Hacker News Reader

rotison Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise

Yes, this paper and many others will be forgotten as soon as they leave the front page. Afterwards noone refers to articles like these here. People just talk about anecdotes and personal experiences. Not that I think this is bad.

rotison Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety

That's another issue I have with this article. It lists the risks, but does not provide any specific well documented examples. It (and many others privacy related) does not try to quantify them either. Driving a car, flying a plane pose risks too. Yet milions of people take the risk daily. Jumping from 10th floor is also risky and here somehow most peoply don't try it. People intuitively can evaluate the risks on their own and ultimately you cannot do that for them. If examples of negative consequences of their data being sold start appearing, they will stop using these apps by themselves. But I personaly think these risks are blown out of proportion.

rotison My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

The author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece:

https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/

Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together.

For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in mind, if I am nuts for being sceptical of LLMs, I think it is fair to call the author a clickbaiter.

rotison Phoenician culture spread mainly through cultural exchange

I dunno. Cultural exchange has positive connotations in my book.

rotison A PostgreSQL planner semi-join gotcha with CTE, LIMIT, and RETURNING

To add to sibling comment. This sounds like a parameter sniffing. Read it up. It should help you understand the problem. It is a known issue with SQL Server. Or rather a tradeoff. You don't want to compile a new execution plan for every query. This would eat up CPU by itself.

rotison “Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

Atmosphere of this exoplaned is rich in hydrogen. Also it has likely different atmospheric pressure than we have on Earth. Doubtful there is any life form as we know it. I suspect best we can expect there is something like a primordial soup: a mix of relatively simple organic compounds.

rotison Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age

How can this article be written by LLM? Its date is November 2021. Not judging the article as a whole but the command you pointed out seems to be correct. Faster is the name of the pool.

rotison Exposing concurrency bugs with a custom scheduler

This sounds very similar to Cuzz from Application Verifier for Windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

rotison Hello World on z/OS (2018)

Mirrors my experiences with z/OS. One thing I distinctly remember was when I tried to write JCL to move some datasets. Took me 2 days reading documentation and trying out things. Finally I just gave up. It is not fun when you have noone to help and Google isn't very helpful. If you think Unix tools have no consistency, try JCL and z/OS. Considering how alien JCL is and magic incantations I invoked with it, I'm convinced that there is Cthulhu in the mainframe machine.

Still, I'm quite proud I manage to write some JCL which saved us potentially days of manual work.

Other things I remember from that time was that passwords were only 8 characters long and case insensitive. My guess is z/OS is secure only by its obscurity. Though maybe this was just our installation. No idea until today.

rotison America has a child marriage epidemic

Here are the marriage ages for US and the world for context:

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

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

The US doesn't seem to particularly stand out. I feel this article is manipulative and just tries to antagonize people. Manipulative because it says some marriages were for children aged 10, while the minimum age is usually 15/16. So how is this even possible? Those 10 year child cases should definitely be investigated, but I'm sceptical that's anything more of a small fraction of underage marriages and they are probably illegal to begin with. The antagonizing part is simple: It's all Republicans. Don't mention that California has technically no official age defined. This would break the narrative.

rotison 2024 Antarctic ozone hole ranks 7th-smallest since recovery began

>area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh-smallest since recovery began in 1992

Yet later in the article:

>In previous years, NOAA and NASA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time period dating back to 1979 (...) . Using that longer record (...) this year's hole ranked 20th-smallest in area across 45 years of observations.

20th-smallest or 25th-biggest. So looks like perfectly average size to me.

If we look at year earlier:

>the hole ranked as the 12th largest single-day ozone hole since 1979.

from:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152023/modest-ozone...

Why do I have a feeling these numbers are being manipulated?

rotison Coronavirus vaccines are now pricey w/o insurance as CDC access program expires

Seems like approximately noone is vaccinating or taking boosters. Looks like an attempt to stir up old scares

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

rotison Husband and wife outed as GRU spies aiding bombings and poisonings across Europe

Oh yeah the reports about Russian army from beginning of war in Ukraine read like someone copying his book Inside the Soviet Army. Which in turn reads like stories you heard about the Soviets in WW2.