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not_kurt_godelon Goldman Sachs is pulling Claude Code from its bankers and traders

> When you have to go in to your next standup and explain what your code does to your boss, and what you've done since the last meeting, what do you say?

You say the same thing to your boss as if you were a lead or manager reporting on a project that your junior and mid-level devs are working on. "What" is the easy part to explain; "how" is the details that your manager doesn't need to hear about if you're doing your job properly.

not_kurt_godelon No AI, 52 min. Build all Linux Files utils in C by Hand [video]

I'm not as certain as you seem to be, but I agree it's at least suspicious. The keypress sounds are admitted to be fake in the comments. The way the camera shakes (or doesn't) in response to keypresses seems odd and physically inconsistent over time; same goes for his apparent manual adjustments of its position/angle. Also the way his eyes track when he looks at his notes doesn't seem to be consistent with the screen layout as shown - he looks noticeably far downward when the notes pane on the screen is horizontally level with vim.

not_kurt_godelon There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]

> But that's to misunderstand what science is for, which is to expand human knowledge

I agree ideologically and aspirationally but I don't believe it's the economic reality of how and why most science is actually funded (and I think you agree based on your comment about not making any money).

> But if you care about programming itself

I'm...not so sure I do any more? At least, not any more than I care about using Java over Python, or C++ over Java, or C over C++, or ASM over C, or machine code over ASM, or an abacus over machine code.

> nothing has changed, it never can

We now have programs that can write any program 100x faster and better than even the best humans and solve the hardest math problems known to humankind that have stumped the greatest minds the planet could produce for decades. That, to me, is a change with profound implications for understanding the nature of programming.

not_kurt_godelon There's never been a better time to go into math (by: 3blue1brown) [video]

> So there will be endless work for humans to go over machine proofs and turn it into something we understand

I'm not convinced humans will be better at this than LLMs. Frontier models are quite good at handling even deliberately lazy/ambiguous eli5 prompts on complex topics IME.

not_kurt_godelon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

In reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50146584:

Ok, I found a study estimating a net willingness to pay per citizen for this type of ecological restoration at ~$72.31/per person/year. If we assume 100,000 people derive this level of benefit over a 30-year time horizon (same as I used for the previous numbers) that yields $21,693,000 which brings the removal WITH immediate solar/wind/BESS replacement scenario on par or marginally better than keeping the dam as is.

But even then, I believe that is being overly generous to the dam removal because electricity demand has been rising steeply recently and is projected to continue doing so. Until we are meeting 100% of current and future demand with new renewable energy, every existing carbon-neutral source that gets removed is creating a gap in future demand that will be partially filled by new fossil fuel generation and therefore incurring many of the same associated negative societal costs.

not_kurt_godelon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

My napkin math disagrees. Small/medium hydro (<100 MW) appears to account for ~1.7% of annual US grid energy output. If we replace that with fossil fuel generation and account for the cost of dam decommissioning, account for estimated benefit of ecosystem restoration in terms of quantified dollars willing to pay by benefiting citizen, and net annual CO2 cost I come up with an annual cost to society of removal of small/medium hydro dams between $1.7B/year on the low and $41.7B/year on the high end. Happy to show detailed assumptions and calculations if desired. But tl;dr fossil fuel generation is very, very bad and replacing even comparatively small amounts of carbon-neutral generation with it results in a significant societal net negative.

not_kurt_godelon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

What do you calculate it as?

not_kurt_godelon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

I did some quick napkin math on the net economic benefit, including carbon pollution and local economic benefit, of 3 scenarios:

1. Keep dam: -$2M to -$10M

2. Dam removal with 5 MW capacity replaced/absorbed by natural gas plants (no solar/wind/BESS): -$28.3M to -$249.8M, depending on whether you use the EPA's $190/tCO2 cost of damage or $1000/tCO2 DAC remediation.

3. Dam removal with 5 MW solar/wind/BESS replacement: -$3.5 to -$25M

In other words, removing the dam without equivalent solar/wind/BESS immediately in place is a net negative for society (and even then, keeping the dam might be neutral or still better).

not_kurt_godelon Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

No one who values democracy is complaining about Trump getting kicked off social media for inciting a mob to kill the vice president certifying the election in the Capitol building.

not_kurt_godelon Dam removals are bringing fish back across the northeastern United States

We also shouldn't really be removing hydropower at this point in time from a net zero/global warming perspective. It is orders of magnitude less environmentally harmful than generating electricity with fossil fuels, and one of two carbon-neutral sources of significant amounts of baseload power at scale along with fission nuclear.

not_kurt_godelon China Overtakes U.S. For First Time as Top Spender on R&D in 2024

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-026-00088-9/index.ht...

> More than 7,800 research grants terminated or frozen. Some 25,000 scientists and personnel gone from agencies that oversee research. Proposed budget cuts of 35% — amounting to US$32 billion.

> These are just a few of the ways in which Donald Trump has downsized and disrupted US science since returning to the White House last January. As his administration seeks to reshape US research and development, it has substantially scaled back and restricted what science the country pursues and the workforce that runs the federal scientific enterprise.

not_kurt_godelon US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia

Your "point" is soundly refuted by the available evidence including the very evidence you cite.

not_kurt_godelon US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia

> Our meta-analysis finds that lockdowns in the spring of 2020 had a relatively small effect on COVID-19 mortality and is consistent with the view that voluntary changes in behavior, such as social distancing, played an important role in mitigating the pandemic

I find it strange you bemoan the public health establishment's credibility when your own source shows that people following its guidelines played a greater role in saving hundreds of thousands of lives than legal mandates.

not_kurt_godelon US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia

States and people that listened to the public health establishment saved hundreds of thousands of lives: https://batten.virginia.edu/research/how-state-policies-impa...:

> If all states had imposed restrictions similar to those used in the 10 most restrictive states, excess deaths would have been an estimated 10% to 21% lower than the 1.18 million that actually occurred during the 2-year analysis period; conversely, the estimates suggest counterfactual increases of 13% to 17% if all states had restrictions similar to those in the 10 least-restrictive states. The estimated strong vs weak state restriction difference was 271 000 to 447 000 deaths, with behavior changes associated with 49% to 79% of the overall disparity.

not_kurt_godelon MongoDB CEO resigns to join Meta

> The vast majority of projects seem to not meet their stated goals or KPIs or mission, be late, not follow remotely the planned path, etc

Citation needed

not_kurt_godelon Plan mode is dead

The fundamentals of writing correct code have become dramatically cheaper by orders of magnitude. I have been involved in hiring dozens of developers. Fable/Opus 5.5 would be a superior drop-in replacement for perhaps 75% of those hires at roughly 1/100 the cost.

not_kurt_godelon Plan mode is dead

> The people that sat around handwringing about tech debt and trying to read every line of LLM code will really struggle to find a job. The profession fundamentally changed, and these people did not catch up.

I'm inclined to agree - the latest models seem to have crossed a threshold where trying to review by hand becomes akin to a manager insisting on reviewing PRs.

not_kurt_godelon Plan mode is dead

> data-focused startup

What could possibly go wrong with building a data-focused company on a foundation of violating the most fundamental precepts of data management

not_kurt_godelon NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

God forbid we figure out the best way for the smartest and most talented people of all backgrounds to contribute to science. Why take diamonds from the rough when you can just leave them there instead?

not_kurt_godelon They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore

I have encountered the behavior you are describing too many times to count and then some. Of course step debuggers are going to expose and hide race conditions. In fact, exposing them is often the explicit purpose of using a step debugger in the first place. If you don't have a mental model of your code that includes conceptually separating the actual system behavior from the artificial debugging conditions, then you are correct, a step debugger is not going to be much use to you. Print debugging will help you limp along by virtue of letting you stab a little more accurately in the dark, but ultimately it's usually just punting the actual bug down the line until someone who understands the code more deeply is forced to fix it properly.

not_kurt_godelon Grok outage

Some napkin math - total Internet bandwidth is estimated to be 3-4 petabits per second. Let's say 1% of that is inference traffic - 35 terabits - then that's ~4.375 trillion characters per second at 8 bits per character. A single keyboard press might require 2 mJ, so you need roughly 8.75 GW (electricity required for ~9 million homes) of continuous mechanical force to keep pace. This would cause the keyboard to heat up 175 million degrees C per second. Disappointingly, this is not enough to create a black hole but I'm sure Randall Munroe could tell you how the guy's pet T-rexes would be vaporized into previously unknown types of plasma and how satisfyingly whimsical that would be.

not_kurt_godelon They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore

Step debuggers don't "create Heisenbugs", you're just much more likely to notice race conditions while step debugging than print debugging. If anything, print debugging creates more bugs because you're altering the code you're trying to test by definition.

not_kurt_godelon They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore

I would estimate print debugging is usually twice the work for 30% of the effectiveness of step debugging. It's the screwdriver to step debugging's drill. Fundamental and absolutely necessary sometimes but not the first tool you should be reaching for unless there's a specific reason.

not_kurt_godelon They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore

VS Code is not fit for professional software development. JetBrains products are far and away superior. Sublime Text is nice as a notepad, extended clipboard, and quick file editor.

not_kurt_godelon My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

> It is also, believe it or not, possible to own a moderately loud car (even with a modded exhaust)

Not legally in many places. California limits exhaust levels to 95 dbA or less, and I'm betting that OP's mods violate that given that "ATAK exhaust systems produce the highest dB (decibel) levels in the Borla line" [0]. Washington state prohibits modifying exhaust "in a manner which will amplify or increase the noise emitted by the engine of such vehicle above that emitted by the muffler originally installed on the vehicle" [1]

> Have you considered that maybe this guy just likes the car?

I'm inclined to give the same amount of consideration for this guy's preferences as he is towards the thousands of people he chooses to subject to unnecessary, annoying, unhealthy[1], and likely illegal noise.

[0] https://www.borla.com/products/atak

[1] https://app.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=46.37.390

[2] https://noiseawareness.org/noise-hurts/impact-on-health/

not_kurt_godelon Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

Yes, that all tracks, and all of those skills are worth maintaining and improving. Great to tinker with LLMs locally hands-on to learn, and having a powerful enough machine to enable that to a reasonable degree is just one of many reasons why it's worth it. I'm just saying that IMO "how can I best take advantage" lands firmly in the bucket of only cloud-hosted frontier models being worth my time. I would speculate that holds true for a large portion of the wider HN audience but YMMV of course.

not_kurt_godelon Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

> Having a machine that can run some modest local LLMs, like the Gemma 4 12B, is really worth it.

Agree having a powerful machine is really worth it in general for professionals, but strong disagree that running local LLMs has anything to do with it. It's hard enough as it is getting a good ROI on your time/money prompting/wrangling with frontier models. IMO leaning on the comparatively limited capabilities of local LLMs is best avoided in favor of keeping your own personal coding skills fresh and continuing to learn new ones.

not_kurt_godelon Ask HN: Due to spam on GitHub, what platforms can I move my projects?

> is it even possible to do read-write to a git repo over https instead of ssh?

Yes; it's not only possible but very common: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/git-basics/about-remo...

(IIRC it is in fact actually even sometimes preferable from a security standpoint; or at least that's the tentative conclusion I've reached under a few specific circumstances over the years, although the exact details elude my memory at the moment.)

not_kurt_godelon Running local models is good now

I had some local model FOMO, trialed for a few days, and tentatively arrived at the same conclusion. I can get a better ROI on the time I spent waiting and dealing with poor quality by just programming by hand myself instead.