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This context is very important.

"Little by little, over-inflated results and breathless breakthroughs betray trust. They throwing dimes in a wishing well which people rapidly start to expect will never pay compound interest."

"Then, when one of those people is elected to parliament, or Congress, and start to cut the budget for the National Science Foundation, or declares that All Research Should Be In The National Interest (whatever that is), I wonder how much we reap what we have sown."


The climate shock from stopping aerosols would be a crisis for the planet, but we would have more than weeks to stop it. First it would take months for the aerosols to leave the upper atmosphere, and then years for the earth to heat up to its new equilibrium temperature - catastrophe, but not likely the end of all life.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/solar-geoengineering-risk-termin...


I gave my engineering students a CO2 removal design problem once, and at the end, asked why the theoretical efficiency had increased in the time since the textbook was written. The answer was that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was higher.


Yes, in fact they might be useful for chemistry simulation long before they are useful for cryptography. Simulations of quantum systems inherently scale better on quantum hardware.

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


More recently it's turned out that quantum computers are less useful for molecular simulation than previously thought. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDj1QhPOVBo

The video is essentially an argument from the software side (ironically she thinks the hardware side is going pretty well). Even if the hardware wasn't so hard to build or scale, there are surprisingly few problems where quantum algorithms have turned out to be useful.


It is tough to beat classical computers. They work really well, and a huge amount of time (including some of mine) has gone into developing fast algorithms for them to do things they're not naturally fast at, such as quantum chemistry.


At 15:00, she says "quantum computers are surprisingly good at [...] quantum simulations [of electron behavior]", which would seem to contradict you.


Regardless of what funding mechanism you would prefer in its place, turning off the existing system with no transition plan is a huge mistake.


What are the actual numbers you think are fantasy? Most of the time when I see someone claiming economic statistics are fake, it's a misunderstanding or lack of context. For instance, people will say the US unemployment rate is fake because it doesn't include people who have given up on looking for work... but the U-4 unemployment metric, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics alongside the main U-3 metric, does include these people.


I think the jobs numbers are somewhat fake. There are so many evergreen postings and stuff like outright fake postings.


Usually “jobs numbers” refer to actual hires, so would not be affected by fake job postings.


No, those are typically estimates. For awhile now, they’ve had to be retroactively cut [https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/08/21/economy/bls-jobs-revision...]


“Jobs numbers” refers to both the initial reports and the later revisions.


That's not usually the ones reported on in the media. The media loves to talk about job openings and unfilled postings.

Edit: why disagree?


> Edit: why disagree?

Because it is hilariously wrong. You have been operating under the false understanding, for who knows how long, that the media are talking about job postings when they are talking about jobs numbers.


There are some that talk about jobs filled, others are talking about unfilled postings. I guess you can laugh at your hilariously wrong assumption while reading this article.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/29/economy/us-job-openings-jolts...


That article is about job postings. You are demonstrating the same confusion again.


Lol OK buddy


For one, look at the evolution of the number of submissions in the threads who is hiring/wants to be hired.

While it's a local biaised, as a Swiss resident, I feel the same about the evolution of the IT job market here.


I've been using this for years as a signal of how the market's doing. Visualized well on https://www.hnhiringtrends.com/


Many thanks, I was thinking to build something similar and try to predict stock market macro movement.

Typically, right now I am relatively bearish but I feel I am 3-6m too early.

Trend is downward for both hiring and seeker, which I would interpret as employers are hesitant to invest in IT due to current US politic unknowns, typically, the tarifs and actual impacts on economy.


Growing and sequestering enough biomass to slow down climate change means effectively running the fossil fuel industry at the same scale but in reverse. In that spirit, I'll point out that most efficient way of moving carbon-bearing solids per ton-mile is the bulk carrier ships we use for shipping coal.


Another apt ancient example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sphacteria

Lightly-armed Athenians trapped heavily-armed Spartans in hilly terrain, and instead of fighting them in a phalanx, wore them down with a long day of hit-and-run. Hundreds of exhausted Spartans were taken alive, which was a massive scandal for the Spartan reputation at the time.


Plants still perform respiration using oxygen. Photosynthesis lets them create their own sugars, but their process for using those sugars in the mitochondria is similar to how we do it. Plants release more oxygen than they consume because they grow: in order to grow they must pull CO2 from the air, use the C as building material (instead of respiration fuel), and dump the O2.

https://www.pthorticulture.com/en-us/training-center/basics-...


That analysis is from the perspective of the scammer. The scammer has limited time to write to each victim once the responses come back from the initial mass-email, so the scammer is better off if only the most gullible people reply. From the perspective of the person being attacked, the counterintuitive result based on selection bias goes away, and a more convincing scheme is more of a risk to you personally. (The assumption that scammers have limited time to write to each victim may itself become less true because of LLMs.)


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