Hacker News: adrianN

New comment by adrianN in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

adrianN — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 05:59:06 +0000

Well if you realized that the profession will not return to the form that you enjoy you should try to accept that and find something different to enjoy. Being bitter is not a good method of coping with change.

New comment by adrianN in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

adrianN — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 03:22:08 +0000

Reminds me of this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM

New comment by adrianN in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

adrianN — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:54:45 +0000

That is kind of my point.

New comment by adrianN in "How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs"

adrianN — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:59:48 +0000

There is plenty of historical precedent for machines replacing professions. You could read what those people did and how well it worked.

New comment by adrianN in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

adrianN — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 10:05:51 +0000

That will either lead to students becoming frustrated after spending inordinate amounts of time on the unsolvable problem or students giving up too early on the solvable problems.

New comment by adrianN in "How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments"

adrianN — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 08:22:43 +0000

Teaching is imo mostly about techniques that battle laziness. Teaching intrinsically motivated intelligent students has always been trivial. All progress in education is about scaling it to work for people who only reluctantly engage with the material.

New comment by adrianN in "Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale"

adrianN — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 07:02:47 +0000

Runtimes are usually pretty well applicable at scale, it’s just that most people don’t have a good intuition about asymptomatic notation. Constants and lower order terms matter a lot in practice but are hidden in asymptotic notation.

New comment by adrianN in "Oracle on the hook to pay data centre investors even if site has no electricity"

adrianN — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:04:31 +0000

Even a billionaire doesn’t have many _good_ years left after 80.

New comment by adrianN in "Hackers influence ChatGPT and Gemini to direct users to scam centers"

adrianN — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:57:07 +0000

Recent political discourse has all but proved that a majority of the populace in many countries is quite removed from facts in general. I don’t think that there is much hope for critical thinking.

New comment by adrianN in "Tokens too cheap to meter"

adrianN — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 06:00:01 +0000

There is no reason to assume that quantum computers would benefit LLMs in particular. Perhaps we could implement LLMs as analog circuits to save energy.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:24:12 +0000

It takes five years to build a wind turbine in Germany. There is a snowball's chance in hell that you can build a nuclear power plant in that time.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:09:18 +0000

There is no reason to assume that fusion will be a particularly cheap power source.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 03:05:49 +0000

Only a tiny fraction of the Federation's population is part of Star Fleet. There are only a few thousand star ships scattered over thousands of light years. Crew complements are rather small, so at most a single-digit million people are on Star Fleet ships. That's comparable to the size of just the current US military personnel but the Federation has hundreds of planets and many billions of people.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:22:10 +0000

To produce 10x the current power demand with nuclear you’d need breeder reactors or perhaps thorium unless you want to run out of fuel rather quickly. That’s not what is being proposed here.

I also don’t believe that fission, fusion or antimatter are on the same branch of the tech tree.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 18:16:02 +0000

Cost and time seem like a pretty important con to me.

New comment by adrianN in "Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 17:49:04 +0000

It is sad that this has become a topic of the culture wars. Nothing good comes out of this, certainly not a rational weighing of the pros and cons of nuclear power.

I’m particularly interested in how they plan to finance reactors in a grid dominated by solar. I wouldn’t be surprised if they legally allow the building of new reactors but then fail to find investors. But perhaps they plan on using them as some sort of strategic assets and will just run them at a loss?

New comment by adrianN in "Woman Arrested, Dragged Away After Speaking About Flock at City Council Meeting"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:18:21 +0000

Your comment would be much better without the last sentence.

New comment by adrianN in "The darker side of being a doctor"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:42:56 +0000

I'd like not to have to wait for three months to see a doctor to prescribe me the routine treatment for my routine illness, so yes, more mediocre doctors would be good for me. It would also unburden the doctors who are "really into medicine" so that they could spend their time on more difficult cases.

New comment by adrianN in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:47:29 +0000

It’s hard to retrofit that on existing buildings for reasons of structural integrity.

New comment by adrianN in "What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals"

adrianN — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 08:41:49 +0000

Changing permitting laws can take ages if it works at all.