Hacker News: pzs

New comment by pzs in "How I write software with LLMs"

pzs — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 07:19:46 +0000

While I agree with you, I also find that an LLM can help organize my thoughts and come to realizations that I just didn't get to, because I hadn't explained verbally what I am thinking and feeling. Definitely not a substitute for human interaction and relationships, which can be fulfilling in many-many ways LLM's are not, but LLM's can still be helpful as long as you exercise your critical thinking skills. My preference remains always to talk to a friend though.

EDIT: seems like you made the same point in a child comment.

New comment by pzs in "Ask HN: How to be alone?"

pzs — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:31:14 +0000

First of all, don't give up. What you are going through is not what you deserve, but a transition to the next stage in your life. Just because a relationship with someone didn't work out as you had hoped for does not mean you can't have even better relationships with others in the future. Adjustment takes time, so don't be judgmental about yourself. (Unsolicited advice, I know. I am about to get separated after a 20-year relationship myself, so I may be writing this in part also to myself.)

Now may be the time to learn who you really are! Do you have any interests you never really pursued because of lack of time? Are there any things you once planned to do but never really found them important enough to prioritize against being with your SO? You may need to think back several years to discover those... How about reconnecting with friends you may not have met only infrequently during recent years? While previously your schedule might have been defined by others in your life, now you need to take active control of it.

One thing that works really well for me is social dancing. It feels like a tactile game where the goal is to have fun and express what we hear in the music through connected movements. When I get to dance with a partner who's really good, it feels almost euphoric. It can be very-very rewarding. And there is most likely a community of social dancers who you can connect to. There is a bit of a learning curve, but there are dances like Cuban salsa where it is not so steep.

Good luck!

EDIT: added one more thought

New comment by pzs in "Anthropic tries to hide Claude's AI actions. Devs hate it"

pzs — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 14:31:52 +0000

Related question: how do we resolve the problem that we sign a blank cheque for the autonomous agents to use however many tokens they deem necessary to respond to your request? The analogy from team management: you don't just ask someone in your team to look into something only to realize three weeks later (in the absence of any updates) that they got nowhere with a problem that you expected to take less than a day to solve.

EDIT: fixed typo

New comment by pzs in "Cloudflare was down"

pzs — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 08:52:43 +0000

Just experienced this and came here to check, because even their website is down. The referenced link also returns with 500.

New comment by pzs in "Everyone in Seattle hates AI"

pzs — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:08:29 +0000

Hmm, (whatever is in execs' head about) AI appears to amplify the same kind of thinking fallacies that are discussed in the eternal Mythical Manmonth essay, which was written like half a century ago. Funny how some things don't change much...

New comment by pzs in "Fan Service"

pzs — Sun, 11 May 2025 05:43:26 +0000

This trend of overengineering is apparent now in cars, too. An innocent failure, like a headlight going out can turn into a major systemic issue, like the engine refusing to start through a chain reaction inside an inadequately tested software control system.

I wonder if this is a one-way street, that is, if a realization will come at some point that simple solutions to simple problems can be more robust...

New comment by pzs in "Coffea stenophylla: A forgotten bean that could save coffee from extinction"

pzs — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 15:12:42 +0000

They call the cherries cascara, and I have come across them in some specialty coffee shops packaged just like the beans. You can pour hot (not boiling) water over them and prepare a tea-like infusion. It tastes sweet-ish without adding anything else. It gives a pretty noticeable kick to me when I drink it, even though I am a regular coffee drinker. I think it is worth a try, if you haven't done so yet.

New comment by pzs in "O1 isn't a chat model (and that's the point)"

pzs — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 21:04:12 +0000

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t." - without trying to defend such business practice, it appears very difficult to define what are necessary and sufficient properties that make AGI.

New comment by pzs in "I've acquired a new superpower"

pzs — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 21:22:09 +0000

To update this excellent quote to 2025, change minutes to seconds and you just described TikTok.

New comment by pzs in "Do AI companies work?"

pzs — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 20:22:23 +0000

"The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. The commonly asserted use cases are the following: Chatbots Developer tools RAG/search"

I agree with you that ROI on _most_ AI spending is indeed poor, but AI is more than LLM's. Alas, what used to be called AI before the onset of the LLM era is not deemed sexy today, even though it can still make very good ROI when it is the appropriate tool for solving a problem.

New comment by pzs in "Introduction to Dynamicland (Bret Victor)"

pzs — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 20:05:43 +0000

There is a video on the page in which Bret Victor explains what it is all about. I find it very difficult to summarize, but my best attemp would be something like transforming computation into an activity that a community of people performs via manipulating real world objects.

New comment by pzs in "Sleep on it: How the brain processes many experiences, even when 'offline'"

pzs — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 04:29:33 +0000

This reminds me of what I learned about myself during my years spent at the university. I observed that in the morning my brain is better at understanding new concepts. Mornings were the best time for me to practice and improve problem solving, but I tend to remember less details of what I come across. However, at about 2pm my brain appears to switch to memorizing mode, where I struggle with problem solving compared to the morning, but I will remember a lot more of what I read. I structured my learning activity leveraging this observation. Even to this day (am 46) I can feel the same tendency, e.g., if a problem seems somewhat difficult, I just wait until the next morning, if I can, only to find it easy to come up with some solution that seemed out of reach the previous evening. Also, I try to do most of my reading at night (well, life with a family doesn't leave a whole lot of options for timing anyway).

New comment by pzs in "Time-Memory Trade-Offs Sound the Death Knell for GPRS and GSM"

pzs — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 07:57:07 +0000

> an attacker passively eavesdropping a GSM communication between a target and a base station can decrypt any 2-hour call with probability 0.43, in 14 min

The authors give the above example in the abstract. It does not look like the typical use case for embedded systems. I would think embedded systems send and receive small amounts of non-critical data over GSM, hopefully encrypted, as the parent pointed out. But I may be wrong here - is there a real use case for attacking embedded systems using this method?

New comment by pzs in "What Life Means to Einstein (1929) [pdf]"

pzs — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:36:18 +0000

I read his book on relativity theory, which I would characterize as one written for popular consumption [1]. I recommend reading it if you have not done so yet. I found the explanation of the special theory in the book easily accessible and enlightening, less so the explanation of the general theory, although it did help me understand it better.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity:_The_Special_and_th...

New comment by pzs in "It's always TCP_NODELAY"

pzs — Fri, 10 May 2024 04:36:58 +0000

"As the article states, no sensible application does 1-byte network write() syscalls." - the problem that this flag was meant to solve was that when a user was typing at a remote terminal, which used to be a pretty common use case in the 80's (think telnet), there was one byte available to send at a time over a network with a bandwidth (and latency) severely limited compared to today's networks. The user was happy to see that the typed character arrived to the other side. This problem is no longer significant, and the world has changed so that this flag has become a common issue in many current use cases.

Was terminal software poorly written? I don't feel comfortable to make such judgement. It was designed for a constrained environment with different priorities.

Anyway, I agree with the rest of your comment.

New comment by pzs in "Atomic nucleus excited with laser: A breakthrough after decades"

pzs — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 08:27:45 +0000

Not a physicist, so I am asking out of curiosity and to learn: have the limitations to the precision of current atomic clocks posed any problems?

New comment by pzs in "Launch HN: Patchwork (YC W24) – Team communication based on feeds, not chat"

pzs — Sat, 30 Mar 2024 06:08:15 +0000

On your point about tech not solving social problems: I fully agree. Moreover, I think that tech _aggravates_ some of these problems. Case in point: why do some people think they can run around and interrupt others at any time for any reason? I think it could be related to having tech in our pockets constantly interrupting us throughout the day, which makes us operate in a new normal, where attention span a shorter, and where it's ok to just quickly check the notifications or just send a quick message while in a personal live conversation with someone.

A Faraday cage may become an important component to taking time for relaxing.

New comment by pzs in "BlenderBIM – add-on for beautiful, detailed, and data-rich OpenBIM with Blender"

pzs — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 05:22:59 +0000

When we had our home reconstructed three years ago, the architect exported the plans in BIM format from the software he used. I used Blender with BlenderBIM to arrange virtual tours with my wife to get a better (immersive?) view of how the different rooms will look after the planned changes. The result wasn't perfect, which I attribute to my very limited experience with Blender and some minor flaws around the export/import process (e.g. doors and windows were missing, some walls had the wrong dimensions). I fixed some of the problems manually in Blender after the import in a few minutes. All in all, the plugin did the job very well, and helped us make some decisions. I would gladly recommend it for a similar use case.

EDIT: removed typo

Q-Learning

pzs — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 11:00:18 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-learning

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39560615

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by pzs in "So You Want to be a Big Shot: Advice on playing the promotion game"

pzs — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 06:56:13 +0000

I agree with you power game view. The cooperation can even extend beyond the current job. That is, when managers move to another company, they attract some key people from their team to the new place. (There are other incentives for managers to do so: e.g. to show they are effective at recruiting.)