Hacker News Reader

CamperBob2on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

Yes. Any other questions?

CamperBob2on ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

No one wants to invest a lot of money into something that might be illegal tomorrow. (Do you?)

CamperBob2on US jury says Apple owes record $5.7B in haptic technology patent case

But what got those engineers in the same room in the first place?

If whoever happens to need the technology first is almost certain to invent it, it's not worth $6B. The idea behind patents is supposed to be disclosing things that people wouldn't otherwise come up with on their own.

Not saying that's true here, but it's certainly true for a lot of patents. (Variable-speed windshield wipers deserved a government-enforced monopoly? Really?)

CamperBob2on Scientists build most accurate atomic clock

The contribution of the crystal to the overall tank circuit Q is vastly higher, by several orders of magnitude, than the contribution of the varactor diode.

So while making an oscillator steerable inevitably increases its phase noise slightly, the increase is either ignorable in practice or cancelled by the control loop itself.

CamperBob2on Scientists build most accurate atomic clock

The Rb lamp is as simple as anything can possibly be, at least if you're not tasked with coming up with the right gas recipe.

Lasers, on the other hand, have to be frequency-stabilized for use in high-quality Rb clocks. Every time someone has tried to use an unstabilized laser to replace an Rb lamp, the results have been worse in one way or another.

Usually stabilization involves a separate loop with an Rb gas cell. A bit of an oversimplification if you count miniaturized Rb standards based on VCSELs, but those are at the very bottom end of the performance spectrum to begin with. As adrian_b suggests, the best crystal oscillators are superior in many respects to the worst rubidium standards.

So a good laser-based standard will never be more economical than a lamp-based standard unless someone finds a way to run the laser open-loop. AFAIK that hasn't happened yet, at least not with something I can order off the shelf from Edmund or Thor Labs.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

GP might have been thinking of things like the inventions of the illustrious Thomas Midgley Jr. and his vigorous promotion of tetraethyl lead, etc.

Yep, that would be a much better example. Defending Midgley is a task for superintelligent AI if there ever was one.

Still, the underlying technology is not "leaded gasoline" but "internal combustion engines." The human condition would certainly be better if you could erase Midgley from history, along with the people who invented shoe-store fluoroscopes and radium paint, but it would be worse if you erased Roentgen, Otto and Diesel. Horses weren't the global-max of mobility and human brains aren't the apotheosis of reason.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

You have every behavior captured in tests, right?...right?

Not necessarily. I'm still learning how to do that, just like the rest of the industry will have to. TDD in the age of AI is a skill that will emerge from disciplined practice as well as a lot of trial-and-error.

As for digging in manually, right now I still have to keep a pretty close eye on the C code the clankers emit, but then I'm old enough to remember when we had to debug compiled C code by stepping through x86 opcodes in Turbo Debugger. That need went away, frankly sooner than I thought it would. I almost never need to look at x64 assembly anymore, and I can't sight-read ARM at all. The same thing will happen with what we call high-level languages today.

At some point last year I noticed that I was finding fewer bugs in AI-generated parts of the code than the AI was finding in my own, and that trend clearly isn't going to reverse itself. When the clanker screws something up, it's usually because I gave it flawed or incomplete instructions, not because it's incapable of doing the job right.

Not always, but usually.

CamperBob2on Zelensky says Russia has widened attacks to hit Ukraine's data centres

There's been a recent influx of pro-Russian astroturfers here and elsewhere. I have a feeling something seriously bad is about to happen.

Alternatively, people could be reading hollerith's post as "I want Ukraine to do whatever's necessary to make peace with Russia," which is obviously downvote-worthy.

I personally chose to read it as "I want a peace deal that involves Russia G'ing TFO and paying reparations," but he did leave room for other interpretations.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

Youve laid out an idealistic view of how the world will work. You have not laid out how the transition between the current world where wealth is being concentrated somehow turns into UBI.

Nor have you laid out how traditional political and social structures are going to save your job (or anyone else's) in the long run. You say you're "Angry and opinionated." We've seen the anger part, so let's hear some opinions.

Are you a rationalist, e/acc, or someone related to TESCREAL, or especially anything touching on Curtis Yarvin? If so no need to answer, I think you guys are in a cult with the modern equivalent of Dianetics, so we are never going to see eye to eye.

I'm e/acc-curious, you could say. Lots of philosophical overlap but I'm not much of a joiner. Not sure who the rationalists or TESCREAL are.

I know who Yarvin is, though, and would generally take the opposite side of any argument with him. If there's a "cult" in play here, it's the voters who were duped into electing and then re-electing Trump. Democracy simply cannot survive if it continues to grant stupid people the same political power as smart people. The stupid people will be herded to the polls by unethical smart people like Yarvin, using the power of mass media and social media as we've seen.

Meanwhile, the remaining smart people get along together like cats in a sack, ensuring they have only sporadic political influence that is bound to diminish further over time.

At the same time, democracy cannot retain the support of the people if it disenfranchises voters on grounds of education or intelligence. That leaves one obvious conclusion: that it won't survive. How AI will get us past that, I have no idea. But if you want to predict the future you're going to have to account for both the rise of AI and the fall of democracy.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

I see it as a second Industrial Revolution. After the IR, everybody still had a job, but most of those were (in the words of one personal friend) "bullshit jobs." Jobs that didn't involve growing food or building tangible things. What we'd call "white collar jobs," in other words. The economic value associated with those jobs simply didn't exist before the IR. It couldn't.

After this incarnation of the Industrial Revolution, those white-collar jobs will be mostly gone, and nothing will replace them. I personally don't think CEOs and politicians will end up being any more immune than junior programmers. New forms of organization will have to emerge on both the labor and management sides. (Democracy at the nation-state level is pretty much toast anyway, so something else is going to have to replace it, AI or no AI.)

Blue-collar labor will eventually be subsumed by robotics, but that will take longer. Things like UBI will make more sense in this environment than they do now, and I think that'll be a big part of it. Not to say that all gains will be equally distributed, or that they should be, but I don't things can get much worse than where they are headed today with regard to the tilted economic playing field.

The worst case scenario would indeed be if all the gains get concentrated and centralized, as the major AI labs seem to want, but I don't think it'll work out that way.

CamperBob2on Zelensky says Russia has widened attacks to hit Ukraine's data centres

Every conventional weapon in our arsenal, if need be.

As a taxpayer I'd consider it one of the world's great bargains, shutting down Russian imperialism before they cause even more grief.

CamperBob2on Zelensky says Russia has widened attacks to hit Ukraine's data centres

Yep. The sanctions could be a thing of the past.

CamperBob2on Zelensky says Russia has widened attacks to hit Ukraine's data centres

Even Russia would be better off today if we'd given Ukraine the tools to beat them back a couple of years ago.

CamperBob2on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

Actually, on further research, what I have wrong here is that Brockman was the largest single donor to the MAGA PAC after the election, contributing $25 million in September 2025 [1].

Which if anything seems worse.

1: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/867947/o...

CamperBob2on U.S. appeals court upholds designation of Anthropic as supply chain risk

Not just "a big MAGA donor," the biggest single contributor. Greg Brockman donated $25 million.

I get downvoted every time I point out that this was entirely rational. This, downvoters, is why it was entirely rational. Does that mean I agree with it? Of course not. But investments are made to pay off, and this one certainly has for OpenAI.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

It's a concern, all right. Fortunately my local rig won't "run out of prompts" as long as I pay the electric bill.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

Everything needs to be test-driven now, in my experience. The test harness is the part that needs the most careful vetting.

My workflow used to be:

    1. Draft rough spec
    2. Write a bunch of C/C++ code
    3. Test manually

Now it's more like:

    1. Put some actual care into a detailed spec
    2. Write equally detailed test harness spec
    3. Hand both specs to clanker.  Surf HN for a while
    4. Review target code casually
    5. Review test harness very carefully
    6. Run test(s) manually (or, lately, get the clanker to do that too)
    7. Iterate if necessary, going back to step 1, 2, or 3 as appropriate

This doesn't necessarily even save that much time, but it makes the job easier and more enjoyable, and it forces me to do things I should've been doing all along. If steps 1, 2, and 5 are done properly, step 4 can be "Meh, whatever, LGTM."

The analogy I like to use is Harold Black's work in the 1930s, trying to convince the patent office and his peers that yes, negative feedback is a huge, huge F'ing deal, because it only takes a small amount to make a large improvement in linearity. Anytime you have something that is 95% as good as it needs to be, it will be good enough if you can wrap a loop around it.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

Pro tip: Feedback fixes everything, including whatever you think is wrong with AI-generated code. If you can wrap a feedback loop around it, you can automate it safely. If you can't, then you're in a really bad place to begin with.

When I say that nobody cares about determinism, that's what I mean. Determinism is indeed important, but only at the delivery level. There are many routes to achieving it, none of which require you to write low-level code yourself. If you insist on doing that, you have a hobby, not a profession.

CamperBob2on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

[Citation needed]

Where does this happen, besides the Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast?

CamperBob2on Google’s Project Suncatcher to put ML infrastructure in space

Yes, the physics are worse, and yes, the economics are worse, but data centers in space have the crucial advantage that they are out of range of the molotov-throwing arm of Joe Public (recently unemployed).

So are container ships in international waters. Put them there.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

You first. You're arguing for the status quo, where you and I have to work for a living. Let's hear why that's so great.

CamperBob2on S.F. Democratic Party stands behind Flock surveillance cameras in vote

How will a corporate death penalty address illegal behavior by police?

CamperBob2on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

If you can live with two seats, Porsche seems to have finally greenlighted production of the electric Boxster/Cayman. I believe that platform will be shared with Audi to make a lower-cost offering available.

CamperBob2on Toyota is taking the Corolla electric

Toyota isn't so much pro-internal combustion as pro-hydrogen. They bet on the wrong horse -- a really stupid horse -- and it cost them heavily.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

LLMs are probabilistic. Compilers are not.

Nobody cares. Deal with it and get over it.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

That's great, you sound proud of your work and you should be. But what about all the human pipeline-inspection crews you've put out of work with your robots?

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

For every person killed by a fluoroscope, a thousand have been saved by radiotherapy. Did you have a larger point to make?

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

Answer the question: who's coming to save you? Bernie? Donald? AOC? J.D.?

Better if you don't need saving at all, because you've been empowered to help yourself at your job. Ultimately the goal is to free you entirely from dependence on a day-to-day occupation.

You may have noticed that no one else is even trying to help.

CamperBob2on Feds Target AI Critics as "Foreign Agents"

The Chinese labs are giving us open-weight models that we can serve with hardware that we own or control. Some of those models are extremely capable, judged by frontier or at least near-frontier standards.

The American labs are giving us endless FUD and unaffordable DRAM.

So, yes, there's a lot of room to 'promote' Chinese models and 'cast shade' on domestic models.

CamperBob2on Jensen Huang says the junior developer problem ends in two years

Who else is going to save you? You might as well shake your fist at a tsunami.

AI is the ultimate social safety net, if you'll just get out of the way of the people weaving it.