Hacker News: thaw13579

New comment by thaw13579 in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

thaw13579 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:51:30 +0000

People have a variety of intensities of cravings and capacities for self-regulation (with a magnitude that is largely out of their control). Discipline only works for people where the capacity for self-regulation outweighs the intensity of cravings. These cravings are huge though because our food system is engineered to be both extremely calorie rich and appealing. It's hard to blame people when they're surrounded by fast food restaurants on every corner that has been engineering to target what's called the "bliss point" when experiencing their food.

Looking at this a different way, maybe the discipline / self-regulation needs to be applied at the societal (not individual) level, to improve the environment in which we all live?

New comment by thaw13579 in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

thaw13579 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:39:34 +0000

The issue is that our modern world has engineered our food to be highly energy-dense and incredibly appealing, so the root cause is an evolutionary mismatch with our environment, which has diverged incredibly from early humans.

Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists as akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that, often that's a lifelong solution.

New comment by thaw13579 in "What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis"

thaw13579 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:36:34 +0000

It's great to be active, but there's more to it than that, namely that our modern world has highly engineered our food to be highly energy-dense and incredibly appealing. So the root cause is an evolutionary mismatch with our environment, which has diverged incredibly from early humans. Expecting an individual to overcome won't generally work, since their brains are simply wired for it. Sure there are some people who can simply choose to ignore the fast food place at every corner and go to the gym via willpower alone, but they are exceptional in their brain's capacity for executive control.

Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that. That said, it's not one or the other, it's always great to be more active.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 21:45:27 +0000

Yes, $50 was a rough out-of-pocket estimate, the amortized cost per scan for operation alone is probably on the order of hundreds of dollars per scan, assuming high utilization.

One funny thing about MRIs is the magnet is always on, so there could be some clever ways to reduce costs running them after hours.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:37:03 +0000

From what I know, seems like a mix of medical price fixing by the gov't, adoption of lower cost hardware, and universal healthcare. There's apparently less bureaucracy, perhaps because there is no need for negotiation at every step of the process?

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:30:52 +0000

Yes totally, and ultrasound already does wonders in that regard. It's a good strategy to focus on the specific use cases that match the strengths of the tech. I think MRI will be useful in validating and mapping out those cases.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:00:34 +0000

Yes, that is a economic & public health policy problem that really needs to be solved. We can look to Japan as example of what's possible, they have invested in nearly twice the number of scanners per capita of Canada, and they can get same-day MRIs for $50, roughly speaking.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:57:39 +0000

I completely agree that's an issue, although more of an economic / public health policy issue than a technical one. There are low field MRI systems, such as the one made by Hyperfine that are, like you say, an order of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run. We should have these everywhere, IMO

https://www.hyperfinemri.com/

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:53:55 +0000

Here are OECD and WHO reports on regional availability of MRI:

https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/health-at-a-glance-2025...

https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

Africa, Central & South America are clearly underserved, perhaps a good opportunity for ultrasound and low-field MRI

New comment by thaw13579 in "Ultrasound imaging of the brain"

thaw13579 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 17:38:48 +0000

Cool work and proof of concept, and very excited to see where this goes. However, I do think there is enough exaggeration and missing information here that it warrants some critical appraisal. What's really missing is a comparison and validation with any existing medical imaging tech. Whole brain, contrast-free neurovascular imaging is essentially solved with MRI, why not run a scan and compare? Ultrasound is of course portable and less expensive, but MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost for medical workflows, and low-field brain MRI is addressing the portability and cost issues to some extent. I guess they are pitching this as a wearable "telepathy" device, which I think appropriately differentiates their product, but of course, this wording also invokes a framing that "you won't / don't need to know how it works," which invites skepticism and a higher bar for validation in my view.

New comment by thaw13579 in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

thaw13579 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 17:47:11 +0000

That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Midjourney Medical"

thaw13579 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 16:55:54 +0000

They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...

New comment by thaw13579 in "GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers"

thaw13579 — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 10:30:04 +0000

To be honest, this one could just as well be a sloppy bibliography.

New comment by thaw13579 in "X blames users for Grok-generated CSAM; no fixes announced"

thaw13579 — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:13:04 +0000

The core issue is that X is now a tool for creating and virally distributing these images anonymously to a large audience, often targeting the specific individuals featured in the images. For example, to any post with a picture, any user can simply reply "@grok take off their clothes and make them do something degrading", and the response is then generated by X and posted in the same thread. That is an entirely different kind of tool from an open-weight model.

The LLM itself is more akin to a gun available in a store in the "gun is a tool" argument (reasonable arguments on both side in my opinion); however, this situation more like a gun manufacturer creating a program to mass distribute free pistols to a masked crowd, with predictable consequences. I'd say the person running that program was either negligent or intentionally promoting havoc to the point where it should be investigated and regulated.

New comment by thaw13579 in "My role as a founder-CTO: year 8"

thaw13579 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:12:33 +0000

Those were most likely from a multi-line list that was converted to a single line when the comment was processed on submission.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Brown/MIT shooting suspect found dead, officials say"

thaw13579 — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 06:00:21 +0000

Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?"

thaw13579 — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 22:19:12 +0000

Curious why this comment is being flagged if anyone minds explaining.

New comment by thaw13579 in "We Induced Smells With Ultrasound"

thaw13579 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 04:39:51 +0000

I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"

These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.

If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.

New comment by thaw13579 in "We Induced Smells With Ultrasound"

thaw13579 — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 04:27:55 +0000

I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.

New comment by thaw13579 in "Claude Is Down"

thaw13579 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 16:26:25 +0000

Probably an M4 which has up to 128GB currently