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JackFr

14,997 karma · joined May 16, 2012

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JackFr··on Meta-analysis of 2.2M people: Loneliness increases mortality risk by 32%
> She hitched her identity to the man of the house, even signing checks "Mrs. grandad's name."

That was quite common for much of the 20th century.

JackFr··on Meta-analysis of 2.2M people: Loneliness increases mortality risk by 32%
There was a funny statistical artifact I read once (well, for some value of 'funny') that home was a terrible place to have a heart attack, because people are willing to 'just lie down and see how I feel' rather than in a restaurant or movie theater where an ambulance will be called.
JackFr··on The AI coding trap
It’s exhausting because most of us like to sit down open an IDE and start coding with the belief that ambiguous or incomplete aspects will be solved as they come up. The idea of writing out the spec of a feature from without ambiguity, handling error states, etc. and stopping to ask if the spec is clear is boring and not fun.

To many of us coding us simply more fun. At the same time, many of us could benefit from that exercise with or without the LLM.

JackFr··on US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees
As a parent who once flew with a baby with an ear infection, I'll admit there were times I desperately wanted to be seated apart from her.
JackFr··on US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees
Exactly.

States in the United States are more than just administrative districts. in the case of the first thirteen states, the predate the federal government.

Each one has its own elected government. They have their own criminal and judicial system, as well as their own tax regimes.

Apart from the tax regime though, some states are home to large refineries which produce gasoline and many states don't. The distance you are from the point of production of the gasoline also comes into play.

JackFr··on NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks?
The article describes 300 servers and 100,000 SIMs across a handul of locations.
JackFr··on NYC Telecom Raid: What's Up with Those Weird SIM Banks?
I not familiar with any of it, so I’m willing to take your word, but doesn’t the scope raise some eyebrows?

Using the prices quoted in TFA they’re talking about $900,000 in servers and another $500,000 in SIM cards, before labor, rent and electricity.

Is that sort of outlay typical for phone scammers.

Also on a technical note is there an advantage to having all your sites in the NYC area? Is it simply that there’s enough cell traffic, the bad actors illicit traffic won’t stand out?

JackFr··on You did this with an AI and you do not understand what you're doing here
> As a side note, if anyone I'm communicating with - personally or in business - sends responses that sound like they were written by ChatGPT 3.5, 4o, GPT-5-low, etc, I don't take anything they write seriously anymore.

What if they are a very limited English speaker, using the AI to tighten up their responses into grammatical, idiomatic English?

JackFr··on Kmart's use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful
Woolworths too!
JackFr··on Kmart's use of facial recognition to tackle refund fraud unlawful
On a recent visit to the UK (from the US) I briefly thought I was in an alternate universe because their TJ Maxx stores are virtually identical but inexplicably called TK Maxx.

(Well, not quite inexplicably. Wikipedia cleared it up for me.)

JackFr··on The Counterclockwise Experiment
It seems unlikely. Some control groups might be nice.

Send two more groups on a week long retreat, tell them some quack theory and see if they improve.

JackFr··on They Thought They Were Free (1955)
The problem is norms are being destroyed.

It’s not all new with Trump (governing by executive order, ignoring duly enacted laws, strong arming media companies, etc.). But while earlier administrations might have done those things on the margins, Trump takes them to 11 (in the spirit of the new Spinal Tap) and makes them the central and primary means of administration.

With the norms destroyed, we potentially lose our nation of laws, and become a plutocracy with different juntas every few years.

JackFr··on They Thought They Were Free (1955)
From June 4, 1940 to June 22, 1941 Britain faced Hitler alone.
JackFr··on They Thought They Were Free (1955)
> they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire.

they just wasted it on things like nationalizing the coal, gas, electricity, rail, air transport and steel industries.

JackFr··on Ask HN: Has anyone else been unemployed for over two years?
1) as the child of a parent who was a smart, hard working accountant/financial analyst who was out of work for 2 long stretches in my youth, I have learned when you lose your job, you do not fuck around — you attack it with the same urgency as if the house was on fire as in immediately; 2) after 25 years, you’ve got to have some network — swallow your pride and use them.

I have been there, and I saw my father — there is nothing good about it. You have my sympathy and I wish you the best.

JackFr··on A shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity
(Apologies for the bad form of replying twice…)

> it seems to me improved technology on the whole leads to increased concentration of power

Which is why we are dominated by IBM, AT&T, Kodak and Xerox.

JackFr··on A shift in developer culture is impacting innovation and creativity
If you take human brains as the limit (a questionable assumption) they do it all for 20 watts (and hardware that makes itself!) The training is often years and can be expensive.

In all seriousness though there’s plenty of room for improvement both in current models and hardware.

JackFr··on We all dodged a bullet
Artifactory. Nexus. I believe AWS/GCP/Azure have offerings.

No bank, and almost no large corporations go directly to artifact/package repos. They all host them internally.

JackFr··on 14 Killed in anti-government protests in Nepal
> supported by various mega-money interest groups

‘Mega-money interest’ groups are a bugaboo for people who find it hard to accept that a large swath of the public doesn’t agree with them.

JackFr··on 30 minutes with a stranger
Show HN is advertising.
JackFr··on 30 minutes with a stranger
That’s jesuitical hair-splitting.
JackFr··on LandChad, a site dedicated to turning internet peasants into Internet Landlords
It’s not a racket — the state does use its monopoly on violence to enforce your title to the land. Otherwise it would only be yours until someone bigger and stronger came by.
JackFr··on Do the simplest thing that could possibly work
Before you write a parser, try a regex. (But some times you really do need a parser.)
JackFr··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
This. I work with juniors who have no idea what a spec is, and the idea of designing precisely what a component should do, especially in error cases, is foreign to them.

One key to good prompting is clear thinking.

JackFr··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
Stopping by to concur.

Tried about four others, and to some extent I always marveled about capabilities of latest and greatest I had to concede they didn’t make faster. I think Claude does.

JackFr··on AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard'
I think that’s a disingenuous take. Earlier in the piece the AWS CEO specifically says we should teach everyone the correct ways to build software despite the ubiquity of AI. The quote about creative problem solving was with respect to how to hire/get hired in a world where AI can let literally anyone code.
JackFr··on Why LLMs can't really build software
> Junior developers not even out of school don’t need to be instructed to think.

Have you trained juniors lately?

JackFr··on Swiss vs. UK approach to major tranport projects
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue.

That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest.

It’s not an easy problem to solve.

JackFr··on Why LLMs can't really build software
- When we have a report of a failing test before fixing it, identify the component under test. Think deeply about the component and describe its purpose, the control flows and state changes that occur within the component and assumptions the component makes about context. Write that analysis in file called component-name-mental-model.md.

- When ever you address a failing test, always bring your component mental model into the context.

Paste that into your Claude prompt and see if you get better results. You'll even be able to read and correct the LLM's mental model.

JackFr··on Why LLMs can't really build software
> Every AI-related invention is hyped as "intelligence" but turns out to be "Necessary but Not Sufficient" for true intelligence.

Alternatively, the goalposts keep being moved.

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