — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 19:32:28 +0000

Isn’t this kind of all bullshit. Like Anthropic licenses so many of its models through Bedrock. If the DoD has a contract with Amazon they can just use them.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Notepad++ supply chain attack breakdown"

stanfordkid — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:02:49 +0000

Shouldn't public signature of the hash of the exe file from a known key before execution fix this??? What am I missing?

New comment by stanfordkid in "Poison Fountain"

stanfordkid — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:15:22 +0000

Just look at the domains. Obviously social media will get harder to do this with, maybe that's okay though. I think a simple criterion can be used: could the pre-trained LLM have come up with this itself? If so it probably doesn't have training value.

New comment by stanfordkid in "HP Reveals Keyboard Computer with Ryzen AI Chip"

stanfordkid — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:12:55 +0000

Cool to see some innovation from HP, this is actually unique and fills a niche of going from desk to desk (home->office), without needing mobile. Much better than ripping off the latest aluminum MacBook designs.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Poison Fountain"

stanfordkid — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:58:52 +0000

I don't see how you get around LLMs scraping data without also stopping humans from retrieving valid data.

If you are NYTimes and publish poisoned data to scrapers, the only thing the scraper needs is one valid human subscription where they run a VM + automated Chrome, OCR and tokenize the valid data then compare that to the scraped results. It's pretty much trivial to do. At Anthropic/Google/OpenAI scale they can easily buy VMs in data centers spread all over the world with IP shuffling. There is no way to tell who is accessing the data.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Weaponized (teeny tiny) black holes"

stanfordkid — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 01:31:13 +0000

Is it really true that nothing would change if the Sun's mass was suddenly compacted by several orders of magnitude (into a point mass or black hole)?

This seems unintuitive to me. The sun is a million miles in diameter, so surely shrinking that to zero would lower the amount of gravitational force infinitesimally since the gravity is 1/distance^2 not linear. I would think the planets would sort of drift ever so slightly farther.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Software engineers should be a little bit cynical"

stanfordkid — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:36:02 +0000

The dude works for GitHub. I don’t doubt there is some rotten code on there, but what you’re saying seems like a stretch and exactly what he’s describing.

New comment by stanfordkid in "Show HN: Jmail – Google Suite for Epstein files"

stanfordkid — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 17:27:03 +0000

To be fair, millions could be hundreds of millions.

New comment by stanfordkid in "TailwindSQL – Like TailwindCSS, but for SQL queries in React Server components"

stanfordkid — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 00:39:44 +0000

Just because it uses the className attribute doesn't really mean it is "like tailwind"... SQL is not anything like CSS classes and cannot be composed in the same manner. It's basically just using className as a data attribute. You might as well just stick raw SQL in there and parse it... what is the point of the weird hyphenated pseudo dialect?

New comment by stanfordkid in "Thin desires are eating life"

stanfordkid — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 01:07:10 +0000

What’s the point of this article — everyone knows desiring heroin is different from wanting to become an Olympic swimmer.

New comment by stanfordkid in "America's betting craze has spread to its news networks"

stanfordkid — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 04:56:22 +0000

This feels like a nascent form of what Nick Land describes as "hyperstition" ... feedback loops where the presence of it's idea within peoples mind brings it into realization.

Worth a read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperstition

New comment by stanfordkid in "Reverse engineering a $1B Legal AI tool exposed 100k+ confidential files"

stanfordkid — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 21:51:02 +0000

I mean... in what world would you send a customers private root key to a web browsing client. Like even if the user was authenticated why would they need this? This sort of secret shouldn't even be in an environment variable or database but stored with encryption at rest. There could easily have been a proxy service between client and box if the purpose is to search or download files. It's very bad, even for a prototype... this researcher deserves a bounty!