Hacker News: yobbo

New comment by yobbo in "Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s"

yobbo — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:35:11 +0000

Stuff like this exists for bicycles. For mopeds and motorcycles there are electrification kits.

It should be possible to just replace the flywheel altogether with a generator/motor that both brakes and powers during each cycle, cancelling vibrations. Then more generation during deceleration, and more power during acceleration.

New comment by yobbo in "Nintendo has raised its employees base salary by 10%"

yobbo — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 17:02:16 +0000

This (classic) argument is symmetric with respect to the value of money and quantity of goods. As in "if you know money will buy more in the future, it increases your incentive to sell now rather than wait for higher prices. And if you know prices will increase, you will hoard products." The argument doesn't favour either side.

One mechanism of inflation is that it effectively lowers wages (and other contracts) without negotiation. Asset prices are valued by markets and increase with inflation. It effectively transfers wealth from wage earners to capital owners.

Deflation would effectively increase wages instead, and require occasional renegotiations if productivity isn't keeping pace.

New comment by yobbo in "The US Used to Demand the Best Tech. Now We Ban It"

yobbo — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:43:51 +0000

4) add taxes to effectively double price of gasoline

New comment by yobbo in "xAI is looking more like a datacentre REIT than a frontier lab"

yobbo — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 08:10:43 +0000

Normal use means loading data into the GPU for each batch. The load is not even, though training might be worse than "production".

New comment by yobbo in "Tiny hackable CUDA language model implementation"

yobbo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:37:11 +0000

Looks very nice, but I can't find numerical gradient checks, which is helpful when verifying that backward pass is correct:

https://github.com/markusheimerl/gpt/blob/main/transformer/a...

New comment by yobbo in "Failing grades soar with AI usage, dwindling math skills in Berkeley CS classes"

yobbo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 06:21:42 +0000

Testing was the annoying flood barrier. AI is the rainstorm that shows why it was necessary.

New comment by yobbo in "Economists Are Obsessed with "Job Creation." How about Less Work? (2017)"

yobbo — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:01:49 +0000

The point of automation is that it reduces the bargaining power of human workers, but they still have to trade their time and effort for wages. When automation improves, the wage proportion of the created value shrinks.

New comment by yobbo in "Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?"

yobbo — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:17:31 +0000

Housebuilding is motivated as much by need for housing as the prospect of increasing market value, "building equity" and so on. This prospect depends most strongly on location, which means the land price dominates the cost of construction.

New comment by yobbo in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

yobbo — Wed, 27 May 2026 19:40:52 +0000

> Sweden had nothing like this

Not entirely true. AstraZeneca and ABB are examples that remain partly Swedish but many companies were merged into big multinationals and eventually marginalised.

New comment by yobbo in "A polynomial autoencoder beats PCA on transformer embeddings"

yobbo — Fri, 08 May 2026 07:19:29 +0000

My understanding after scanning the code examples is the technique expands the dimensionality of each data point with a set consisting of the quadratic coefficients of its existing dimensions. I thought it sounded like kernel PCA.

New comment by yobbo in "A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury"

yobbo — Sun, 03 May 2026 10:05:38 +0000

If your goal is to translate Haskell (or other garbage collected code) pattern-for-pattern into Rust, you will almost certainly burn out.

New comment by yobbo in "A couple million lines of Haskell: Production engineering at Mercury"

yobbo — Sun, 03 May 2026 09:36:24 +0000

> difficult or impossible in Rust were to me pretty basic patterns for modularity

Many things are plainly not permitted, either because the borrow-checker isn't clever enough, or the pattern is unsafe (without garbage collection and so on).

Many functional/Haskell patterns simply can not be translated directly to Rust.

New comment by yobbo in "Softmax, can you derive the Jacobian? And should you care?"

yobbo — Fri, 01 May 2026 17:31:19 +0000

The reason for exp(x) is that its derivative is exp(x), which makes it possible to express the gradient of s(x) in terms of s(x), or both in terms of exp(x). This simplifies the computation of backward pass.

New comment by yobbo in "Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation"

yobbo — Fri, 01 May 2026 10:22:03 +0000

In ancient times, slaves didn't revolt because they were oppressed by weapons and violence. Instead of paying workers, resources were used to pay and feed the military. Slaves were considered "war bounty" and tradeable goods.

When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.

New comment by yobbo in "Monad Tutorials Timeline"

yobbo — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:06:56 +0000

The point is rather that in a pure language, each io operation needs to be dependent on a sort of "world state" which is updated for each operation. They chose to implement this state as the io monad but there could have been other ways.

New comment by yobbo in "Simulacrum of Knowledge Work"

yobbo — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 08:32:27 +0000

> I don't know if I agree with either assertion…

Yes, I don't think this matters. Much of "knowledge work" was always a proxy for something else.

High quality in terms of typos and errors is mainly a signal of respect in a similar way to wearing ironed white shirts with neck-ties. "Walls of text" that no one is expected to read in depth. Basically a symbolic demonstration of sacrifice and subservience (or something). LLMs remove this mode of signalling.

If quality of content wasn't examined before, it was probably never particularly important.

New comment by yobbo in "All phones sold in the EU to have replaceable batteries from 2027"

yobbo — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:45:57 +0000

> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people

Not really. The battery just needs to have a connector rather than soldered, and no other things blocking the battery once the back-case is opened. Realistically, a service shop will do the replacement like how watch-batteries are typically replaced.

New comment by yobbo in "Saying goodbye to Agile"

yobbo — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 10:30:07 +0000

They are conditions to be met. It's not enough to proclaim them as "your process" and expect results.

When playing piano, the condition you are measured by is acoustic harmonies in the air, not finger movements. The only reasonable advice is either practice more or give up. If you are tone-deaf, it's not reasonable to expect you will learn to play the piano.

New comment by yobbo in "European AI. A playbook to own it"

yobbo — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:56:47 +0000

Deepmind was not a viable business at the time Google acquired it. Today, it is probably even less viable. It functions as R&D-lab for Google which has its own products and datacenters.

New comment by yobbo in "The AI Layoff Trap"

yobbo — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:12:31 +0000

Start by shifting taxation from worker incomes to corporate incomes?