Hacker News: gpsx

New comment by gpsx in "US companies, consumers are paying for tariffs, not foreign firms"

gpsx — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 01:13:17 +0000

To be fair, the portion of the tariffs passed on to the consumer is a regressive tax. The portion of the tariff that is covered by the American companies is more complicated and probably goes mostly against the wealthy. (Then, of course, there’s the portion of the tariffs, covered by the foreign companies, which is article is saying it’s not a large portion.) There is hope the consumer is not completely screwed. We will have to see how it turns out. (I am not a fan of tariffs or the administration, but I am ok with people who are.)

New comment by gpsx in "Claude Code Pro Limit? Hack It While You Sleep"

gpsx — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 18:29:23 +0000

It would probably look suspiciously like Linux.

New comment by gpsx in "Recent AI model progress feels mostly like bullshit"

gpsx — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 03:08:04 +0000

I just tried. Claude did exactly what you said, and then figured it out:

Central Park in New York City is bigger than GoldenGate Park (which I think you might mean Golden Gate Park) in San Francisco.

Central Park covers approximately 843 acres (3.41 square kilometers), while Golden Gate Park spans about 1,017 acres (4.12 square kilometers). This means Golden Gate Park is actually about 20% larger than Central Park.

Both parks are iconic urban green spaces in major U.S. cities, but Golden Gate Park has the edge in terms of total area.

New comment by gpsx in "What if we made advertising illegal?"

gpsx — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 01:21:12 +0000

If you are a new company starting out (suppose aluminum siding), you have to market your product or else nobody will know about it. I'm not sure what all parts of marketing are counted as advertising here, but generally in marketing you pay to get word out about your product. Wihtout that, starting a business might be tough. And then, as a consumer, there are lots of free products I have gotten my entire life by virtue of the fact that one of those companies offered to pay for it for me. If you turn that off I'm not sure how that all would work. I don't think the OP goes into too much detail.

New comment by gpsx in "U.S. pauses all military aid to Ukraine"

gpsx — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:00:46 +0000

Trump said he wanted peace, but I think he really wanted an end for the sanctions, probably to help with his goal of lowering the price of oil. I don’t think he cares at all about how things turn out in Ukraine.

New comment by gpsx in "Ask HN: Why isn't anyone else bothered by the fact that life is only on Earth?"

gpsx — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 05:09:44 +0000

I am of the view that the chance of life in a single universe is vanishingly small. Fortunately, there can be many, many universes, or many, many effective universes. I googled the number of stars in the universe and it said 10^23. I am admitteedly not sure exactly what all this entails, but that is a pretty small number. How many ways are there to arrange a deck of cards? 10^68. That means you would have to put 10^45 decks of cards in each star system just to get a good chance of finding another deck with the same order of cards as one you shuffle yourself. And life it a lot more complex than a deck of cards. The number of stars grows linearly with the volume of space. Probability shrinks much faster. I don't know what the actual probabilty of life evolving is, but I wouldn't expect it to be very easy. And I don't think there is any reason to think the universe we see is the only "try" there has been to create life.

New comment by gpsx in "The Crisis in String Theory Is Worse Than You Think"

gpsx — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:23:34 +0000

I suspect when Susskind was talking about ideas away from the consensus _usually_ being suspect, he was talking about what the general public or non-practitioners should think about, especially since they are not usually in a position to judge those ideas. As a practitioner you certainly can’t ignore non mainstream ideas, or else no new ideas would ever become mainstream.

New comment by gpsx in "It might be possible to detect gravitons after all"

gpsx — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 13:44:41 +0000

Gravity is similar to an electric field here. A wave function for a field consists of an amplitude for each field configuration, where a “field configuration” refers to a value for the electric field for each point in space. In GR each field configuration would correspond to a space time geometry for the universe. We have quantized excitations as distinct “valid” solutions to the wave function, which we call a particle, though it is nothing like an electron. The notion of space time geometry holds throughout. (Edit: in practice, people never calculate wave functions for fields like electric fields. That would be too hard. Different methods are used in calculations. Second edit: the wave function wouldn’t be composed of complete space-time configurations, histories of the universe, but time slices from it, like space geometries. Maybe this can be expanded in responses/comments.)

New comment by gpsx in "Chain-of-thought can hurt performance on tasks where thinking makes humans worse"

gpsx — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 21:48:06 +0000

I saw an LLM having this kind of problem when I was doing some testing a ways back. I asked it to order three fruits from largest to smallest. I think it was orange, blueberry and grapefruit. It could do that easily with a simple prompt. When the prompting included something to the effect of “think step by step”, it would try to talk through the problem and it would usually get it wrong.

New comment by gpsx in "How fast is quantum entanglement? Scientists investigate it at attosecond scale"

gpsx — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:36:05 +0000

It looks like they measured the time of the process where the entanglement occurred, not a time of entanglement itself. I guess they can use this to put an upper bound on the time for entanglement, which is a valid thing to do for an instantaneous process.

New comment by gpsx in "What Is a Particle? (2020)"

gpsx — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 01:07:29 +0000

I did study quantum field theory and I have a hard time viewing a fermion as a continuous field, whereas a gauge field I do view as a continuous field. I view a fermion as a true point particle, kind of like it is in a lattice. The fermion still has a wave function of course. It is very different from the wave function of a gauge field. The wave function of an electric field is a wave function over field configurations. The fermion wave function is a wave function of fermion spins. I don't think this is an unreasonable view, but I am not trying to force it on anyone else.

New comment by gpsx in "What Is a Particle? (2020)"

gpsx — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 19:57:18 +0000

I have another definition, or at least this is how I think of it. I’m not sure many people would buy into it. In the standard model, the fermions are particles, like the electrons, quarks, neutrinos. Electroweak, strong force, gravity are fields. This means the photon is not a particle, but just a field excitation. I know people can think of fermions as fields, I just think of them as particles.

New comment by gpsx in "Doctor who sounded alarm on ultra-processed food urges tougher action"

gpsx — Sat, 21 Sep 2024 16:52:44 +0000

I agree with you. I think the place to start would be with the ingredient list. I think they would say to avoid things that don't sound like food. I think chemicals are the real danger. It is very hard to do a conclusive study on how good or bad specific ingredients are, unfortunately, so it is hard to say some chemicals is OK. Secondly, but not as bad, I think are ingredients that are refined from foods. There are many levels of refinement so this is tougher. White flour? Sugar? Then there are things that take an industrial process to extract things from food, which I just put in the chemical category. Maybe they could color code the ingredient list on food packages?

New comment by gpsx in "They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket"

gpsx — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:46:33 +0000

I seem to have noticed a marked increase in the number of people in public listening to music with no headphones over the past several years, as in going from essentially 0 to it now being a thing. I wonder if this came from people not wanting use or buy USB headphones? Or because phones don't come with headphones anymore? (Personally, I have earpods but don't like them. I use a set of standard Apple headphones.)

New comment by gpsx in "Well-known paradox of R-squared is still buggin me"

gpsx — Thu, 04 Jul 2024 05:18:36 +0000

My statisitcs are a little rusty, so I might be off here. Someone correct me if I have this wrong. R^2 = 1 would be every voter in one state votes blue and every voter in the other votes red. R^2 = 0 would mean both states are exactly even between red and blue. The states are a lot closer to that. Again, my statistics are rusty so I'm no sure if this next part is valid, but sqaure root of .01 is .1, which doesn't seem like such a bad representation of the situation.

New comment by gpsx in "How is France dodging the global obesity trend?"

gpsx — Wed, 12 Jun 2024 15:36:45 +0000

I think you right. Oddly, celebrating food will keep you from getting fat, as the alternative is putting crap in your body.

New comment by gpsx in "Apple blocks PC emulator in iOS App Store and third-party app stores"

gpsx — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 20:22:30 +0000

What country do you say you are from, Kingdom of Normway? Federal Republic of Germany? Peoples Republic of China? Commonwealth of Australia?

New comment by gpsx in "Why YC went to DC"

gpsx — Mon, 03 Jun 2024 20:59:22 +0000

I am assuming YC will be lobbying on their own interests, which, at least for typical VCs is getting some of their small companies to go big, rather than promoting success among all their companies. They probably won't be lobbying for the companies that do not get/take VC funding, which are the less capatilized ones that probably need more representation. And, their interests with go big or go bust doesn't always align with the funded companies' interests, since optimizing for their portfolio of many is different from optimizing for the founders' portifolio of one.

New comment by gpsx in "What we've learned from a year of building with LLMs"

gpsx — Sat, 01 Jun 2024 21:24:30 +0000

One option for doing this is to incrementally build up the "document" using isolated prompts for each section. I say document because I am not exactly sure what the character sheet looks like, but I am assuming it can be constructed one section at a time. You create a prompt to create the first section. Then, you create a second prompt that gives the agent your existing document and prompts it to create the next section. You continue until all the sections are finished. In some cases this works better than doing a single conversation.

New comment by gpsx in "7.4 earthquake in Taiwan, 34km depth"

gpsx — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 03:26:01 +0000

It’s not really a wave, it is more of a tide that comes in quickly. So everything gets flooded to 3m above the normal water level, and stays that way for a while.