Hacker News: eterevsky

New comment by eterevsky in "Allow me to get to know you, mistakes and all"

eterevsky — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 07:15:02 +0000

I don't often use AI to cleanup my texts, but when I do, I fully own the output. I make a conscious decision whether to leave in every AI suggestion or not. The final text _is_ what I want to say.

New comment by eterevsky in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

eterevsky — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:25:59 +0000

It's a good advice, if you are watching on a reference monitor in a dark room.

New comment by eterevsky in "Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings"

eterevsky — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:25:13 +0000

James Cameron is one of the few who do this.

New comment by eterevsky in "AI Police Reports: Year in Review"

eterevsky — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 08:40:38 +0000

I think whether any text is written with the help of AI is not the main issue. The real issue is that for texts like police reports a human still has to take full responsibility for its contents. If we preserve this understanding, than the question of which texts are generated by AI becomes moot.

New comment by eterevsky in "XSLT RIP"

eterevsky — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 08:48:28 +0000

In all seriousness, XSLT looked stillborn even 25 years ago when it was introduced.

New comment by eterevsky in "Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating"

eterevsky — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 08:01:22 +0000

If they are replacing a fixed cosmological constant by a model with variable dark energy, doesn't it introduce extra parameters that describe the evolution of dark energy over time? If so, wouldn't it lead to overfitting? Can overfitting alone explain better match of the new model to the data?

New comment by eterevsky in "Resolution limit of the eye – how many pixels can we see?"

eterevsky — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:21:07 +0000

Probably not for 32” monitor, but I think 8k would be noticeably better for a 43”.

New comment by eterevsky in "Watching AI drive Microsoft employees insane"

eterevsky — Wed, 21 May 2025 11:33:07 +0000

The plan is to improve AI agents from their current ~intern level to a level of a good engineer.

New comment by eterevsky in "The Einstein AI Model"

eterevsky — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 09:49:47 +0000

This article seems to argues from the way scientific discoveries are made by humans. It seems to me that its gist is similar to some article from the 80s that claims that computers will never play good chess, or an article from the 2000s that claims the same for go.

The general shape of these arguments is: "Playing chess/go well, or making scientific discoveries requires specific way of strategic thinking or the ability to form the right hypotheses. Computers don't do this, ergo they won't be able to play chess or make scientific discoveries".

I don't think this is a very good frame of reasoning. A scientific question can take one of the following shapes:

- (Mathematical) Here's a mathematical statement. Prove either it or its negation.

- (Fundamental natural science) Here're the results of the observations. What are the simplest possible model that explains all of them?

- (Engineering) We need to do X. What's an efficient way of doing it?

All of these questions could be solved in a "human" way, but it also possible to train AIs to approach them without going through the same process as the human scientists.

New comment by eterevsky in "Undergraduate shows that searches within hash tables can be much faster"

eterevsky — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 12:00:57 +0000

If we achieved local maximum at something, the only way to progress is to make a big leap that brings you out of it. The trouble is that most of such big leaps are unsuccessful. For every case like you are describing there are probably hundreds or thousands of people who tried to do it and ended up with something worse than the status quo.

New comment by eterevsky in "Stop using zip codes for geospatial analysis (2019)"

eterevsky — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 19:31:13 +0000

ZIP codes are a simple approximation, which does their job good enough in most cases.

The alternatives that the author suggests are much more complicated, both in terms of the implementation and in terms of convincing the user to give you their full address.

New comment by eterevsky in "Backblaze seemingly does not support files greater than 1 TB"

eterevsky — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 12:05:07 +0000

I would assume some limit no higher than 2^64, since all common file systems have file size limits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

New comment by eterevsky in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

eterevsky — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 10:15:03 +0000

Government employees are never elected. They are hired by the elected officials. In this case the general public in the US was aware of DOGE before the election and chose to vote for it.

New comment by eterevsky in "JSON5 – JSON for Humans"

eterevsky — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 07:31:12 +0000

Because it was the only widely used generic text format for structured data.

New comment by eterevsky in "JSON5 – JSON for Humans"

eterevsky — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 06:51:46 +0000

To be precise, JSON was a replacement for XML, not the other way around. And the problem with XML was that it's way to verbose and difficult to write by hand, so it's exactly the opposite of the direction YAML/JSON5/... are taking.

New comment by eterevsky in "The correct amount of ads is zero"

eterevsky — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 16:06:35 +0000

This entirely depends on the subscription fee, doesn't it? The amount of ad revenue that the service is getting for you is limited, even accounting for the fact that as a paying user you might push the price of ads up a bit.

If you set the subscription fee above this value, you as a service will be better off regardless of the advertizers.

New comment by eterevsky in "The correct amount of ads is zero"

eterevsky — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 12:45:40 +0000

It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all.

I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.

New comment by eterevsky in "Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo"

eterevsky — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 10:27:50 +0000

In C++ you can force the move of the parameter by wrapping it with std::move() this should take care of unnecessarily cloning the argument in the example.

New comment by eterevsky in "Student rocket group shatters amateur space record"

eterevsky — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:23:32 +0000

470'000 ft = 140 km altitude

New comment by eterevsky in "DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome"

eterevsky — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 08:16:54 +0000

Because for that to make sense you need to have some strong evidence that the resulting status quo will be better for consumers than the present situation. You don't break monopolies just for the sake of breaking monopolies. You do that to avoid locking into some suboptimal outcomes for consumers.