Hacker News: thatoneengineer

New comment by thatoneengineer in "The Exponential Time Hypothesis Is False [pdf]"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 23:23:36 +0000

Assuming P != NP (and that this NP != EXP proof holds up), what's the next most "natural" candidate for how fast NP must grow? This paper appears to show Omega(2^(n/sqrt(log(n))) with a couple additional fudge factors which would be a very disappointing answer.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Zoomsday How a Security Found a Nation-State Vulnerability in Zoom in One Day"

thatoneengineer — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:59:34 +0000

Looks legit and serious. Needing a meeting invite is a barrier to exploiting but not a huge one-- this is right to treat zero click RCE over Zoom as a big deal. Kudos to the write-up for being an effective explanation that's not obviously AI written, though it was probably adapted from an AI report.

A New Type of Levee Is Taking Root in Northern California

thatoneengineer — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:52:00 +0000

Article URL: https://grist.org/solutions/a-new-type-of-levee-is-taking-root-in-northern-california/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49260210

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thatoneengineer in "When the apartment listing is too good to be true"

thatoneengineer — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:51:45 +0000

Never use AI to write something primarily intended for other humans to read.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Scientists discover Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability on the surface of the Sun"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:10:52 +0000

Good to know this is "discover" in the sense of "confirm, understand better" rather than "suddenly find out about". Otherwise this would be quite the background-tv-in-a-disaater-movie headline!

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Inkling: Our Open-Weights Model"

thatoneengineer — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:45:52 +0000

Same. Gutsy bet to make in the face of Fable / Mythos, but the multimodal quality is at least a promising technical/ product story to tell. Everyone knows throwing Opus at everything is wasteful and domain expertise should live in the weights eventually; the question is whether foundation model scaling will slow down enough soon enough for that to matter.

Or maybe this is just a warm-up / stopgap and Thinking Machines is betting on finding the next architectural breakthrough that lets it compete with the big foundation models?

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Rocketlab acquires Iridium"

thatoneengineer — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 19:35:27 +0000

Space is big and still very hard to get to. A kilogram of payload in orbit costs several times as much as a kilogram of silver on earth, even after SpaceX's aggressive scaling of capacity. No one's going to be spending that kind of money and effort carelessly. I was more worried about SpaceX becoming monopolistic, so I'm encouraged to see this deal.

Don't project your worries about pollution on Earth-- which is a much bigger problem!-- onto space industry which is at a much much earlier stage. The "burning-up" thing sounds extremely speculative, like you're looking around for reasons to dislike this. Space is exciting and inspiring-- and yes, that includes commercial uses, since realistically we couldn't afford to expand science or exploration in space much otherwise!

New comment by thatoneengineer in "The Coming Divide: AI-Native or Left Behind"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 01:25:44 +0000

You could have said that about any successful technology ever! But for some reason everyone is anxious to say it about AI while being extremely vague about the benefits. (This is especially funny in the mouth of VPs and the like: "we're not sure what AI means for us, but we urgently need to adopt it so we don't fall behind!") If you want me to get deeper into AI tell me what it'll do for me, don't try to scare me with vague FOMO.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "The Coming Divide: AI-Native or Left Behind"

thatoneengineer — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 22:50:13 +0000

I'm an early adopter of AI products myself, but I'm always disgusted when I hear this kind of case being made for them. It's fear-mongering, plain and simple. The cloud, mobile, even crypto sounded like "join us in this exciting new world" at their most hyped. Why does AI so often sound like "get on board or you'll be obsolete"?

If the author really is right, that we're heading for a world with a cutthroat binary divide between the adopters and the non-adopters, then I know in my gut which side I want to be on, and it's not his.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

thatoneengineer — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 21:03:32 +0000

Imagine a worst case scenario: the Herculaneum scrolls turn out to be just the works of this one mediocre pet philosopher. What would we still expect to learn from them, and what would the next step be?

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Telescope Ranchers"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:31:38 +0000

Why do people get into birdwatching?

It's a hobby, there doesn't need to be much in the way of novel "data" for it to be rewarding. Though considering this guy found a nebula I wouldn't be surprised if there was some. The universe is big (citation needed) and good hobbyist telescopes are quite powerful; you have a lot of sky to explore and could easily be getting the best images ever of any particular patch of it.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Telescope Ranchers"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 19:24:44 +0000

I'm sure it's a lot of work for him, mostly maintenance and cleaning. Also it sounds like the remote operation hardware and software are provided by him-- that can't be trivial and probably means he doesn't break even on a given telescope for a few months at least. Plus whatever it costs him to recruit new customers.

I bet he makes a good living on his labor and whatever capital he has tied up in the land, but it doesn't sound like an easy business.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "How Alberta Eradicated Rats"

thatoneengineer — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 21:21:54 +0000

Don't forget screwworms!

https://cr.usembassy.gov/sections-offices/aphis/screwworm-pr...

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Extinction-Level Capitalism"

thatoneengineer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:34:28 +0000

I stopped reading after the first sentence. Calling something "inherently political" is a self-fulfilling prophecy and intentionally so. It consistently turns out to be an attempt to lay the groundwork for expropriation. No one called the Internet "inherently political" until people built stuff there that other people wanted to control.

Jenny Haniver

thatoneengineer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 23:51:15 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Haniver

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48498004

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

Don't Conflate Intelligence with Value

thatoneengineer — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:57:32 +0000

Article URL: https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/07/dont-conflate-intelligence-with-value/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48492128

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Likely AI-generated short story won a major prize

thatoneengineer — Tue, 19 May 2026 19:03:11 +0000

Article URL: https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/2056397504824963296

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197814

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by thatoneengineer in "If AI writes your code, why use Python?"

thatoneengineer — Tue, 12 May 2026 21:34:25 +0000

Shout out to the apparently large class of programmers who think LLMs make it okay not to understand their own code, yet react with horror when someone suggests porting it to Go or Rust.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Ti-84 Evo"

thatoneengineer — Sat, 02 May 2026 18:48:49 +0000

I see we've finally progressed beyond https://xkcd.com/768/, in specs if not in functionality or price point.

New comment by thatoneengineer in "Isaac Asimov: The Last Question (1956)"

thatoneengineer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 16:00:27 +0000

If you like this kind of thing, try reading Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. Similar themes, full novel, even older. It makes for interesting reading in that it more obviously represents a "path not taken" by science fiction (and by science?!) but still has that early-sci-fi spirit of fundamental curiosity.