Hacker News: scott_weber

New comment by scott_weber in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

scott_weber — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:50:22 +0000

So labour doesn't really scale. It's measured in hours, and you only get so many of those in a week.

If you're using "scale your labour" to mean "scale your output". Well, two cases: your selling your labour as an employee, or your output directly. Either way: the market won't value them above their cost of substitution, which is just the cost of substitution of your original, non AI labour, plus the cost of the AI (an ever cheaper commodity).

New comment by scott_weber in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

scott_weber — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 20:44:53 +0000

Very convenient, if you're someone who benefits from this arrangement, to be able to tell yourself that a brute numerical fact (if you profit off others labour, there must be those whose labour is profited off of) just so happens to by divine coincidence to go hand in hand with the profiteers just happening to have some nebulous quality that morally justifies the whole arrangement.

New comment by scott_weber in "Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta warn against overregulating open-weight models"

scott_weber — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 01:04:15 +0000

The difference might be the immense cost of physical infrastructure needed for AI training. People would make open source contributions for free, TSMC, NVIDIA and power companies seems less likely to make free contributions to AI.

New comment by scott_weber in "QuineDB – A quine that is also a key-value store"

scott_weber — Wed, 14 Sep 2016 02:37:27 +0000

Sponge delays the overwriting of the input file, so its not trying to read and write quinedb at the same time.

New comment by scott_weber in "Postgresql 9.3 Released"

scott_weber — Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:52:05 +0000

(FirstName, LastName) is probably not a very good UNIQUE KEY.

New comment by scott_weber in "Why 256 bit keys are large enough"

scott_weber — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 04:07:15 +0000

The numbers are correct, but it was written in an odd way. Grovers algorithm gives a speedup of sqrt(n), so the exponent gets halved.

New comment by scott_weber in "Jun Fukuyama's P≠NP Page"

scott_weber — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 04:38:38 +0000

Not sure if I'm labouring under basic misconception here (or if you're trolling). First, you note that BPP <= P/poly. Secondly, you note that it is hard to prove P = BPP, but this is not necessary, all we need is the trivial P <= BPP. Then P <= P/poly < NP (if the author is correct).

New comment by scott_weber in "Bret Victor: Learnable Programming"

scott_weber — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 01:55:39 +0000

Perhaps Bret Victor's ideas are comparable to something like formal methods: few doubt their enormous power, but the difficulty is in the extreme effort one needs to implement them in a project. It is tempting to believe that the level of instrumentation that Bret proposes could be achieved automatically, just as it was once dreamed that formal methods could be fully automatic. But experience with formal methods has shown us that while some of their promise can be implemented by automatic tools, and this is valuable, to realize their full potential for a complex project requires substantial effort, non-reusable effort.