<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: dnc</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dnc</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:22:44 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=dnc" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Replies to comments on my "LLMs are eroding my career" post"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I attribute the excitement of the VC and CEO cast to the same underlying motive, but I think there are at least several other ways all this could play out:<p>- the Cul-de-Sac: AI progress flattens as scaling data and compute, RL and algorithmic improvements hit diminishing returns.<p>- democratization: LLMs decentralize, mirroring the shift from mainframes to personal computers.<p>- AI creates new jobs and thus new dependencies for the capitalist class<p>- Any combination of the above.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:45:48 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444123</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444123</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444123</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Are you sure you want to use MMAP in your DBMS?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Previous discussions:<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563187">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563187</a><p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29936104">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29936104</a><p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504052">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31504052</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:05:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39324718</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39324718</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39324718</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>yes, you are correct, sorry for the ambiguity and late reply.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 06 May 2023 09:15:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35839592</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35839592</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35839592</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Brain activity of dying people shows signs of near-death experiences"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>From my own experience, "only" deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 02 May 2023 18:26:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35792043</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35792043</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35792043</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Stock-market investors can no longer count on the ‘index effect’"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>According to the article (and the discussed research) this was only a minor factor:<p>"The researchers also explored the possibility that index changes are more predictable today than in the past, leading sophisticated market participants to trade ahead of the events. They concluded that this played only a minor role in their findings, however."<p>The two main factors being:<p>"...an increase in migrations over time from the S&P MidCap 400 index, and an overall increase in the market's ability to provide liquidity to those investors seeking to buy and sell around the time of index changes.<p>The additional liquidity has 'made it easier for everyone to trade, and as a result, the prices move less.' says Dr. Greenwood.<p>And with more stocks migrating to the S&P 500 from the S&P MidCap 400, midcap funds are selling as S&P 500 funds are buying, leading to 'a wash' in demand, he says.<p>"</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 10 Apr 2023 07:08:23 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35509882</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35509882</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35509882</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-find-new-jobs-11672097730">https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-find-new-jobs-11672097730</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34147858">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34147858</a></p>
<p>Points: 4</p>
<p># Comments: 2</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 27 Dec 2022 11:48:19 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.wsj.com/articles/laid-off-tech-workers-quickly-find-new-jobs-11672097730</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34147858</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34147858</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Franz Kafka’s Dissenting Bodies"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> I read all his novels (and some of his short stories), he's one of my favorite authors<p>That makes at least two of us. :) But, I suspect there are quite a few more HN readers who like Kafka's works and literature in general (the first is arguably very correlated to the other), judging from how often literature related articles appear on the HN front page. Often, when that is the case I also can't help but wonder the same about the correlation between being a fiction and HN reader.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 12 Oct 2022 17:49:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180481</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180481</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33180481</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "What to read to become a better writer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An essay on writing by Raymond Carver [1] (as well as pretty much anything by Raymond Carver and authors he mentions in the essay :)). It's about good fiction writing, but, I think, good to keep in mind for writing in general.<p>[1] <a href="https://bryanafern.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/on-writing-raymond-carver.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://bryanafern.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/on-writing-ra...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 25 Sep 2022 18:47:08 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32974591</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32974591</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32974591</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Algolia Acquires Search.io"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Vector search, though, isn't as good on handling typos and not good at all when it comes to as you type searching. Vehic won't match on auto, for example.<p>This is incorrect in general case and it entirely depends on the model that is used to produce word vectors and the text corpus the model is trained with.<p>For instance, fastText model is trained on words, but also their parts (n-grams), so it should produce word vectors that would be close (in cosine-distance) to vectors of their corresponding typos and partials, even if the text corpus that was used to train the model doesn't contain same typos and partially typed words verbatim.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 15 Sep 2022 14:38:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32852735</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32852735</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32852735</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Mozilla releases local machine translation tools as part of Project Bergamot"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hi,<p>This is an awesome project, congratulations!<p>Could you share details about the machine translation engine that is used (or where to find out more about it)? Are there any plans to open source the extension code (with the WebAssembly optmizations that are mentioned in the article)?<p>Thanks.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 02 Jun 2022 18:26:11 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598689</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598689</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31598689</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I can experience something similar with the ventilation system in my apartment. Usually, the sound of it is immersed in the background noise together with other sounds coming from the outside, so most of the time I'm not aware of it at all. However, sometimes when I meditate I hear it and if I focus my attention on it, after a while it becomes clear and loud, rich and versatile, not unlike a music played on a wind instrument.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 29 Jun 2021 07:58:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27673110</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27673110</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27673110</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Just Too Efficient"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Related to this and discussed quite a few times on HN ([1],[2]), 'In Praise of Idleness', an essay by Bertrand Russell: <a href="https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Prais...</a> . I return to it every once in a while, if not to regain a bit of sanity, than just to enjoy clarity of thought and style in his writing.<p>[1]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21509144</a>
 [2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9015092</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 12 Jul 2020 10:47:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810419</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810419</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23810419</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[Michel Houellebecq: World will be worse after ‘banal’ virus]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Article URL: <a href="https://www.dawn.com/news/1554623">https://www.dawn.com/news/1554623</a></p>
<p>Comments URL: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080216">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080216</a></p>
<p>Points: 2</p>
<p># Comments: 0</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 May 2020 14:16:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://www.dawn.com/news/1554623</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080216</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080216</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Sir Rod Stewart reveals his epic model railway city"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I wonder where the fascination with trains and railways (that I share) comes from. Maybe from the 19th century industrialization and technological revolution when railway was one of its main symbols ("locomotion of progress")? Related to this, it was a great surprise to me when I first found out about the origin of the term 'hacker':<p>"3. The Early Hackers<p>The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1. The Signals and Power committee of MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club adopted the machine as their favorite tech-toy and invented programming tools, slang, and an entire surrounding culture that is still recognizably with us today. These early years have been examined in the first part of Steven Levy's book Hackers [Levy] .<p>MIT's computer culture seems to have been the first to adopt the term `hacker'. The Tech Model Railroad Club's hackers became the nucleus of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the world's leading center of AI research into the early 1980s. Their influence was spread far wider after 1969, the first year of the ARPANET. "<p>Source: <a href="http://catb.org/esr/writings/hacker-history/hacker-history-3.html" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/esr/writings/hacker-history/hacker-history-3...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2019 21:18:52 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529697</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529697</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21529697</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Query2vec: Search query expansion with query embeddings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>"The difference between this and word2vec is that the primitive atomic unit we are embedding isn’t a word, but a search query. Therefore this isn’t a language model, but a query model."<p>If a primitive embedding unit is a search query instead of a word, then I assume that a query vector model is trained on a limited dictionary of queries. I wonder if that implies that the trained vector model can encode only search queries that are already present in its dictionary? If not, I think it would be interesting to know more about how the closed dictionary problem was solved.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2019 22:21:22 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21457403</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21457403</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21457403</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "5-MeO-DMT Associated with Improvements in Depression, Anxiety"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've recently read a seminal work on LSD and how it affects human psyche: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196573.Realms_of_the_Human_Unconscious?ac=1&from_search=true#" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/196573.Realms_of_the_Hum...</a>. Cannot recommend it enough. I feel it demystified a great deal of uncertainty and unknowns I had about LSD. 
The book was based on roughly 2500 LSD sessions (mostly high dose, in 150-300mg range) that the author conducted in 70s with different patients, including himself. AFAIK, it is the first book to systematically approach the topic and map psychedelic LSD experiences in roughly 4 categories: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof#Encounter_with_birth_and_death:_dynamics_of_the_perinatal_matrices" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Grof#Encounter_with_...</a>.<p>Each patient would have series of LSD sessions in a regulated environment (usually in a room with an interior that feels secure  and comfortable, a psychoanalyst guiding the session included). First sessions were used to test an individual high dose threshold. Once the high dose for a patient was established they would stick to it. According to the book, 'bad' or traumatic LSD experiences are mostly related to the 2nd (BPM II: Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit) and 3rd (BPM III: The Death-Rebirth Struggle), reliving of birth- and prenatal traumas that are suppressed. It takes usually several high dose sessions with a psychoanalytic integration work afterwards in order to 'resolve' traumas. Once they are resolved they don't resurface and the person generally can lead happier life.<p>Regarding 'bad trips' with lasting consequences in the aftermath: the author mentions that _in some cases_  when a trauma was not resolved or properly addressed in the course of one session the patient could suffer from various psychotic episodes after the sessions was over. As far as I could tell, simplistically speaking, this was attributed mainly to the fact that the traumatic content (normally suppressed) resurfaced and was sort of left uncovered and 'half-processed'. It was stressed in several places in the book how important is that the 'set and setting' is right for an LSD session and how it could be dangerous and counterproductive if LSD is consumed in a wrong environment or not followed up with an appropriate 'psychoanalytic' work after the session is finished.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 19 Mar 2019 19:39:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434841</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434841</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19434841</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "My favorite principle for code quality"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Thank you for saying it, cannot agree more. Premature derivation of abstractions so often leads to code that is later difficult to modify and understand and leads to a vicious circle of adding more abstraction and complexity.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 May 2018 20:52:42 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17129328</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17129328</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17129328</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Ask HN: Effective methods to fight depression?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I've recently watched Tim Ferris's pod-cast with Dr. Gabor Mate who is well known for his work with people who suffer from ADHD (including himself), Depression and various types of addiction: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9B5mYfBPlY</a>. It's rather a long interview (2h 23') that touches on many topics (Depression, ADHD, Ayahuasca), but IMO well worth time invested. Very insightful as to the ways one might take when it comes to improving his/her own wellbeing.<p>I had a rather milder form of depression few years ago (with symptoms such as low-self esteem, loss of motivation to work, eat, exercise and pretty much all standard symptoms except suicidal thoughts). One thing that helped a lot to break negative thought patters and to start pro-actively coping with my own issues was attending few Ayahuasca sessions. I'd recommend it only if you find really experienced, trustworthy, practitioner such as Dr. Gabor Mate and if you are healthy enough (health heart, you cannot use antidepressants and other, prescribed or not, psychoactive drugs and you should do specific diet few week prior to it). Some claim that it's worth 10 years of psychoanalysis. I don't not know how much truth is in that claim, but in my case it really gave me immediate relief, sense of a fresh start and valuable insights about why I'm the way I'm.  Of course, a real work starts after it when it takes time and effort to integrate these insights into your everyday life (but I felt motivated to do so).</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 25 Apr 2018 17:53:44 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16924161</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16924161</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16924161</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Fifteen Years Ago, America Destroyed My Country"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Neither most likely. I think that this man is an apatrid and that he doesn't have a real home judging by a similar string of events in my life. My country was economically devastated due to unfavorable Geo-political circumstances and I eventually had to choose to move, rather than to prolong meaningless suffering. I was lucky to have a choice. Although, I'd say it was not as dramatic as in the case of Iraq. Anyhow, I feel as if I don't belong anywhere.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 20 Mar 2018 17:48:47 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630844</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630844</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16630844</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by dnc in "Could ayahuasca have health benefits?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I was not long enough to make any general conclusions, but from what I could see it is a mixture. I saw quite a few 'westerners' who had given up 'western' medicine and came to try Ayahuasca for various reasons. As for natives, I don't know, I think they still go to traditional healers, but also very rapidly adopt 'western lifestyle'. I'm sure 'western' medicine is not an exception from this trend. Ayahuasca still seems to be deeply ingrained in their culture and original religion (which is a sort of spiritual pantheism for the lack of a better term), it is considered holly plant and still deeply revered and respected. Personally, I would not like to see this tradition they have preserved for millennia to disappear or completely mutates into something like "Ayahuasca turism"...</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 01 Oct 2017 19:10:36 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15379294</link><dc:creator>dnc</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15379294</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15379294</guid></item></channel></rss>