Hacker News: rotis

New comment by rotis in "Why I Joined OpenAI"

rotis — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 09:15:05 +0000

Asking ChatGPT about safety of someone traveling instead of asking that person is the nerdy thing to do. Somehow a hairstylist doesn't invoke image of a nerd in me. That is why I find this story implausible.

New comment by rotis in "Lead Limited Brain and Language Development in Neanderthals and Other Hominids?"

rotis — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 08:49:43 +0000

Agreed. Lead main source in nature is galena, which is relatively nontoxic. It rarely occurs in metallic form.

New comment by rotis in "Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available"

rotis — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 11:09:53 +0000

The fire started on 26th September and news about it reached HN only now. I think this is telling how disruptive for South Korea daily life this accident really was.

New comment by rotis in "Just let me select text"

rotis — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 20:44:54 +0000

Reminds me of one of the stupidest hacks I discovered (In my mind). In one of my previous companies we had many similar Lotus Notes databases and one of them didn't allow to copy text from it. You could paste, I'm sure. You could select the text. But not copy. Turns out you could DRAG the selected text to other window. This copied the text over. So being able to highlight a text may mean you can indeed copy it ;)

New comment by rotis in "Gemini in Chrome"

rotis — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 11:59:47 +0000

I'm sceptical a layperson will understand or care what it means that their data will be used in training. If you are concerned about such things this heavily implies you don't want to share your data. Just don't agree to the terms and move on.

New comment by rotis in "450× Faster Joins with Index Condition Pushdown"

rotis — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 16:56:42 +0000

Exactly. This is a basic optimization technique and all the dinosaur era databases should have that. But if you build a new database product you have to implement these techniques from scratch. There is no way you shortcut that. Reminds me about CockroachDB and them building a query optimizer[1]. They started with rule based one and then switched to cost based. Feature that older databases already had.

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/building-cost-based-sql-o...

New comment by rotis in "Digital vassals? French Government ‘exposes citizens’ data to US'"

rotis — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 09:56:32 +0000

Everything else aside moving to R and Python to escape the USA hegemony means you are still dependend on Python Software Foundation and R Fundation. First is American. Second is based in Vienna, Austria yet still has big American presence among its members. So you end up still dependending on USA. Same with most free and open source. Even if its authors may appear to be European, they may turn out to be Americans (Linus Torvalds) or work for US company anyway (Guido van Rossum)

New comment by rotis in "CO2 sequestration through accelerated weathering of limestone on ships"

rotis — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 07:29:43 +0000

All that and who will pay for it? Politicians? They use taxpayers money. Companies? They will pass on the bill to the customers. So in the end same group will experience higher prices. I can't wait for all the poor becoming poorer.

New comment by rotis in "Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise"

rotis — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 09:20:38 +0000

Yes, this paper and many others will be forgotten as soon as they leave the front page. Afterwards noone refers to articles like these here. People just talk about anecdotes and personal experiences. Not that I think this is bad.

New comment by rotis in "Menstrual tracking app data is gold mine for advertisers that risks women safety"

rotis — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 19:11:11 +0000

That's another issue I have with this article. It lists the risks, but does not provide any specific well documented examples. It (and many others privacy related) does not try to quantify them either. Driving a car, flying a plane pose risks too. Yet milions of people take the risk daily. Jumping from 10th floor is also risky and here somehow most peoply don't try it. People intuitively can evaluate the risks on their own and ultimately you cannot do that for them. If examples of negative consequences of their data being sold start appearing, they will stop using these apps by themselves. But I personaly think these risks are blown out of proportion.

New comment by rotis in "My AI skeptic friends are all nuts"

rotis — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 10:49:33 +0000

The author defends mediocore code, yet wrote this piece:

https://fly.io/blog/vscode-ssh-wtf/

Where he dunks on how SSH access works in VSCode. I don't know. The code and architecture behind this feature may well be bananas, but gets the work done. Sounds like a clear case of mediocority. I wonder how does he reconcile those two articles together.

For me this is more of a clickbait. Both of the articles. With that in mind, if I am nuts for being sceptical of LLMs, I think it is fair to call the author a clickbaiter.

New comment by rotis in "Phoenician culture spread mainly through cultural exchange"

rotis — Fri, 09 May 2025 11:05:13 +0000

I dunno. Cultural exchange has positive connotations in my book.

New comment by rotis in "A PostgreSQL planner semi-join gotcha with CTE, LIMIT, and RETURNING"

rotis — Sun, 04 May 2025 10:30:25 +0000

To add to sibling comment. This sounds like a parameter sniffing. Read it up. It should help you understand the problem. It is a known issue with SQL Server. Or rather a tradeoff. You don't want to compile a new execution plan for every query. This would eat up CPU by itself.

New comment by rotis in "“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System"

rotis — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 12:01:11 +0000

Atmosphere of this exoplaned is rich in hydrogen. Also it has likely different atmospheric pressure than we have on Earth. Doubtful there is any life form as we know it. I suspect best we can expect there is something like a primordial soup: a mix of relatively simple organic compounds.

New comment by rotis in "Senior Developer Skills in the AI Age"

rotis — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 07:24:28 +0000

How can this article be written by LLM? Its date is November 2021. Not judging the article as a whole but the command you pointed out seems to be correct. Faster is the name of the pool.

New comment by rotis in "Exposing concurrency bugs with a custom scheduler"

rotis — Fri, 14 Feb 2025 10:28:50 +0000

This sounds very similar to Cuzz from Application Verifier for Windows:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...

New comment by rotis in "Hello World on z/OS (2018)"

rotis — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 08:59:23 +0000

Mirrors my experiences with z/OS. One thing I distinctly remember was when I tried to write JCL to move some datasets. Took me 2 days reading documentation and trying out things. Finally I just gave up. It is not fun when you have noone to help and Google isn't very helpful. If you think Unix tools have no consistency, try JCL and z/OS. Considering how alien JCL is and magic incantations I invoked with it, I'm convinced that there is Cthulhu in the mainframe machine.

Still, I'm quite proud I manage to write some JCL which saved us potentially days of manual work.

Other things I remember from that time was that passwords were only 8 characters long and case insensitive. My guess is z/OS is secure only by its obscurity. Though maybe this was just our installation. No idea until today.

New comment by rotis in "America has a child marriage epidemic"

rotis — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 20:55:01 +0000

Here are the marriage ages for US and the world for context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...

The US doesn't seem to particularly stand out. I feel this article is manipulative and just tries to antagonize people. Manipulative because it says some marriages were for children aged 10, while the minimum age is usually 15/16. So how is this even possible? Those 10 year child cases should definitely be investigated, but I'm sceptical that's anything more of a small fraction of underage marriages and they are probably illegal to begin with. The antagonizing part is simple: It's all Republicans. Don't mention that California has technically no official age defined. This would break the narrative.

New comment by rotis in "2024 Antarctic ozone hole ranks 7th-smallest since recovery began"

rotis — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 15:57:32 +0000

>area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh-smallest since recovery began in 1992

Yet later in the article:

>In previous years, NOAA and NASA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time period dating back to 1979 (...) . Using that longer record (...) this year's hole ranked 20th-smallest in area across 45 years of observations.

20th-smallest or 25th-biggest. So looks like perfectly average size to me.

If we look at year earlier:

>the hole ranked as the 12th largest single-day ozone hole since 1979.

from:

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152023/modest-ozone...

Why do I have a feeling these numbers are being manipulated?

New comment by rotis in "Coronavirus vaccines are now pricey w/o insurance as CDC access program expires"

rotis — Tue, 03 Sep 2024 16:11:00 +0000

Seems like approximately noone is vaccinating or taking boosters. Looks like an attempt to stir up old scares

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations