Hacker News: stickfigure

New comment by stickfigure in "Shift will clean homes for free to train future robots"

stickfigure — Fri, 29 May 2026 20:59:31 +0000

Seems like a relevant time to post this Danny Gonzales video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24UqL389rs

You will be amused.

New comment by stickfigure in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

stickfigure — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:41:18 +0000

People who are otherwise smart often believe dumb things. History is littered with them. Which is why appeal to authority should always be regarded with skepticism.

This prayer example illustrates a series of fallacies and human biases. Confirmation bias, survivorship bias, apophenia, post-hoc reasoning... many ways we know our brains trick us.

Try this pre-registered, with large numbers and control groups.

Or just read the literature from people who did. Prayer does nothing.

New comment by stickfigure in "FBI Arrests CIA Official with $40M in Gold Bars in His Home"

stickfigure — Thu, 28 May 2026 14:09:39 +0000

Newton spent more of his life working on alchemy than math or physics. Shall we all start searching for the Philosopher's Stone? Why not?

New comment by stickfigure in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

stickfigure — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:25:05 +0000

Not only is this true, there are about 50 million people in the south who are incredibly grateful for US involvement. And about 26 million people in the north who are, on average, several inches shorter than the southerners due to the end of US involvement.

New comment by stickfigure in "We are Poles, so, of course, we print in Latin"

stickfigure — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:26:18 +0000

Except now the whole world is in a common meme pool. Thanks to the internet, Metcalfe’s Law applies to languages globally. China may stave it off for a while by firewalling its population... but the rest of the world won't care.

It's not going to change again. Not even if the US and UK both sank into the ocean.

New comment by stickfigure in "The real cost of owning a home"

stickfigure — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:27:09 +0000

I think this really depends on your expectations. Let the driveway go to gravel. Only mow near near the house. Hardscape instead of 12 irrigation zones.

If you expect the whole place to be manicured like a city lot, yeah, that's a huge amount of work.

We maintain the areas around our house. The rest is just oak woodlands. Looks like nature because it is nature.

New comment by stickfigure in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

stickfigure — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:16:04 +0000

I think this is not quite true. They feel "shame"... right up until you wipe the context window. And then they forget any valuable lesson they might have learned.

The problem with LLMs is that they live in eternal September. Keeping a few bits of compressed residual context around isn't enough to offset the refreshed naivete.

New comment by stickfigure in "Qwen3.7-Max: The Agent Frontier"

stickfigure — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:00:58 +0000

It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen. For better or worse, these companies are filled with ideologues and something that invasive would trigger an army of whistleblowers (despite legal consequences).

New comment by stickfigure in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

stickfigure — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:54:08 +0000

When Tesla was overpromising self-driving cars, the thing they sold was still a pretty nice car. Even without the magical features, customers were still satisfied with the product.

Now imagine you're selling robots. If the robot "disengages" and breaks 10% of your plates while emptying the dishwasher, you're going to be pissed. There's no fallback to manual mode. It has to work 100% of the time out the gate.

Based on past history, I don't think Tesla has an engineering culture capable of hitting a home run with this kind of frontier technology out of the gate. So they either delay it until it's ready or they launch it prematurely, in which case everyone mocks it and the dream crashes (along with the stock price).

New comment by stickfigure in "At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025"

stickfigure — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:53:28 +0000

Dunno about you, but I would prefer to live out the rest of my life without a gun pointed at my face. Again.

New comment by stickfigure in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

stickfigure — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:51:43 +0000

> The US attacks have only made the regime stronger.

This claim is not supported by evidence. The "best" we can say about the regime is that it persists. So far.

New comment by stickfigure in "Garry Tan, the CEO of YC, accused me of unethical reporting"

stickfigure — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:17:03 +0000

From an article linked in the original article:

> In the pro-recall camp, big money makes up a much bigger slice of the pie. Over three-quarters of the total money raised ($4.76 million) has come from $50,000-plus donations, and only 4 percent has come from donations smaller than $1,000.

This doesn't give me a very charitable view of the recall donors. Democrats or not.

New comment by stickfigure in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

stickfigure — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:42:21 +0000

It did, however, allow the Khomeini regime to murder its own citizens with impunity. So someone paid.

New comment by stickfigure in "Elon Musk has lost his lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI"

stickfigure — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:00:22 +0000

Year over year sales are declining. Stratospheric stock price is propped up by promise of selling humanoid robots, a technology (and market) which are unproven.

I would not invest.

New comment by stickfigure in "At least 25 Flock cameras have been destroyed in five states since April 2025"

stickfigure — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:42:31 +0000

Over generations that will probably help, sure. In the mean time...

New comment by stickfigure in "Bun Rust rewrite: "codebase fails basic miri checks, allows for UB in safe rust""

stickfigure — Fri, 15 May 2026 20:24:46 +0000

It may just be different expectations about what the `main` branch means. In my organization we don't merge half-finished work into `main`.

New comment by stickfigure in "Starship V3"

stickfigure — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:52:05 +0000

Why? Have you run the math and genuinely belive the future profits justify the valuation, or is your thesis that there will be greater fools?

Do you actually believe this data centers in space nonsense?

New comment by stickfigure in "Starship V3"

stickfigure — Wed, 13 May 2026 03:44:53 +0000

Musk is not just "one of them"; the financial success of SpaceX is extremely unevenly distributed.

Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.

New comment by stickfigure in "Googlebook"

stickfigure — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:45:16 +0000

That's fine? Especially if the AI does the searches for me, and does them more frequently than I would.

I have a half dozen facebook marketplace searches going. I used to automate craigslist searches before craigslist became irrelevant. It's nothing complicated but "AI searches for me and notifies me" is better than me remembering to look.

New comment by stickfigure in "Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise"

stickfigure — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:05:10 +0000

I hear it from many native speakers. The deliberate incorrectness is a sort of cutespeak. "Since... years".

I can't stand l33tspeak but in this case I think the kids can stay on the lawn.