Hacker News: jvans

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

jvans — Sun, 10 May 2026 14:53:41 +0000

Lots of fun counter examples to this. Complex numbers were introduced in the 1600s with no practical application for almost 300 years until they were used in electromagnetism and quantum mechanics.

New comment by jvans in "The next two years of software engineering"

jvans — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 01:51:33 +0000

i notice a huge difference between working on large systems with lots of microservices and building small apps or tools for myself. The large system work is what you describe, but small apps or tools I resonate with the automate coding crowd.

I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.

New comment by jvans in "Go beyond Goroutines: introducing the Reactive paradigm"

jvans — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:05:47 +0000

it's used extensively in java and it would be my first choice when starting a java project. I don't think I'd use it in Go though.

New comment by jvans in "Go beyond Goroutines: introducing the Reactive paradigm"

jvans — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:03:41 +0000

i like reactive programming in other languages but it is at odds with Go's philosophy of simplicity and avoiding big abstractions

New comment by jvans in "The Moat of Low Status"

jvans — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 01:52:31 +0000

Ya except people with innate talent are frequently lazy and take their talent for granted. You can often outwork these people and get better than them

New comment by jvans in "Skip the exit interview when you leave your job"

jvans — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 23:36:34 +0000

I kind of agree with you. On the one hang OP is logically correct, on the other it's very sad and a form of a tragedy of the commons. If everyone gave candid feedback we'd all be better off.

New comment by jvans in "The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)"

jvans — Sat, 10 May 2025 17:24:36 +0000

Even when it is the case you can logically come to a resolution but if you don't emotional feel it, the problem/conflict is not solved and will come up again. In my experience this manifests in non obvious ways that are far removed from the original problem

New comment by jvans in "The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)"

jvans — Sat, 10 May 2025 14:47:26 +0000

Good luck with that :)

New comment by jvans in "The Deathbed Fallacy (2018)"

jvans — Sat, 10 May 2025 14:11:19 +0000

I think this blind spot exists because the pure engineering/logic mindset is such a massive superpower in so many elements of life, people fail to consider that it might not always be the right way to think about the world.

One obvious example where it falls laughably short is in interpersonal relationships. Trying to logic your way out of an emotional conflict just does not work

New comment by jvans in "AI helps unravel a cause of Alzheimer’s and identify a therapeutic candidate"

jvans — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 01:49:53 +0000

A lot of people should be mad at Marc Tessier-Lavigne, not just HN folks. He lied for personal gain at the expense of scientific progress and millions of patients who suffer

New comment by jvans in "AI helps unravel a cause of Alzheimer’s and identify a therapeutic candidate"

jvans — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 01:00:22 +0000

The controversy over the amyloid hypothesis comes from a Stanford professor faking data[1] and setting the field back decades. The amount of harm this individual caused is hard to overstate. He is also still employed by Stanford.

[1] https://stanforddaily.com/2023/07/19/stanford-president-resi...

New comment by jvans in "The cultural divide between mathematics and AI"

jvans — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:40:44 +0000

in poker AI solvers tell you what the optimal play is and it's your job to reverse engineer the principles behind it. It cuts a lot of the guess work out but there's still plenty of hard work left in understanding the why and ultimately that's where the skill comes in. I wonder if we'll see the same in math

New comment by jvans in "400 reasons to not use Microsoft Azure"

jvans — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 13:05:02 +0000

For comparison if you run your own hardware and do a memcached KV lookup with a different server on the same rack, p99 times are slightly under 1ms. Given the guarantees of cosmosdb ~10ms isn't that bad for a p100

New comment by jvans in "Show HN: I analyzed 1500+ job ads to find the most wanted skills by recruiters"

jvans — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 14:45:35 +0000

I had a lightbulb moment recently where I had a recruiter ask me if I had any experience building recommendation systems. While I don't use that word on my resume, my resume is full of technologies and projects that point toward recommendation system experience.

The recruiter was tasked to find candidates with a recommendation system background but the only way they know to do that is look for that exact word.

New comment by jvans in "US will ban cancer-linked Red Dye No. 3 in cereal and other foods"

jvans — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 09:32:33 +0000

> only take action when there is actual evidence and proof of harm being done.

Sounds like a good way to kill a lot of people

New comment by jvans in "Lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)"

jvans — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:40:45 +0000

Imagine a scenario where option B does 10x better than option A during the morning hours but -2x worse the rest of the day. If you start the multi armed bandit in the morning it could converge to option B quickly and dominate the rest of the day even though it performs worse then.

Or in the above scenario option B performs a lot better than option A but only with the sale going, otherwise option B performs worse.

New comment by jvans in "Debugging: Indispensable rules for finding even the most elusive problems (2004)"

jvans — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 14:25:40 +0000

git bisect is an absolute power feature everybody should be aware of. I use it maybe once or twice a year at most but it's the difference between fixing a bug in an hour vs spending days or weeks spinning your wheels

New comment by jvans in "Ask HN: How to approach first days on a new job as a senior engineer?"

jvans — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 18:02:46 +0000

Figure out the core technologies they use and become an expert at them. Read the documentation of those technologies like a book. Is kafka at the heart of the stack? Learn everything related to kafka and setup a small dummy instance to play around with. This can take some time but after a couple of months you'll be more knowledgeable about the technology than many people on the team who have been there longer.

New comment by jvans in "Agents Are Not Enough"

jvans — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 17:14:10 +0000

this is a great write up, thank you

New comment by jvans in "Cognitive load is what matters"

jvans — Thu, 26 Dec 2024 21:57:34 +0000

but there isn't actually a second set of eyes because the second set of eyes you're thinking about is complaining about formatting or slamming the approve button without actually looking