Hacker News: tempestn

New comment by tempestn in "OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields"

tempestn — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:09:42 +0000

You might have a point, but this isn't the way to make it.

New comment by tempestn in "People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes"

tempestn — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 02:59:17 +0000

Though it took my dad a bit longer, he managed to quit for good when I was a kid. Still died of lung disease at 80, but I have to think it would likely have been much sooner if he'd never quit. Anyway, watching him struggle with it when I was young definitely make me repulsed by cigarettes (and most other addictive substances) such that I've certainly never been tempted to try them.

New comment by tempestn in "Attention is all you have"

tempestn — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 04:10:04 +0000

Back in 2012 I switched almost entirely from bookmarking to web clipping into Evernote, which has been great. Evernote itself has gone downhill, and at some point soon I'll probably migrate my collection to Obsidian (which has its own web clipper), but I'm still a big advocate of the general practice. It is indeed great to have a searchable record of stuff you've bookmarked vs just a tree of links that you'll soon forget exist.

New comment by tempestn in "U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore"

tempestn — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 03:16:09 +0000

That's true in a sense of the overall trade deficit, but not in terms of specific trade deficits with individual countries, which seems to be Trump's focus.

Even looking at the overall case though, there is an alternate way of looking at it, which is that the trade imbalance must be equal to the imbalance between domestic savings and investment. There was a NY Fed article last year that was discussed on HN and covered this well: https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2025/05/why-do... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44040407

So again, I think the domestic imbalance plays a larger part than this analysis gives credit. (And per my original comment, the government portion of national saving is made up of, basically, taxes minus government spending, so - while the effect is complicated because taxation also affects private spending and investment - increased taxation could be expected to reduce trade deficits.)

Basically I don't think there's an economic justification for tariffs as a solution to trade imbalances, overall or (especially) bilateral. (Bilateral trade imbalances really shouldn't be seen as a problem at all. As the saying goes, I have a trade deficit with my grocery store, but that's not a bad thing.) There are situations where they can make sense in order to strategically protect specific industries for security or long-term growth reasons, but that's a separate issue, and the key word there is strategically, something I'm not seeing a lot of.

New comment by tempestn in "U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore"

tempestn — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:11:51 +0000

The current round of tariff wars are all about Donald Trump and his obsession with bilateral trade imbalances. Long-term bond rates would be better addressed through the balance of production and taxation in the domestic economy.

Edit: do those downvoting disagree that a focus on bilateral trade imbalances and tariffs is an idiosyncrasy of Trump, and that we would not be seeing similar trade wars with a different president? If so, please make your case. He has repeatedly stated that that is what he feels is important, and has shared explicit motivation for broad tariffs based on facile derivations from bilateral trade imbalances. So it's pretty difficult to see it instead as a reasoned response to long-term bond rates.

New comment by tempestn in "U.S. Small Biz Can't Ship to the EU Anymore"

tempestn — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 21:08:06 +0000

Yes, the US started this scrapping of de minimis exemptions.

New comment by tempestn in "StarCraft returns in 2030 as an open-world shooter"

tempestn — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 23:37:04 +0000

Problem is I don't want a spiritual successor. I want an actual successor that would build on the Starcraft universe, but in an RTS.

New comment by tempestn in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

tempestn — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 23:53:15 +0000

Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.

New comment by tempestn in "Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses"

tempestn — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 20:28:15 +0000

I do agree that Lambert's coverage of Tesla appears to be pretty one-sided, and that the company has provided significant benefits to the world, but I also think there's a reasonable case to be made that Musk himself is a uniquely deleterious figure, even if the harm he brings isn't with his bare hands.

New comment by tempestn in "The largest electric aircraft just flew [video]"

tempestn — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:32:28 +0000

Having the generator as backup means you need a lot less battery though, so it saves weight overall.

An 'Exercise Pill' Just Cleared Its First Human Test

tempestn — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:15:39 +0000

Article URL: https://gizmodo.com/an-exercise-pill-just-cleared-its-first-human-test-2000800380

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49560117

Points: 8

# Comments: 5

New comment by tempestn in "GPT-6 Astra"

tempestn — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 21:39:37 +0000

I would bet that llms have talked plenty of people both into and out of suicide at this point. That nitpick aside, I think that's an excellent list. Especially being able to articulate what it does and doesn't know, or how confident it is. That's something that naively sounds pretty simple, but clearly isn't. And it's something humans aren't great at either (see: Dunning-Kruger), but so far LLMs don't even really have the capability to attempt it.

GoPro acquired, getting into 'defense, government, robotics and aerospace'

tempestn — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:29:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/news/987494/gopro-starman-holding-merger-aquisition

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554469

Points: 37

# Comments: 3

New comment by tempestn in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

tempestn — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 01:04:46 +0000

If the culture shifted such that people were skeptical of original results but excited about replication, replication would be the big news and people would want to do it. How to get there, I don't know.

New comment by tempestn in "AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late"

tempestn — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:59:10 +0000

Any original text has value for the purpose of AI training. The argument is that they have no other value.

New comment by tempestn in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

tempestn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:56:11 +0000

But the choices are weighted based on those probabilities. This doesn't affect the weightings, only how the final weighted pseudo-random selection is made.

New comment by tempestn in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

tempestn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:58:52 +0000

It's not just swapping synonyms. The way llms work is by predicting the likelihood of the next token. It's inherently probabilistic. Choices are made based on weighted random number generation, based on those probabilities. Changing how you generate the random numbers doesn't degrade the output.

New comment by tempestn in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

tempestn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:55:37 +0000

You're generating a pseudo random number one way instead of another way. How would that inherently compromise quality?

New comment by tempestn in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

tempestn — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:53:06 +0000

LLM output, as the author acknowledges here, is already non-deterministic. Next token probabilities are set, and tokens are chosen pseudo-randomly. As I understand it, this watermark is just going to be a matter of using a known seed and algorithm to make those pseudo-random choices, such that a signature can be detected. The important thing is, it's not replacing intentional choices with random ones, it's just generating pseudo-random results differently. Quality shouldn't be affected.

New comment by tempestn in "Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?"

tempestn — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:02:57 +0000

Every one of them has their own particular flavour of this aggravation too. Gemini has been my standard go-to for non-coding tasks for a while, but I started to get really annoyed with a couple aspects, especially how it would end almost every response with a barely related "would you like to do this next??" tangent, regardless of my prompt to the contrary. So I've been using Claude more for regular tasks, and am now running into its brand of infuriating idiosyncrasies. I'm also hesitant to try to code too much of this out with system prompts, for fear of degrading the outputs.