Hacker News: jebarker

New comment by jebarker in "Ferrari Luce"

jebarker — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:13:46 +0000

Imagine being able to afford a Ferrari and then buying the one that looks like a fancy Prius

New comment by jebarker in "How diamonds are made"

jebarker — Sun, 17 May 2026 14:43:12 +0000

It’s kind of surprising that diamonds still have appeal as jewelry at all given the rise of lab-grown. I always assumed that people liked them because they were rare and expensive.

New comment by jebarker in "We've made the world too complicated"

jebarker — Sat, 16 May 2026 21:46:37 +0000

AlphaFold has a shared technical ancestry with LLMs and many people believe that was a truly significant advancement of science that may lead to benefits for humanity and the planet. I don't think this was a one-off fluke, strongly generalizing pattern matchers will be useful in many areas of science even if LLMs turn out to be overblown.

New comment by jebarker in "What's a Mathematician to Do?"

jebarker — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:43:47 +0000

By having a job. If that job is the same as your intellectual/artistic pursuit then you have to balance the needs of satisfying your employer and what keeps your motivation going over the long term. All I’m saying is that worrying too much about future achievement or “great contributions” are a recipe for burnout and disappointment.

New comment by jebarker in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

jebarker — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:26:54 +0000

“Comparison is the thief of joy.”

Do the math because you enjoy doing the math and if you do it long enough you may well do something of value to someone else. Same goes for most intellectual and artistic pursuits I think.

I’ve learned for myself that as soon as enjoyment is based on some future achievement or ranking my work against others the day to day satisfaction dries up.

New comment by jebarker in "Pulitzer Prize Winners 2026"

jebarker — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:38:12 +0000

I’ve been gradually reading prior Pulitzer winners for fiction and I have to say I haven’t hit a bad one yet. Maybe I’ll try and read this years before it’s several decades old.

New comment by jebarker in "For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day"

jebarker — Sun, 03 May 2026 16:54:03 +0000

> the actual engineering

I was with you until the last three words. Craftsmanship in writing code is also “actual engineering”, it’s just not the engineering that people will pay a human to do now.

New comment by jebarker in "Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?"

jebarker — Sat, 02 May 2026 20:49:59 +0000

Retire earlier?

I Saw the Earth Breathe

jebarker — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:01:50 +0000

Article URL: https://www.montananaturalist.org/blog-post/i-saw-the-earth-breathe/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47974939

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by jebarker in "A Dumb Introduction to Z3 (2025)"

jebarker — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 14:17:29 +0000

I wonder how often interviewers object to the approach of solving their dynamic programming problem using a constraint solver?

New comment by jebarker in "I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack"

jebarker — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:20:03 +0000

What has your career looked like? I'm interested because I've spent 20 years in applied research and I've only more recently realized the continual stress that I've felt for 20 years from trying (and mostly failing) to innovate in the "what to build" space.

New comment by jebarker in "Improving my focus by giving up my big monitor"

jebarker — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:42:52 +0000

I find it useful to have multiple monitors or a large monitor that can support multiple windows comfortably useful for development, e.g. multi-pane IDE, terminals, documentation all visible simultaneously. The distraction problem is that everything else (slack, email, internet) is just a click away. I wonder if the answer is to treat the computer desktop like a real desktop that only supports having the materials open for one task at a time. So consciously switch tasks by putting the old things away and getting out the new things.

Maybe the fact that slack and outlook take a painful amount of time to open is a feature not a bug

New comment by jebarker in "What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?"

jebarker — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 03:40:41 +0000

What do you think caused you to stop caring as much? I’ve been becoming more aware of my finitude recently for a variety of reasons relating to middle-age and having kids. A side effect of that is definitely caring less about lots of things in order to focus on others. But I have an internal battle going on with the part of me that says I should still be ambitious and make a dent in the world.

New comment by jebarker in "Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI"

jebarker — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 14:05:27 +0000

I don’t see why “natural evolution of human tools” implies “such that it can replace and supersede human labor altogether”. Can you clarify?

New comment by jebarker in "My Astrophotography in the Movie Project Hail Mary"

jebarker — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 14:16:25 +0000

> Its seems the post is part of a coordinated pump on the movie here by Amazon Studios

Is there any evidence for this?

New comment by jebarker in "Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?"

jebarker — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 21:44:35 +0000

I work in an R&D team as research scientist/engineer.

Cursor and Claude Code have undoubtedly accelerated certain aspects of my technical execution. In particular, root causing difficult bugs in a complicated codebase has been accelerated through the ability to generate throwaway targeted logging code and just generally having an assistant that can help me navigate and understand complex code.

However, overall I would say that AI coding tools have made my job harder in two other ways:

1. There’s an increased volume of code that requires more thorough review and/or testing or is just generally not in keeping with the overall repo design.

2. The cost is lowered for prototyping ideas so the competitive aspect of deciding what to build or which experiment to run has ramped up. I basically need to think faster and with more clarity to perform the same as I did before because the friction of implementation time has been drastically reduced.

New comment by jebarker in "I'm 60 years old. Claude Code killed a passion"

jebarker — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:47:15 +0000

I agree with you. I try to remember though that this is just the same situation that artists, musicians and (more recently) writers have been in for a long time. Unless you’re one of a very lucky few you’ll only get fulfillment in those pursuits if you enjoy the process rather than the output since it’s hard to get money or recognition for output anymore. Pure coding and lots of areas of code problem solving are going to end up in the same position.

New comment by jebarker in "Jared Kushner Solicits Funds for His Firm While Working as Mideast Envoy"

jebarker — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 22:31:12 +0000

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

New comment by jebarker in "An opinionated take on how to do important research that matters"

jebarker — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:02:15 +0000

You made me order The Cuckoo's Egg. Luis Alvarez is my scientific hero since I read his memoir last year. Truly underappreciated in the pop-sci community.

New comment by jebarker in "We Stopped Using the Mathematics That Works"

jebarker — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 16:18:56 +0000

I have a background in mathematics, I believe in mathematics, but I don't believe in blind faith. Physics gave us statistical mechanics precisely because it's impossible to measure, model and predict the behavior of every individual particle in real-world systems. My gut feeling is that a mathematical theory of LLMs is more likely to look like statistical mechanics than something that tames chaos. That certainly doesn't mean that theory wont't open new doors though that we haven't currently thought of.