Hacker News: wxw

New comment by wxw in "OpenAI's financials have leaked, showing $21B in losses against $13B in revenue"

wxw — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:15:17 +0000

> OpenAI 2025 financials versus 2024

Revenue: $13.07 billion up from $3.7 billion.

Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion up from $2.65 billion.

Research and Development: $19.18 billion up from $7.81 billion.

Sales and Marketing: $5.73 billion up from $1.11 billion.

General and Administrative: $1.57 billion up from $907 million.

Total Costs and Expenses: $34 billion up from $12.48 billion.

Loss from Operations: $20.92 billion up from $8.78 billion.

They're in a CapEx war. Not bad all things considered.

New comment by wxw in "Apple is about to make Hide My Email useless"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:58:29 +0000

I pay for Fastmail just for masked email and its integration with 1Password.

New comment by wxw in "U.S. pulling ocean sensors a 'shock' for Canadian research as El Niño nears"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:55:46 +0000

> Starting this week, the Ocean Observatories Initiative will lose a network of more than 900 ocean sensors from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland.

> By 2027, the National Science Foundation will have dismantled most of the system, which had been slated to run another 15 to 20 years.

> Scientists had seen warning signs as the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget included a 55% cut to the science foundation. Official word to begin shutting down arrived in early May.

Defunding science is embarassing and sad.

New comment by wxw in "Gamers beware: malicious wallpapers on Steam found stealing accounts"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:14:41 +0000

> The whole concept of “application wallpapers” essentially allows foreign code to be run directly on your computer. Cybercriminals took note of this feature and started embedding malware right into these types of wallpapers.

> Because Wallpaper Engine relies on Steam Workshop for content sharing, anyone can create a wallpaper and publish it for the community to download and install for free.

RIP

New comment by wxw in "Claude: Elevated errors across many models [resolved]"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:05:21 +0000

There are plugins in the app.

Haven’t tried Cowork, interesting. Isn’t it just the same agent minus the git worktree based UI?

Frankly, neither Claude nor Codex are as good as hype entails.

New comment by wxw in "Specs Augmented Reality Glasses"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:55:15 +0000

> Today, SPECS are available for pre-order at SPECS.COM for $2,195, with a $200 refundable deposit.

Dayum.

I do buy into the AR glasses future. They’re insanely cool tech. Meta makes a great one.

New comment by wxw in "Claude: Elevated errors across many models [resolved]"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:50:00 +0000

I’ve been using Codex w GPT 5.5 more than Claude Code recently. I think Anthropic won the marketing game because Codex is quite good, even better IME.

New comment by wxw in "Struggling Pizza Hut restaurant chain will be sold for $2.7B"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:44:41 +0000

Pizza Huts in Asia have some crazy toppings (e.g. seafood). I can’t remember the last time I was at a Pizza Hut in the states.

New comment by wxw in "SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:39:55 +0000

Hm, surprised at all the Cursor hate here. Tab complete, at the quality they delivered, was a game changer back in the day.

And their current work on Composer is great. Composer is super fast and quality is decent. More competition in the model space always welcome.

New comment by wxw in "SubQ 1.1 Small"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:32:02 +0000

> SSA replaces the O(n²) dense attention pass with a learned sparse formulation that scales linearly with context length.

> At 1M tokens, SubQ 1.1 Small requires 64.5x less compute than dense attention and runs 56x faster than FlashAttention-2.

Awesome stuff. Solving context at the model architecture layer rather than trying to bolt on extra memory is the right direction IMO.

New comment by wxw in "Running local models is good now"

wxw — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 15:26:44 +0000

> “if we are constrained by performance and price, what architectural tradeoffs do we need to make?” a question that so far has not really been asked in the mad token gold rush.

To be fair, I think the labs are also interested in this (e.g OpenAI parameter golf). But the incentives are tricky. When the subsidies and tokenmaxxing era ends, local models will be essential.

New comment by wxw in "A backdoor in a LinkedIn job offer"

wxw — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:46:56 +0000

> a recruiter at a small crypto startup [...] she described a broken proof-of-concept they needed a lead engineer for, and then sent me a public GitHub repo to review. Specifically, she asked me to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue.”

> ...buried between walls of commented-out tests, the payload runs anything the server sends back to your machine.

> npm runs prepare automatically after npm install, so just installing dependencies executes the backdoor.

> The instruction to “check out the deprecated Node modules issue” was bait to get me to run npm install.

Great catch. I've not been phished on LinkedIn before. Surprised it's getting this bad.

New comment by wxw in "Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech"

wxw — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 23:10:31 +0000

What was the speech on?

New comment by wxw in "Firewood Splitting Simulator"

wxw — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:08:29 +0000

Wonderful. I appreciate that it auto-rotates when the piece is too narrow to split along one axis.

New comment by wxw in "Statement on US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5"

wxw — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:30:07 +0000

This is all great for marketing.

New comment by wxw in "Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive"

wxw — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:15:46 +0000

Fable 5 is relentlessly underwhelming.

New comment by wxw in "Travel locally, where you are"

wxw — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 06:15:03 +0000

I can’t find the exit.

New comment by wxw in "Travel locally, where you are"

wxw — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 20:53:05 +0000

I recently found out about a tiny room in the local public library that resells books (most for $0.25-$1). I've lived here over a decade.

Overreliance on echo-chambering platforms like Reddit/IG/Google Maps limits one's ability to explore. There's still lots to discover. And re-discover as you grow up.

New comment by wxw in "Waymo Premier"

wxw — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:09:04 +0000

I’m dying to take a Waymo. Glad to see them trying to build sustainable revenue models.

I hate the state of the car-dependent American urban fabric and would love to see public transport everywhere (trains > AVs). But Waymo/AVs can meet people where they are (personal vehicles) and deliver a halfway decent solution (distributed, on demand, cheap transport without human labor).

New comment by wxw in "Software is made between commits"

wxw — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:04:21 +0000

Agents can certainly use a new substrate as they can eat dense information quickly.

Not convinced DeltaDB is useful for humans directly but assume new and interesting interfaces can arise from the abstractions it provides.

Agree that PRs/snapshots is an antiquated way of sharing information.