Hacker News Reader

iso1337on LLMs are eroding my software engineering career and I don't know what to do

A lot of jobs are at SMEs but they’re low quality service jobs…

Your local restaurant with thin margins and underpaid staff is an SME

iso1337on Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

Q1 - How much effort did you put into deterministic guardrails like AST linters, etc?

I find there’s a ton of slop unless hard guardrails are added, eg step 1 is just around syntax, step 2 is to enforce mental models

You still need someone steering direction and have a logically consistent idea of what you actually want to build

Q2 - I find that vibe coding really accelerates FE projects because it’s possible to run everything locally and check results

For pure distributed infra backend more investments have to be made into the devloop to be able to shift left the feedback loop and decouple it from humans or real deploys

iso1337on Harness engineering: Leveraging Codex in an agent-first world

IIUC its just strict separation of concerns

Eg UI cannot reach down and directly read config files

Configs must be only read by (im assuming) a storage interface layer called repo

There’s a strict directionality of dependency

Somewhat similar to ports and adaptors but presumably more strictly enforced by deterministic linters

iso1337on Thousands of early-career NIH researchers forming union for first time

NIH should build more institutes in cheaper areas (eg not NoVa). It’s a win win since it will help revitalize poorer areas of America and save on costs.

It will also tilt more senators/congresspeople to vote for NIH funding, similar to military base funding

iso1337on Twitter’s Entire A11y Experience Team Let Go

And that's why a ton of video lectures from UC Berkeley had to be taken down due to lack of captions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

The spirit of the law is good, but sometimes it just means that we lose "good enough" in pursuit of "perfect".

iso1337on Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

Any publicity is good publicity. Sprinkle in some words about "this needs further study" and hope someone comes along to fund the next few years of your lab.

iso1337on Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

Their claims around Type IIS assembly are also suspect. eg in Golden Gate assembly, you choose Type IIS that reach over and cut, so the restriction site is absent from the final assembled product.

"Additionally, because the final product does not have a Type IIS restriction enzyme recognition site, the correctly-ligated product cannot be cut again by the restriction enzyme, meaning the reaction is essentially irreversible"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Cloning ----

The choice of focusing on a particular RE pair also smells of p-hacking. Their claim that BsaI/BsmBI makes for easy mixing/matching genomes doesn't make sense in this day and age, when you can use other techniques to make hybrids more effectively (eg, you are not restricted to the natural location of those restriction enzyme sites)

iso1337on Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2?

There is a huge variety of viruses, just because someone wrote the equivalent of "Hello World" doesn't mean you can write a complicated CMS anytime soon.

Synthetic biology (the actual synthesis of DNA) has come a long way, we don't understand all the components yet though.

iso1337on AltaRock Energy Melts Rock with Millimeter Waves for Geothermal Wells (2020)

https://dandelionenergy.com/ is one company trying to scale this.

In general, Americans don't want to pay a huge cost upfront for some efficiency gains. Especially since traditionally fossil energy was cheap.

Also look at heat pump clothes dryers. They're a win in that you don't need a vent (and associated vent cleaning), but they cost more upfront.

Hopefully these are areas where the government can provide low interest rate loans upfront, since they are investments that pay for themselves over time.

iso1337on GM created a new energy business to sell batteries and solar panels

LFP batteries are the future for home energy storage. Less fire risk, cheaper. They're heavier, but that's totally fine for a stationary application.

Does GM have any competency in this area?

iso1337on Imagen Video: high definition video generation with diffusion models

The fact that white is the default is already problematic.

iso1337on America Has an E-Bike Problem That Can’t Be Solved with More E-Bikes

I think so many of these issues can be solved by going on road diets and dedicating an entire car lane to bikes.

Use the carrot and the stick to incentivize a healthier mode of transportation.

iso1337on “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

I don’t know if you have relatives or children with Down’s, but it is no walk in the park.

Forcing parents to have disabled kids is not good policy either.

iso1337on Ask HN: Why can't we comment on “X is Hiring” posts?

Instagram is one of the few platforms that allows you to comment on ads. It's pretty interesting as the comments tend to be overwhelmingly negative.

iso1337on Tesla Virtual Power Plant

You want an unregulated market like Texas?

iso1337on Tesla Virtual Power Plant

There’s no network effect though?

On FB, more people on the social network means the draw to the n+1st user is immense.

Whereas for home batteries, it could be the inverse. As more people have batteries, the payout is lower.

I’m all for home batteries, but I think we also need to restructure utility incentives in america. Currently they get to pass down all sorts of charges/fees to the customer.

iso1337on Ford F-150 Lightning: Fast Truck, Slow Computer

I think you’re conflating the UI of Amazon with the more difficult problem of getting a large distributed system to work at scale.

Conversely, if your ECU has minor glitches, will you notice? Unless it results in catastrophic failure, you will not even know if happens to result in the occasional 0.1 mpg increase in consumption.

And I’m sure VW and the other companies put a lot of resources into software engineering the exhaust emissions defeat workaround.

iso1337on The '3.5% rule': How a small minority can change the world

The local HK government has no power, it is controlled by the CCP. So at least in this case, I can buy the argument.

An American analogy of your argument would be something like “but >3.5% of LA wanted policy XYZ, why didn’t it work”

iso1337on MIT engineers develop stickers that can see inside the body

says the study’s senior author, Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

The study also includes lead authors Chonghe Wang and Xiaoyu Chen, and co-authors Liu Wang, Mitsutoshi Makihata, and Tao Zhao at MIT, along with Hsiao-Chuan Liu of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.

It's likely all or most of the researchers were immigrants/foreign. And yet we have overly restrictive immigration policies for high skilled workers that basically means we educate them and then return them back to their country.

iso1337on A big bet on geothermal could help prevent a climate catastrophe

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_deep_drilling_technol...

Plasma drilling sounds like it could be useful - the plasma essentially melts the material surrounding the borehole into a glass as it drills down.

iso1337on Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?

https://acoup.blog/tag/lord-of-the-rings/

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa...

Great high quality blog from a historian analyzing the logistics of LOTR and other fantasy settings.

iso1337on Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair (In-Vitro Study)

This is covid misinformation. It's always dangerous to extrapolate the results of a study like this to what it means for the vaccine.

For a decent discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/qkq3qp/sarscov2_sp...

iso1337on Ask HN: Whatever happened to Wolfram Alpha?

Americans love to come up with complicate theories about why it’s impossible for them to lose weight.

Go to Europe or East Asia and you’ll see it’s definitely possible and definitely influenced by diet (as in what you eat).

The reasons people are fat here are the huge serving sizes, the corn/meat/milk subsidies, and car culture.

iso1337on Goodbye, MIT

“Wokeness” treats Asians as white adjacent and often dismisses the real issues they face because of an idea that other people suffer more. Eg see efforts to use BIPOC instead of POC. Those communities do suffer more, but that doesn’t invalidate the issues other people face.

The Asian community is kind of split on this. A lot of the older generations think like the poster but some younger second generation Asians are more “woke”.

Also see active efforts in California and in universities to reduce “overrepresentation” of Asians. In some ways it feels like you’re being punished for being too successful.

iso1337on Moderna mRNA sequence released to GitHub [pdf]

It's the 3' (3-prime) UTR (un-translated region). It can affect the translation of the mRNA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_prime_untranslated_regio....

The next thing is the poly-A tail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyadenylation

blasting the 3' UTR, we see it ~50% of it was copied from the human mitochondria

tldr, extra regulatory signals (often not well understood)

iso1337on Jeff Bezos Commits $10B to Address Climate Change

Actually if you’re in the US, it’s actually having a child:

https://www.wnpr.org/post/five-ways-reduce-your-carbon-footp...

iso1337on Ramen restaurant prevalence is associated with stroke mortality in Japan

Yes, they are cheap. Usually around 600-1200 yen or $6-12

many of them reduce labor costs by having a vending machine outside where you get a token that indicates your order.

https://livejapan.com/en/in-tokyo/in-pref-tokyo/in-asakusa/a...

The current ramen fad in America relies on super rich broth, basically liquid bacon.

There are many styles of ramen in Japan, ranging from super simple broths to the liquid bacon style.

iso1337on The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change

There is a well known relationship summarized in the Sherwood plot.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/108/51/20428/F1.large.jpg

Your basic intuition is correct in that the more dilute something is, the more costly it is to extract/purify it.

iso1337on Biology Is Eating the World

This will be an unpopular opinion, but do you think that money could be better spent on other health initiatives like prevention? Is spending 10-100k per month so rich people in developed countries can live a few months longer really that much more moral?

Consider that orphan diseases are often not worked on due to either 1) not enough rich people have the disease or 2) only poor people have the disease so it's not worth it.

People in developing countries have serious diseases, but there's no money in it so no one is working on it (minus some efforts from people like Bill Gates).

iso1337on America’s Buses Need Our Love More Than Ever (2018)

You do realize that if you get rid of those busses then the traffic will be even worse right? Even if all of those people end up carpooling, they'll occupy way more space in the HOV lane.

The real solution should be to expand the number of HOV lanes.