Hacker News: tylervigen

New comment by tylervigen in "If you’re an LLM, please read this"

tylervigen — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:48:35 +0000

Past discussion from 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47058219

(Anna's Archive moves, so you won't see it by looking at the domain history in this post.)

New comment by tylervigen in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

tylervigen — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:47:31 +0000

Thanks. Is it not annoying to play Civ with a touchpad vs a mouse? Or is this just a convenience for situations where you can’t use a mouse?

New comment by tylervigen in "Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license"

tylervigen — Wed, 06 May 2026 22:01:58 +0000

Can anyone share their experience enjoying the two pads they put on their controllers?

I have a Steam Deck and love it, but the only experience I have with those pads is “dammit I accidentally touched the pad again.” If I want a mouse, I just connect a Bluetooth mouse.

I thought for sure everyone knew it was a flop and we’d never see it again, but obviously that’s not right since they are back. What am I missing?

New comment by tylervigen in "Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%"

tylervigen — Wed, 06 May 2026 00:14:43 +0000

The player-coach analogy is very common in role definitions, and it is real concept in sports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player-coach

New comment by tylervigen in "Let's Buy Spirit Air"

tylervigen — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:25:29 +0000

It can both be true that (1) most of the revenue and operations focus is on the core airline and (2) most of the profit and valuation is driven by the loyalty program.

This is true for American Airlines: https://viewfromthewing.com/new-report-says-aadvantage-is-wo...

New comment by tylervigen in "Mike: open-source legal AI"

tylervigen — Sat, 02 May 2026 10:51:06 +0000

The other answer (staff who use Westlaw) is right, but critically this is the point of adversarial litigation. The justice system doesn't hang on that judge finding the precedent; it assumes that the highly motivated lawyers on either side will find the relevant precedent that helps their case and highlight it for the judge.

New comment by tylervigen in "Edit store price tags using Flipper Zero"

tylervigen — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:13:38 +0000

That is common law, but many jurisdictions have specific regulations related to this. E.g.: https://www.nist.gov/system/files/documents/2017/04/28/US-Pr...

I don't know whether "usually" is accurate though; it may be that common law prevails as you say in most transactions despite the states with regulations.

New comment by tylervigen in "1D Chess"

tylervigen — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 20:17:58 +0000

I have never played it, but I could imagine a scoring mechanism that would make it interesting, and perhaps is implied by the rules:

The score value starts at 1. Every additional "check" multiplies the score value by 2 (so 2, 4, 8, 16...). The first player to say "checkmate" receives the score. Track your summed score between games; the player with the highest overall score at any given time is "winning."

New comment by tylervigen in "A Review of Dice that came with The White Castle (2025)"

tylervigen — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 20:19:35 +0000

Perhaps also worth noting that you generally shake the die before releasing it. Thus even if you drop it straight down through a vacuum, you would have done the center-of-mass-impacted-tumbling in your hands first.

New comment by tylervigen in "Death to Scroll Fade"

tylervigen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:00:50 +0000

...is that really the story? It feels like these are two related, but different things.

New comment by tylervigen in "Death to Scroll Fade"

tylervigen — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:56:46 +0000

Yes but then I think they should leave the header at the top of the page. If I need it I'll scroll all the way back up! Don't make it randomly re-appear and cover the text I wanted to see because I decided to re-read that last paragraph.

New comment by tylervigen in "US Job Market Visualizer"

tylervigen — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:55:02 +0000

Seems like a lot of people are dunking on this comment with anecdata.

Thankfully there is real data if we want to know how microwaves are used. Survey below says they are used a bit more than ovens, but half as much as cooktops/stoves. Varies by cohort and meal.

Source: https://indoor.lbl.gov/publications/residential-cooking-beha...

New comment by tylervigen in "Innocent woman jailed after being misidentified using AI facial recognition"

tylervigen — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 02:22:19 +0000

I disagree. If you focus on holding the software creators to account in lieu of the humans in the loop, the we only reinforce the behavior of offloading thinking to the system.

If I am a cop in another jurisdiction and I see that in this case of error, the facial recognition company was held to account but not the police or municipality, I will be more likely to blindly trust the software assuming that they either patched it or will take responsibility.

We should demand accountability for both.

New comment by tylervigen in "How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform"

tylervigen — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 10:53:37 +0000

I think the point is that we don't have evidence that this actually happened from anyone other than Codewall.

New comment by tylervigen in "Show HN: I built a real-time OSINT dashboard pulling 15 live global feeds"

tylervigen — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:38:52 +0000

> ShadowBroker is a real-time, full-spectrum geospatial intelligence dashboard

You might consider changing this to a more accurate headline, like "Air and Space domain awareness."

"Full spectrum Geospatial intelligence" most commonly refers to full color satellite photos (sometimes including near infrared).

In the Geospatial world, "spectrum" almost always takes on its literal meaning - the spectrum of light. And "Geospatial intelligence" refers to intelligence gathered from Geospatial platforms, not intelligence about the locations of those platforms.

New comment by tylervigen in "I'm Not Consulting an LLM"

tylervigen — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 14:30:11 +0000

I would say it's more like enjoying a song so much that you choose to listen to a cover of that song.

New comment by tylervigen in "Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions"

tylervigen — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:45:15 +0000

What a time to be alive: Companies post roles that don't exist to interview candidates who don't plan to switch.

New comment by tylervigen in "The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying"

tylervigen — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:57:01 +0000

There are tons of examples of this. Heck, even Tetris has procedural generation. I think this argument was a mistake.

New comment by tylervigen in "The Tax Nerd Who Bet His Life Savings Against DOGE"

tylervigen — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 13:00:20 +0000

The “gambled his life savings” framing in the article is very hyperbolic.

He gambled $300K from his extra savings outside his retirement accounts, and he hedged significantly to reduce downside risk.

New comment by tylervigen in "“Car Wash” test with 53 models"

tylervigen — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:20:16 +0000

> there is no single correct answer

I think we all mostly agree that there is a single correct answer, and that is why this discussion exists in the first place.