Hacker News: atlantic

New comment by atlantic in "Boring Company cited for almost 800 environmental violations in Las Vegas"

atlantic — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 22:30:45 +0000

How did you reach the conclusion that it is a PR project? Since Elon Musk is pushing ahead to colonize Mars - and Martian cities will probably be built underground - it is just as likely that he is using this company to develop one of the critical technologies for interplanetary expansion.

New comment by atlantic in "We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness"

atlantic — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 18:37:38 +0000

No, it's not. You sound like a biology textbook, not a human being.

New comment by atlantic in "On Not Carrying a Camera – Cultivating memories instead of snapshots"

atlantic — Mon, 05 May 2025 10:33:35 +0000

I usually take one picture of an occasion. And there might be one or two events that qualify as occasions each month. That way, some trigger for the memory is created, but picture-taking does not get in the way of experiencing things.

New comment by atlantic in "'Unstoppable force' of solar power propels world to 40% clean electricity"

atlantic — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 16:23:44 +0000

It's not "over" greenery. Land is entirely cleared of vegetation before panels are installed, including the occasional forest. Thousands of larger birds are killed by wind farms. Offshore wind farms are creating deserts for fish. Understandably, many prefer the good old days before the planet was being saved.

New comment by atlantic in "AI models miss disease in Black and female patients"

atlantic — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 21:37:38 +0000

If diseases manifest differently for different races and genders, the obvious solution is to train multiple LLMs, based on separate datasets for those different groups. Not to mutter darkly about bias and discrimination.

New comment by atlantic in "Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)"

atlantic — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 15:26:01 +0000

Calling Plato a dualist seriously calls into question the author's philosophical credentials.

New comment by atlantic in "A.I. is prompting an evolution, not extinction, for coders"

atlantic — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 19:58:49 +0000

I've found that AI has saved me time consulting Stack Overflow. It combines thorough knowledge of the documentation with a lot of practical experience gleaned from online forums

It has also saved time producing well-defined functions, for very specific tasks. But you have to know how to work with it, going through several increasingly complex iterations, until you get what you want.

Producing full applications still seems a pipedream at this stage.

New comment by atlantic in "My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking"

atlantic — Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:33:01 +0000

You can have homework for practice. That is obviously very useful. What I mean is that any unsupervised work will stop counting towards final grades.

New comment by atlantic in "My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking"

atlantic — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 17:38:10 +0000

The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.

New comment by atlantic in "Fabiano Caruana, Chess Is Meaningless [video]"

atlantic — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 21:42:41 +0000

Usefulness to society is only meaningful if a society is going somewhere. Modern societies don't have any collective goals, they are just drifting agglomerations of individuals, most of them intent on their own enrichment or pleasure. So there is nothing for talented individuals to contribute to, and they may as well channel their energies into following their own curiosity.

New comment by atlantic in "Ask HN: Why don't you use spaced repetition to learn, despite its effectiveness?"

atlantic — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 16:04:42 +0000

I used this method to learn Latin during the lockdown. But I found Anki more trouble than it was worth. Instead I went old school and used handwritten bits of paper. Worked just fine.

New comment by atlantic in "Canvas is a new way to write and code with ChatGPT"

atlantic — Fri, 04 Oct 2024 08:59:34 +0000

Technology also moves into dead ends. Not every change is progress. You can only tell a posteriori which paths were fruitful and which were not.

New comment by atlantic in "Dutch City the Hague Is First Banning Oil and Air Travel Ads"

atlantic — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 18:03:37 +0000

Why fly at all? Why not hold meetings over the internet like other working people? Or organize the conference in Bradford or Blackpool, instead of some tropical paradise, and see how many people are still motivated to fly in?

New comment by atlantic in "Boeing workers vote to strike"

atlantic — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 16:52:42 +0000

Good puns. Just out of curiosity, is your name a synonym for sh*tpost?

New comment by atlantic in "I wish I didn't miss the '90s-00s internet"

atlantic — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:09:33 +0000

When you miss something, you're not referring to the original experience, but to a memory of an experience. Memories being mental artifacts, it's perfectly feasible to miss an imagined experience. Hence the current wave of nostalgia for the Roman empire.

New comment by atlantic in "The biggest diamond in over a century is found in Botswana"

atlantic — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 09:14:43 +0000

> why do diamonds cost so much when they're just old rocks?

Seriously? Economics 101: supply and demand. Or is this a rhetorical question, with some kind of social justice slant?

New comment by atlantic in "Ask HN: Business logic is slowing us down"

atlantic — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 22:34:04 +0000

Exactly. What the OP is saying is: my users are getting in the way of my programming. This is nonsensical. Giving business users good tools to do their job is the whole point of software development. Implementing those tools is our job as developers; but the end goal of the software should not be changed to make development easier.

New comment by atlantic in "Ask HN: Freelancer's Dilemma – Client Won't Pay Despite Clear Agreement"

atlantic — Fri, 12 Jul 2024 10:47:45 +0000

Yes, I have handled a situation like that once, in which the client refused to pay and cut off all communication. It was a remote cross-border gig, and there was no way I could afford a lawyer in the client's country.

After struggling with the problem for a few weeks, I located a debt-collection company, and decided to offer the debt to them, and all related documentation, so they could collect it for themselves. I then informed the client of my intentions via email. I said: I'm never going to see this money, but neither are you.

They got back to me within a couple of hours, and paid before the end of the week.

New comment by atlantic in "LINQPad – The .NET Programmer's Playground"

atlantic — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 21:49:16 +0000

There is already a C# REPL built into Visual Studio, called C# Interactive. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's not bad at all.

New comment by atlantic in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

atlantic — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 15:27:51 +0000

Your metrics are wrong. The measure is not so much how many houses are occupied, as how many houses are occupied by local working people (as opposed to tourists / hippies / anarchists).