Hacker News: atbpaca

New comment by atbpaca in "Sam Altman's response to Molotov cocktail incident"

atbpaca — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:49:27 +0000

I have many disagreements with Sam Altman. But physical attacks are never the answer. Especially attacking one's family.

New comment by atbpaca in "LLM Wiki – example of an "idea file""

atbpaca — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 01:02:12 +0000

An LLM that maintains a Confluence space. That looks like an interesting idea!

New comment by atbpaca in "The Sovereign Tech Fund invests in Scala"

atbpaca — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 21:39:51 +0000

I am very happy for Scala. So many people taking the time to rant on it. Yes, you can do anything with Scala in a million different ways. So what? So can you do it in C++, Python, Rust, etc. I agree that the whole "Category Theory" libraries are way over the top, but so are libraries in Java using "factories" everywhere. Every language has its pros and cons.

New comment by atbpaca in "Scala 3 slowed us down?"

atbpaca — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 16:25:04 +0000

Thank you for sharing. Interesting insight on dep libraries.

New comment by atbpaca in "Netflix to Acquire Warner Bros"

atbpaca — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 21:07:22 +0000

I just hope they won't destroy sagas like they did to the Witcher. In other words, I don't think this is good for future content as there is a risk movies/series will follow the same scripts, underlying story plots, cultural norms, same cinematography, etc. Quality going down.

Moreover, this also means more time for ads to pay for this merger.

New comment by atbpaca in "The Rise and Fall of Scala: A Love Letter to the Language That Broke My Heart"

atbpaca — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 16:31:13 +0000

Nice feedback. I still love Scala write Scala 2 code mainly because of Spark. I wish I could migrate everything to Scala 3.

New comment by atbpaca in "The Origins of Scala (2009)"

atbpaca — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:15:50 +0000

I don't think it is a problem with Scala 3 itself. Scala 3 brought a lot of improvements, one of them is using semantic versioning. People used to complain a log about binary compatibility between versions in 2.x. Now it's here. I think that the slow adoption of Scala 3 is mainly due to one of its most successful projects: Apache Spark. To this day, Spark only supports Scala 2.13 although Scala 3 has been around for years now. This is both disappointing and frustrating because a lot of people were introduced to Scala thanks to Apache Spark.

New comment by atbpaca in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

atbpaca — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:17:03 +0000

Here the context is prozac FOR CHILDREN, not in general. Yet some people make a point in commenting that SSRIs are ineffective in general because they believe in some big pharma conspiracy. This is spreading misinformation. The truth is that SSRIs are modestly more effective than a placebo for approximately >> one third of the individuals << who try them. In other words, SSRIs are effective for more than 60-66% of adults. Moreover, there are a few different types of SSRIs. It takes time to find the one that fits you.

New comment by atbpaca in "Prozac 'no better than placebo' for treating children with depression, experts"

atbpaca — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:03:08 +0000

Here the context is for children, not in general.

New comment by atbpaca in "Show HN: Wealthfolio 2.0- Open source investment tracker. Now Mobile and Docker"

atbpaca — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:58:30 +0000

This is awesome. Thank you for sharing and making it open-source!

New comment by atbpaca in "Sanely-automatic derivation – fixing type classes derivation UX in Scala"

atbpaca — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 16:27:07 +0000

Comprehensive analysis. Awesome!

New comment by atbpaca in "Figure 03, our 3rd generation humanoid robot"

atbpaca — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 14:46:34 +0000

I hope robots like these will be used to help the elderly continue to live in their homes. There is a huge need to support the aging society and not enough people. I believe this would be more useful than replacing receptionists or people that have industry jobs.

New comment by atbpaca in "ML needs a new programming language – Interview with Chris Lattner"

atbpaca — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:56:16 +0000

Mojo looks like the perfect balance between readability (python-like syntax) and efficiency (rust-like performance).

New comment by atbpaca in "Americans Lose Faith That Hard Work Leads to Economic Gains, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds"

atbpaca — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 15:56:01 +0000

Thinking out loud, CEOs have one mission, one objective: increase the ROI of shareholders through stock prices and dividends. I don't know if that is a legal obligation. But I wonder if CEOs were mandated/incentivized to also take into account social and environmental progress, maybe inequality would start to dwindle. Am I dreaming?

New comment by atbpaca in "Using ChatGPT 5 to help undo a wrongful cancellation from the Scala community"

atbpaca — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 20:33:21 +0000

It is surprising that, given the seriousness of the allegations, the police was not contacted by the supposed victims, there was no investigation by authorities and eventually no justice.

New comment by atbpaca in "The two versions of Parquet"

atbpaca — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 13:20:48 +0000

Similarly, Apache Spark and Scala versions. Spark ran on Scala 2.12 for a long time to eventually support 2.13. To this day, no plans to support Scala 3.x. Databricks started supporting 2.13 only in May this year...

New comment by atbpaca in "AGI is an engineering problem, not a model training problem"

atbpaca — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 01:25:49 +0000

It's a research problem, a science problem. And then an engineering problem to industrialize it. How can we replicate intelligence if we don't even know how it emerges from our brains?

New comment by atbpaca in "AI is already replacing thousands of jobs per month, report finds"

atbpaca — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:29:24 +0000

I tried ChatGPT 5 and Claude for some medium, non-trivial coding tasks in Rust, and most of the time the code does not even compile. It may work better for other programming languages. However, this make me believe that unless you want basic small functions (like convert integer to string) done by AI, betting on it to replace SDEs is still risky, as of today. On the other hand, AI tech is progressing quickly.

New comment by atbpaca in "Amtrak NextGen Acela Debuts on August 28"

atbpaca — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:15:41 +0000

Finally! I saw these new trains stationed at Philadelphia Train Station. They're beautiful. I just wished they could operate at real high speed throughout the NEC.

New comment by atbpaca in "Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers"

atbpaca — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 15:33:18 +0000

I quote: "applicants using the tech are overall happy with their experience—and its hiring manager clientele are enthusiastic". Let me translate the PR statement to the real-world: applicants dislike the tech and hiring managers are satisfied with lowering hiring costs.