Hacker News: SJC_Hacker

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Gold is now the top U.S. export"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 23:13:22 +0000

It’s scarce

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:51:16 +0000

Everything fails given a long enough time span.

For solar PV it is ~30 years.

While the cell may continue to generate power, it may have diminished so greatly as to no longer justify its physical footprint

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:40:48 +0000

Because when the continent is not flooded with solar, you still need/want power

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Solar surpasses nuclear power globally for first time"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 18:36:09 +0000

If nuclear is too expensive why are French (~70% nuclear) electricity prices much lower compared to Germany (~60% renewables) ?

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 03:19:00 +0000

Without tips … on busy nights servers can make upwards of $50/hour … even more for bartenders especially youngish and female

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 03:13:22 +0000

Declining population also means declining demand for those same services

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "90% of US working hours are spent on tasks not covered well by AI benchmarks"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 03:05:01 +0000

The thought experiment was not assuming AGI, but something like an old school perfect expert at a given task. Maybe like C-3PO only useful as a “protocol droid”, but fairly useless at everything else

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "GLM-Legal"

SJC_Hacker — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:46:59 +0000

> You could say the same about grilling burgers. And yet, there are millions of burger cooks around the world grilling hundreds of millions of patties everyday with zero knowledge of how to grill burgers, at McDonald's and other bottom of the barrel fast food chains.

If there are cooks successfully grilling burgers, I think they would have to have knowledge of how to grill burgers.

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Postgres isn't slow, your storage is"

SJC_Hacker — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:36:03 +0000

Either you aren’t using indexes or your queries must be doing a lot of JOINS

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]"

SJC_Hacker — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 05:48:16 +0000

Huh? Tao won a Fields medal, that pretty much guarantees quite a bit of attention.

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "I would like the value of my home to rise, while my property taxes fall"

SJC_Hacker — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:18:21 +0000

> A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house

Your better believe it is when it comes time to sell.

Or would owners not mind having 0% property taxes in return for the state taking all gains at sale time

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "The first fully implanted cochlear implant reaches patients"

SJC_Hacker — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 02:07:40 +0000

CI user here. Thus will hve many benefits over conventional CIs such as being able to play sports, especially contact, while wearing the implant. Moisture build up due to sweating is a major killer for conventional implants.

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "The first fully implanted cochlear implant reaches patients"

SJC_Hacker — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 01:47:17 +0000

There are phone apps that do live transcription that work pretty well

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far"

SJC_Hacker — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:37:56 +0000

Wiles proof of Fermats last theorem was over 100 pages

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far)"

SJC_Hacker — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 20:36:15 +0000

Yeah, the love doll companies already have voice synthesis and facial expressions. Full locomotion is the next obvious step

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "UK military jamming other nations' satellites to defend itself, BBC told"

SJC_Hacker — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:29:38 +0000

GPS is generally jammed close to the target, to varying degrees. For intermediate guidance out of range of jammers it works fairly well

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"

SJC_Hacker — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 04:51:23 +0000

How would we know it was correct?

If you feed an AI nonsense in its training data, it will generate nonsense

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Europe's summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat"

SJC_Hacker — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 10:12:12 +0000

California is a big state. The only true deserts are in the south east part of the state

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

SJC_Hacker — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:58:49 +0000

3dfx hardware didn’t run anything but Glide very well. It did run some OpenGL after iD twisted their arm, but it was a really crummy implementation

While ATI and Nvidia never tried to implement a Glide emulation layer, several hobbyists did and 3dfx shut them down with legal threats

Were there any legal barriers to ATI/AMD or Intel implementing CUDA or PhysX on their systems?

New comment by SJC_Hacker in "Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B"

SJC_Hacker — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 10:02:34 +0000

3dfx had their own API which locked in game developers. This was far worse than anything NVidia has tried