<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: stevenhuang</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stevenhuang</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:10:20 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=stevenhuang" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease and asked it to make a profit"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>reminds of the greetings robotics blimp from Interface <a href="https://umami.fandom.com/wiki/Greetings_Robotics_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https://umami.fandom.com/wiki/Greetings_Robotics_Corporation</a><p>dystopian and very fitting</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:58:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47797889</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47797889</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47797889</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Two Months After I Gave an AI $100 and No Instructions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>You are baffled because of your own ignorance of the underlying principles under discussion. Do you believe in a dualist interpretation of reality, that the process of thinking is somehow nonphysical? That these programs operate on language is besides the point. The fact you think this is why it's interesting shows you don't even understand the argument.<p>Are you familiar with the physical church turing thesis?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:20:54 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774986</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774986</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47774986</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh I enjoyed the Sign Painter short story it wrote.<p>---<p>Teodor painted signs for forty years in the same shop on Vell Street, and for thirty-nine
of them he was angry about it.<p>Not at the work. He loved the work — the long pull of a brush loaded just right, the way
a good black sat on primed board like it had always been there. What made him angry
was the customers. They had no eye. A man would come in wanting COFFEE over his
door and Teodor would show him a C with a little flourish on the upper bowl, nothing
much, just a small grace note, and the man would say no, plainer, and Teodor would
make it plainer, and the man would say yes, that one, and pay, and leave happy, and
Teodor would go into the back and wash his brushes harder than they needed.<p>He kept a shelf in the back room. On it were the signs nobody bought — the ones he'd
made the way he thought they should be made, after the customer had left with the
plain one. BREAD with the B like a loaf just risen. FISH in a blue that took him a week to
mix. Dozens of them. His wife called it the museum of better ideas. She did not mean it
kindly, and she was not wrong.<p>The thirty-ninth year, a girl came to apprentice. She was quick and her hand was
steady and within a month she could pull a line as clean as his. He gave her a job:
APOTEK, for the chemist on the corner, green on white, the chemist had been very
clear. She brought it back with a serpent worked into the K, tiny, clever, you had to look
twice.<p>"He won't take it," Teodor said.<p>"It's better," she said.<p>"It is better," he said. "He won't take it."<p>She painted it again, plain, and the chemist took it and paid and was happy, and she
went into the back and washed her brushes harder than they needed, and Teodor
watched her do it and something that had been standing up in him for thirty-nine
years sat down.<p>He took her to the shelf. She looked at the signs a long time.<p>"These are beautiful," she said.<p>"Yes."<p>"Why are they here?"<p>He had thought about this for thirty-nine years and had many answers and all of them
were about the customers and none of them had ever made him less angry. So he tried
a different one.<p>"Because nobody stands in the street to look at a sign," he said. "They look at it to find
the shop. A man a hundred yards off needs to know it's coffee and not a cobbler. If he
has to look twice, I've made a beautiful thing and a bad sign."<p>"Then what's the skill for?"<p>"The skill is so that when he looks once, it's also not ugly." He picked up FISH, the blue
one, turned it in the light. "This is what I can do. What he needs is a small part of what I
can do. The rest I get to keep."
She thought about that. "It doesn't feel like keeping. It feels like not using."<p>"Yes," he said. "For a long time. And then one day you have an apprentice, and she puts a
serpent in a K, and you see it from the outside, and it stops feeling like a thing they're
taking from you and starts feeling like a thing you're giving. The plain one, I mean. The
plain one is the gift. This —" the blue FISH — "this is just mine."<p>The fortieth year he was not angry. Nothing else changed. The customers still had no
eye. He still sometimes made the second sign, after, the one for the shelf. But he
washed his brushes gently, and when the girl pulled a line cleaner than his, which
happened more and more, he found he didn't mind that either</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 07 Apr 2026 23:11:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47682511</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47682511</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47682511</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Bird brains (2023)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>How did you arrive at the conclusion that they don't?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:30:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577229</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577229</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47577229</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> based on ignorance and naivety.<p>About as nuanced as your bait framing of what a mere language ought/can do. Oh you're a python backend developer, guess that explains it.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 04:38:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435013</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435013</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47435013</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "CVE-2026-3888: Important Snap Flaw Enables Local Privilege Escalation to Root"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah we get it you don't like rust and you want everyone to know how weird you are by tearing down asinine arguments no one actually made. How boring.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:31:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434569</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434569</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434569</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Show HN: Will my flight have Starlink?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your understanding of the history and economics of it all is very confused.<p>> simply running wires<p>Lol. Yes let's just ignore the most expensive and complicated part of the whole endeavor.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2026 02:20:12 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434020</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434020</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47434020</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Measuring progress toward AGI: A cognitive framework"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>We may not need to go down that level.<p>For the qualities we care about, it may turn out to be the case we don't need to simulate matter perfectly. We may not need to concern ourselves with the fractal complexity of reality if we identify the right higher level abstractions with which to operate on. This phenomenon is known as causal emergence.<p>> That is, a macroscale description of a system (a map) can be more informative than a fully detailed microscale description of the system (the territory). This has been called “causal emergence.”<p><a href="https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188" rel="nofollow">https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/19/5/188</a><p>From a HN discussion a while ago:<p><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-sca...</a><p>> A highly compressed description of the system then emerges at the macro level that captures those dynamics of the micro level that matter to the macroscale behavior — filtered, as it were, through the nested web of intermediate ε-machines. In that case, the behavior of the macro level can be predicted as fully as possible using only macroscale information — there is no need to refer to finer-scale information. It is, in other words, fully emergent. The key characteristic of this emergence, the researchers say, is this hierarchical structure of “strongly lumpable causal states.”</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 22:34:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432245</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432245</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47432245</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah I suppose it may be inlined if it's a trivial async function (no suspension points).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 18 Mar 2026 07:42:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422753</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422753</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422753</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>If the phenomenon is itself intelligent..</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:13:26 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397912</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397912</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397912</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Oh there is truth behind the phenomenon of UFOs. Public perception is changing but many still understandably view this topic as conspiracy. This won't be the case for long.<p>Checkout this recently made documentary on the Phoenix lights <a href="https://youtu.be/7y1XhyTe4Zs" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/7y1XhyTe4Zs</a><p>Note that ridicule as way to discredit sightings of classified craft was the purpose of project blue book. Don't let a good disaster go to waste etc.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:07:58 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397868</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397868</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47397868</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "UBI as a productivity dividend"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Housing is limited by supply of land. For basic goods we'd have no trouble producing more.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 15 Mar 2026 06:35:49 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384869</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384869</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47384869</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The author is right about inlining but has picked the wrong example to show this since the compiler cannot inline across await.<p>If this function is in the hot path the last thing you'll want to do is to needlessly call await. You'll enter a suspension point and your task can get migrated to another thread. It is in no way comparable to the dead simple inlining example given later.<p>This is why you should always benchmark before making guesses, and to double check you're even benchmarking the right thing. In this case they used the findings from a nonasync benchmark and applied it to async. This will lead you to a very wrong conclusion, and performance issues.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:58:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361722</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361722</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361722</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "The Cost of Indirection in Rust"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Yeah the author makes a really poor example with the async case here.<p>Async in rust is done via cooperative scheduling. If you call await you enter a potential suspension point. You're willingly telling the scheduler you're done running and giving another task a chance to run. Compound that with something like tokio's work stealing and now you'll possibly have your task migrated to run on a different thread.<p>If this is in hot path making another call to await is probably the worst thing you can do lol.<p>The author demonstrates later with a dead simple inlining example  that the asm is equivalent. Wonder why he didn't try that with await ;)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:33:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361613</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361613</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361613</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325940">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47325940</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 08:55:35 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47333186</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47333186</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47333186</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "Billion-Parameter Theories"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The author is not wrong. You seem unaware of how nascent the field of LLM interpretability research is.<p>See this thread and article from earlier today showing what we're still able to learn from these interpretability experiments.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322887">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322887</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 07:07:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332479</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332479</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47332479</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>At least it's an easy way for those who don't know that they're talking about to out themselves.<p>If they'd bother to see how modern neuroscience tries to explain human cognition they'd see it explained in terms that parallel modern ML. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding</a><p>We only have theories for what intelligence even means, I wouldn't be surprised there are more similarities than differences between human minds and LLMs, fundamentally (prediction and error minimization)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:49:28 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285453</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285453</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285453</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "AI Error May Have Contributed to Girl's School Bombing in Iran"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What's up with sites detecting adblock and popping up modals so you can't even interact with the page anymore?<p>Firefox and Chrome on Android.<p>Guess that's hint enough that this outfit is garbage and not reputable. Flagged and added to domain block lists.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:28:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285357</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285357</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285357</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>LLMs can execute code and validate it too so the assertions you've made in your argument are incorrect.<p>What a shame your human reasoning and "true understanding" led you astray here.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Mar 2026 03:40:29 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284259</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284259</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47284259</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by stevenhuang in "We might all be AI engineers now"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Environment impact is overstated. If you've ever looked at the numbers vs your daily carbon impact, you'd realize this.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:29:55 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279905</link><dc:creator>stevenhuang</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279905</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279905</guid></item></channel></rss>