Hacker News: psadri

New comment by psadri in "Elevators"

psadri — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 14:32:19 +0000

To be honest I also just read about it. However everytime I pass through Heathrow I think someone really took the idea to heart.

New comment by psadri in "Elevators"

psadri — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:55:43 +0000

Aside for the algorithms and how well they work, there is a psychological aspect to how people perceive "wait" times. It turns out just waiting is very annoying. But having people do anything during that same wait period → perceived as progress → not upset.

An example iirc was waiting for luggage at the airport. It takes min of x minutes for the first bags to show. In one version, passengers went directly from the gate to the luggage carousel and waited x mins for the first bag → unhappy. Then the airport decided to add a long, round-about "walk" path from the gate to the luggage area that burned some of those minutes → same total "wait" but happier passengers.

New comment by psadri in "More Bounce to the Ounce"

psadri — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 17:50:29 +0000

A version of this idea was mentioned in one of the Three Body Problem books. There, the bombs were pre-positioned along a path and detonated sequentially like dominos, with a vehicle riding the blast waves.

New comment by psadri in "AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study"

psadri — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:12:04 +0000

Sure. But I think they can do it more exhaustively than humanly possible.

New comment by psadri in "AI Boosts Research Careers but Flattens Scientific Discovery"

psadri — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:04:27 +0000

I don’t think we have spent enough time on the creativity axis.

When we solve problems we usually follow a heuristically guided energy efficient path. We just prune a lot of possibilities based on our existing knowledge and experience.

Creativity happens when we consciously (or not) go off the beaten path and explore. Most of those explorations are dead ends. But some will yield unexpected connections, patterns etc that we call “creativity” .

An AI system could also go on those kinds of explorations. Today they aren’t it because we are not asking them to.

New comment by psadri in "The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia"

psadri — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:26:02 +0000

Be sure to visit the basement museum to see the upside-down string + tiny sandbag weights model that was used to simulate the structure. Pure genius.

New comment by psadri in "Learning to code is still worthwhile"

psadri — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:37:36 +0000

Learning to code = understanding a problem, breaking it down into small, manageable pieces, putting all the pieces back together. Debugging. Iterating towards better metrics, etc.

All these are amazingly valuable skills/mindsets that can be highly portable to other "problem solving" domains.

New comment by psadri in "Better Models: Worse Tools"

psadri — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 02:55:05 +0000

This will cause an extra round trip to the LLM. Which means more $ spent.

New comment by psadri in "Om Malik has died"

psadri — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:33:07 +0000

I met Om once in SF over a meal. I could tell he was a kind soul. RIP.

New comment by psadri in "In praise of memcached"

psadri — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 15:28:22 +0000

The comment about memcached being ephemeral is orthogonal to whether people will use it as if it persistent. If the cache appears to get hit 99.9% of the time and is always there, sooner or later people will write code that relies on that behavior.

Maybe the client libraries can help by returning nulls 10% of time, in dev mode?

New comment by psadri in "Pre-2022 Books"

psadri — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:08:46 +0000

We are witnessing the birth of the term "pre-times" you often see in dystopian sci-fi.

New comment by psadri in "Hey, n00b, we didn't hire you to complete tasks"

psadri — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 02:17:44 +0000

It’s interesting that you have to be an A to tell the rest apart.

And good luck if you have a lot Bs that believe they are As.

New comment by psadri in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

psadri — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:09:10 +0000

Claude: configure my Emacs such that … has worked pretty well for me lately.

New comment by psadri in "πFS"

psadri — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 04:20:37 +0000

This is part of the plot in Murakamui's Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

New comment by psadri in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

psadri — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:16:03 +0000

I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.

As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.

In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.

New comment by psadri in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

psadri — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:12:39 +0000

This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.

New comment by psadri in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

psadri — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:18:05 +0000

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

New comment by psadri in "What British people mean when they say 'sorry'"

psadri — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:52:04 +0000

Separately, I love the word “bloke”. I wish it would take off here in the US.

New comment by psadri in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

psadri — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 05:07:32 +0000

You are correct. I apologize. I seemed to have read the next pragma’s depreciation notice!

Aside from this - SQLite has tons of cool features, like the session extension.

New comment by psadri in "Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite"

psadri — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:26:41 +0000

For one it seems to be deprecated.