Hacker News: jebarker

New comment by jebarker in "A new world airport and its baggage"

jebarker — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 14:44:55 +0000

> This year, the airport announced plans to remove the last of the Telecar equipment from the connecting tunnel and refit the space it used to occupy as a pedestrian walkway. The $300-700 million project is scheduled to start early next year

Must be a fancy pedestrian walkway! Also amazing that somehow they can’t estimate the cost to within less than a $400 million difference

New comment by jebarker in "Enjoy Every Sandwich"

jebarker — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:31:26 +0000

Likewise, I already have some regrets about not being as present with the first year of my second kid because of various other life distractions/stresses. Increasingly my biggest fear/worry/anxiety in life is that I just won’t be present for it - which is a self-fulfilling prophecy!

New comment by jebarker in "Why do we need human mathematicians anymore?"

jebarker — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 12:57:04 +0000

> robotic surgery could be done on anesthetized animals in a mass RLVR way.

well that's an awful image

New comment by jebarker in "Show HN: I made a flight simulator, except you're just a passenger"

jebarker — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 13:20:01 +0000

Survival horror, my favorite genre

New comment by jebarker in "Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue"

jebarker — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 20:06:25 +0000

That triggered a physical response of tightening in my stomach and heavier breathing due to frustration.

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 23:11:50 +0000

I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whether it’s wasteful is irrelevant. I was assuming you had some ideas about how to reduce the waste but apparently not, you just wanted to tell everyone about your personal preferences for how other people spend their money.

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:57:16 +0000

You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to compel these individuals to spend on things you believe are more efficient and less wasteful? I would point out that spending $1.075M on food for starving people probably scores more utilitarianism points than an internet cafe though in your zero sum world.

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:13:12 +0000

OK - what is the mechanism by which you believe this private individual’s $1.075M should be turned into a public internet cafe?

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:55:55 +0000

What is the mechanism by which you imagine that this private individuals $75K becomes a public internet cafe?

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:11:41 +0000

> That's... that's all it's ever meant?

Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.

New comment by jebarker in "We built our house for LAN parties (2024)"

jebarker — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:03:57 +0000

> and is being wasted

Why is this use of their money a waste?

New comment by jebarker in "Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem"

jebarker — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 18:26:09 +0000

> Note that this proof while impressive does not add any value to mathematics as a human pursuit.

I don't see how this can be stated with such certainty. We don't yet know what the implications of large scale autoformalization and proof verification will be on the human pursuit of mathematics. I'm open to the idea that it might be a benefit to the human pursuit once the human pursuit adapts.

New comment by jebarker in "Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1"

jebarker — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 23:31:07 +0000

Interesting that Fable produced the Venus elevation map by training a neural net to generate it. I wonder what the prompting looked like to make that happen, I.e. was this a spontaneous discovery or the result of a specific request.

New comment by jebarker in "Beyond Recall and the Illusion of Competence"

jebarker — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:37:19 +0000

I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of developers the author describes. I use AI daily for limited code writing and lots of debugging. I agree with the author that things go off the rails when you stop truly reviewing its output and just click accept to get the thrill of productivity. I don’t think using AI for debugging means you have to do that though, it’s still a choice. As an AI-human team I have had the experience many times now of debugging an issue in a complex system that I simply don’t think I could have done alone or in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t think this is a reflection of my low abilities - it’s because the AI brings to the table skills that I’ll never have like reading through and correlating huge amounts of logs across many runs of the same system on different compute nodes in a cluster. Once it finds a needle in the haystack I can still take the time to understand and reason about what it found though.

New comment by jebarker in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

jebarker — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:11:43 +0000

> Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels

I cannot fathom how people enjoy that book. I appreciate the writing (and love other CM books) but Blood Meridian felt like a gratuitous ordeal to me. I tried watching lit professors lecture about it too but I still just don’t get it.

New comment by jebarker in "To become a better writer, read as much as you can"

jebarker — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 15:07:45 +0000

I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book myself. I grew out of that but still felt/feel like I want to write. The issue that remains is that I’m just not sure I have anything to say!

New comment by jebarker in "Exercise intensity modulates interorgan communication and is associated with"

jebarker — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 13:09:29 +0000

What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?

New comment by jebarker in "Three Minutes of Sprinting Beats 90 Minutes of Moderate Exercise"

jebarker — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:21:35 +0000

Not if you want to run a marathon.

New comment by jebarker in "Could a computer scientist build a brain?"

jebarker — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 17:05:37 +0000

> LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.

This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't make non-quantum computers into quantum computers. Similarly, mimicking some aspects of human cognition doesn't mean you can replicate all of human cognition with the same method.

New comment by jebarker in "In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices"

jebarker — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 16:28:15 +0000

It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.