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analyte123

1,681 karma · joined May 28, 2020

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analyte123··on Finding Slow Code with Wrapture
How do people not see this? I don’t know if this is a useful library, probably it is. The author is legitimate and accomplished. But it’s hard to disregard that they’re willing to paste barely readable unedited LLM output on their website under their name. Or rather, maybe that they’ve spent so much time talking to Claude that they’ve been warped into thinking this is something approximating normal English for communicating with humans.
analyte123··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
IEA’s chart for “final electricity price for large industrial customers in energy-intensive industries” [1] shows the US cheaper than China, but this is using data from Texas as representative. I’m not sure how they back this representation up, or how different this is from GPP “business” prices. So “most places in the US cheaper than China” may be wrong, but certain states or regions are at least competitive.

[1] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-2026/prices

analyte123··on Who's afraid of Chinese models?
The US does not lag behind in energy. Industrial electricity prices in most places in the US are competitive with China, or even cheaper.
analyte123··on Retro-Tech Parenting
My eye went to the labeled floppy disk, since no floppy regularly used for more than a week ever had that pristine of a label on it, and there’s no practical reason you’d use floppy disks over flash drives or burned CDs today. (And why would you write 1998 on it?) Alas, none of us will be able to tell before too long.
analyte123··on Dear friend, you have built a Kubernetes (2024)
Kubernetes can be a sign that are you making things more complicated than they should be, too early. But if you actually have made things complicated enough (whether through essential or accidental complexity) that you have problems that k8s is good at solving, I really hope you have it instead of some hand rolled solution.

I feel the same way about commercial APM tools. Obviously in a perfect world, you would have software so simple and fast that they’re unnecessary. Maybe every month or two someone has to grep some logs that are already in place. Once you’ve gotten yourself in situation where this is obviously not true, having Datadog, New Relic or similar set up (or using k8s instead of 100 unversioned shell scripts by someone who doesn’t work there anymore) will make your inevitable distributed microservice snafu get resolved in hours rather than a longer business-risking period.

analyte123··on 40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal
It’s really, really not. Crop land per capita has been going down for decades despite richer diets, and all the biofuels and livestock feed [1]. Let’s not forget that advanced drugs to stop people from overeating the abundant food are a $60 billion and rapidly growing market.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cropland-per-person-over-...

analyte123··on Payphone Go
Please consider extending the game at least by a couple weeks! I’m very curious what percent of all California payphones could be captured with an extended game. I know the game’s phone number isn’t free but I’m sure it could be largely covered by donations.

Without even going and playing the game yet, it’s already let me understand more of the local geography. Lots of small nursing homes, behavioral institutions, and halfway houses have a payphone. Places that thankfully I haven’t had to think about and didn’t even know were there. I doubt most of these will be captured.

Many have lamented the demise of the payphone but it really bears repeating. If someone loses or is robbed of their phone, they have to rely on the trust of strangers (when they may be looking pretty rough themselves) or scrape up $20-40 for a prepaid phone at a store that’s open, rather than calling at a payphone that’s open 24/7 for 25 or 50 cents or even for free with a collect call.

analyte123··on Software Survival 3.0
I’ve heard this called “technical deflation” and it works similarly to how economic deflation can play out, causing you to forego actions in the present because you think they’ll be easier in the future (or in this case, possibly not needed at all). Time will tell if this results in a “software deflationary spiral” or not.
analyte123··on PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
One of those specific issues is that California electricity prices include what amounts to a redistributive tax, in the form of programs like CARE and FERA - probably about a third of households in the state are eligible for CARE which provides a 30% or more discount on normal prices. While there are low-income discount programs for other states none of them have nearly the reach of the CA programs.
analyte123··on Guideline has been acquired by Gusto
Something no one else mentioned so far is that, depending on your state, some IRA funds can be subject to judgments or non-exempt from bankruptcy, whereas 401k accounts are untouchable for anything except federal tax liens and divorce.
analyte123··on Pharma is a small component of US health care spending
It seems like you've been referring to "Hospital Services", which was 31% of all healthcare spending in 2023, and "Physician and Clinical Services", which was 20% of all healthcare spending in 2023, according to the CMS spreadsheet. But this is made up of revenue to the hospital or doctor's office, not just compensation for the medical professionals. These numbers include all the administration/dealing with insurance that has to be done at the hospital or physician office, as well as rent, malpractice insurance, drugs provided at the hospital, imaging costs and almost everything else that pays for capital spend, etc. The fees at the point of service basically have to account for all the bloat in the system, which of course includes some overdelivery and bloat inside the hospitals and clinics. But I really don't think this builds a case (like you seem to be doing) that doctors and nurses need to be squeezed in order to reduce US health care costs, especially when total healthcare expenditure has grown much faster than clinician pay over the past decades.
analyte123··on Flunking my Anthropic interview again
I once interviewed a very good candidate - good skills, interest in the business, a few years of experience, could definitely do the job I thought I was interviewing him for - only to find out after the fact that we actually only wanted an industry veteran with very specific, particular domain knowledge, and neither the recruiters nor me and my immediate manager had really caught up to that requirement.
analyte123··on H-1B program grew 81 percent from 2011 to 2022
This is false for H-1B - there is no "labor market test". Such a test is required for the PERM process in which an H-1B visa holder would seek a green card through their employer, although the definition of "prove" is up for debate [2].

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62o-h1b-recruit... [2] https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-immigration-h1b-vis...

analyte123··on Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system
I sincerely doubt the Namibian government is giving out thousands of dollars per household in solar subsidies, like the US does up until the end of this year. I doubt Pakistan does either, another country noted in the article where solar usage is expanding. If solar is a mature technology and an economic inevitability as contended in the article (I agree), there is a much weaker case for subsidizing it. In any case, most solar installation costs in the US seem to go to permits and expensive, inefficient contractors - endemic problems which affect all types of development and are probably only made worse by throwing free money at them.
analyte123··on How to not pay your taxes legally, apparently
QSBS has to be issued directly from the qualifying company. Stock sold on a secondary basis does not qualify.
analyte123··on Private sector lost 33k jobs, badly missing expectations of 100k increase
The ADP payroll report is noise. It is based on the payroll data from ADP only. The assumption of this report is that companies that use ADP to process their payroll are completely representative of the entire economy and that there is no regional, sector, or company stage bias to their customers. A firm with ADP laying employees off and 3 new firms with the same number of employees being founded and using a different payroll provider would be reported as a "loss" here. Maybe the private sector did lose jobs, but I wouldn't use this report to find out.
analyte123··on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
Can’t really speak to the business side of things - or if HP and WebOS really could’ve gained market share in mobile - but this reminded me I had a WebOS LG TV in 2015-2017, and in retrospect it was both very snappy and quite good-looking compared to the native interface of every TV I’ve had since.
analyte123··on Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers
The "theory" of a program is supposed to be majority embedded in its identifiers, tests, and type definitions. The same line of reasoning in this article could be used to argue that you should just name all your variables random 1 or 2 letter combinations since the theory is supposed to be all in your head anyway.

Indeed, it's quickly obvious where an LLM is lacking context because the type of a variable is not well-specified (or specified at all), the schema of a JSON blob is not specified, or there is some other secret constraint that maybe someone had in their head X years ago.

analyte123··on The Long History of Nitrous Oxide
100 chargers is not an enormous amount. That’s two normal sized boxes and when each one gets you high for 20 seconds it’s not hard to understand how you can rip through a box. Not trying to be dramatic here, I don’t consider people doing a couple whippets at a festival a public health issue, but from a harm reduction perspective the difference between occasional bouts and regular use of nitrous is somewhat distinct compared to other drugs.
analyte123··on The Long History of Nitrous Oxide
>While Hadland says it would take a lot of repeated heavy use of nitrous oxide to see these effects, over time such use could also cause permanent neurological issues.

This is not a could. Repeated abuse of nitrous, perhaps as little as daily use over 2 months, does cause neurological issues, including spinal cord damage and paralysis [1].

[1] https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31625167/

analyte123··on Ask HN: why is my F500 employer okay with paying 5x to freelancers?
The thing that “doesn’t work” about converting an existing full-time employee to a contractor, and why there wouldn’t be a process for doing so, is that it can make it look like the company is trying to dodge taxes associated with employing someone by “misclassifying” them as a contractor [1], or otherwise skirt around laws associated with employment - even laws considering layoffs: he might trust you individually but if you convert 20 employees to contractors then let them go later probably there’s going to be at least one who says that the contractor conversion was just a ploy to lay people off without notice or severance.

If you really think the market is saying you can make $150 freelancing, you can do what your manager is suggesting (which is actually pretty gracious, not sweating you about freelancing elsewhere affecting your work there), eventually quit the job and see if they’d hire you back as a freelancer in a few months.

[1] https://remote.com/blog/employee-to-contractor-risks#what-ar...

analyte123··on OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
If you have a clean, well-documented API that can be understood in under 30 minutes by a decent software engineer, congrats: you are MCP ready. I wonder how many discussions there will be about "adding MCP support" to software without this prerequisite.
analyte123··on OpenAI adds MCP support to Agents SDK
You could say the same thing about almost any protocol, e.g. HTTP, which runs on arbitrary streams of bytes over TCP; and the headers, methods and status codes are just illusions on top of that.
analyte123··on Family medicine is in decline
Even for the first person described in the story, her search for a doctor is not primarily described a search for medical care, but a search for someone who can create a paper trail to ensure her child's eligibility for benefits.
analyte123··on In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice
It’s more about keeping minerals on the field. A big one is reducing erosion, which practices like no-till and cover cropping help. Tons of soil being washed away is a lot of nutrients being lost.

If you look at a regenerative certification program like [1] you’ll see that you’re allowed to apply synthetic fertilizer but it has to be no more than the rate removed by harvested crops. This means, hopefully, that you aren’t losing much to erosion, runoff, or volatization, and that good soil structure is keeping them available.

[1] https://s3.amazonaws.com/media.regenified.com/wp-content/upl...

analyte123··on In the US, regenerative farming practices require unlearning past advice
Most agricultural land is not double-cropped, in the US less than 3% of farmland was double-cropped in 2015 [1]. You actually have it backwards: when possible, cover crops or double cash crops are a key regenerative practice because they prevent erosion and keep living roots in the ground which can enhance soil health in other ways [2].

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/june/double-croppi... [2] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/conservation-basics/conservation-b...

analyte123··on Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source
If the additive actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and there is a working emissions trading system anywhere in the world, and the additive costs less to use than the reduction times the current carbon price, they could get paid for applying the additive.
analyte123··on Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source
This is a tempting story to believe, but the actual trend is that global agricultural land use is almost flat over the past 30 years and land under cultivation per capita is decreasing almost everywhere due to improved yields [1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

analyte123··on Forage conservation is a neglected nitrous oxide source
Why should this be the takeaway from the paper, as opposed to the fact that an additive to the silage can reduce N2O emissions by up to 99%?
analyte123··on Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth
If their weather forecast is really the best, power traders would pay them large amounts just for the forecast.
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