HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

LargeWu

3,559 karma · joined March 26, 2009

submissionscomments
LargeWu··on U.S. Formally Withdraws from World Health Organization
It's less what should he have done, than what shouldn't he have done. Specifically, he pushed conspiracy theories, demonized his health experts, and touted ineffective cures, and ultimately cast doubt on the safety of the vaccines. All to pander to his base. He had a remarkable chance to build trust in government via a truly extraordinary vaccine rollout, to a crowd which is historically distrustful. Instead he squandered that goodwill on petty fights and self aggrandizement.
LargeWu··on The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis
Palantir is built explicitly for surveillance, in a way the other companies you listed are not. There is no comparison here. It's like saying the City of Minneapolis is complicit because they maintain the roads ICE is driving on.
LargeWu··on Scott Adams has died
The thesis of the article says "If it was bad under Obama, imagine how much worse it is now". It's literally in the headline. This is not the dunk you think it is.

Nobody disputes ICE was bad then. The difference is that Obama wasn't cheering them on, saying anybody who was abused or even murdered by ICE deserved it. Trump isn't just allowing this, he's given them a mandate to act this way.

LargeWu··on Scott Adams has died
They haven't been indicted for kidnapping because it's the government itself doing it with federally deputized agents. What, is Trump's DOJ going to prosecute its own law enforcement agents for executing Trump's policy? No, that's utterly laughable.

Additionally, Obama's use of ICE was far different from what's going on today in that Obama used targeted enforcement prioritizing criminals. ICE today in Minneapolis is just driving around grabbing anyone they think could, possibly, maybe be illegal. US citizens are being swept up by anonymous, violent and poorly trained agents with virtually no accountability. It's causing terror in the community in a way Obama never even came close to. To suggest these are similar is extremely disingenuous.

LargeWu··on Scott Adams has died
Adams claimed Black Americans were a hate group and that white people should "get the hell away".

As to ICE deporting criminal aliens, that's not what they're doing. They're kidnapping people off the street and out of their homes and cars, with no warrants. They're literally doing "Papers, please" style stops of anybody they even suspect could be an immigrant, including Native Americans. Just a few days ago in Minneapolis they abducted four homeless men who are members of the Oglala Nation. This all sounds pretty Gestapo like to me.

LargeWu··on Scott Adams has died
It's not just political views, though.

Politics is "How much should we tax people?" and "Where should we set limits on carbon emissions?" or "Which candidate do I support"

Politics is not "Black Americans are a terrorist group" and "Actually, maybe the Holocaust was not as bad as people say it was".

The latter are core moral views, and we should not be so quick to dismiss them as merely political.

LargeWu··on Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
Yeah, that too. There's not going to be one single solution, the problem is just too big for that. The idea with compost is that growing plants for food and dealing with the waste and excess (which is substantial) is something we're already doing, so can we tack carbon sequestration on top of that
LargeWu··on Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
I've wondered if capturing carbon emissions from industrial-scale compost facilities would be a net positive. It would have the added benefit of the carbon initially being captured by natural organic processes (i.e. growing food), so it avoids the problem of the energy requirements from trying to just pull carbon from the ambient atmosphere. I don't know if this is feasible but I haven't seen any research on it.
LargeWu··on Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits
I mean, Avatar is a pretty on-the-nose allegory for the decimation of American Indian tribes and western colonization. I don't think this is at all a controversial take.
LargeWu··on Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional
Not even just selling seeds. Saving seeds from the crop you planted from the previous year can also lead to infringement lawsuits.
LargeWu··on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?
My middle school aged child was recently diagnosed with learning disorders around processing, specifically with written language and math, which means even though he might know the material well it will take him a long time to do things we take for granted like reading and writing. But, he does much much better with recall and speed when transmitting and testing his knowledge orally. He's awful with spelling and phonemes, but his vocabulary is above grade level. For kids like him, the time aspect is not necessarily correlated to subject mastery.
LargeWu··on We're committing $6.25B to give 25M children a financial head start
The number of people who would do that has got to be less than a rounding error.
LargeWu··on Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America
I think it's less about "individual rights" than "lower standards for disadvantaged groups", where the latter has a very broad definition. There is such an aversion to policing on the left that any enforcement of the social contract is seen as oppression.

To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?

LargeWu··on Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth
Seems like the problem OP is trying to solve for here is not latency, it's signal power and redundancy.
LargeWu··on 'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO?
Definitely single whip. Looks like he stopped to pose in the middle of it. He's also facing the wrong way; that body position should be on the diagonal if anything.
LargeWu··on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun
If there's any difference between printmaking and photography, it's that printmaking requires one to physically print each item. There's a non-trivial amount of manual setup to do, and the process can take days.

Photography can be printed basically on-demand owing to the nature of the medium.

It doesn't mean that limited runs in photography are less valid, though. Once that print is editioned no reputable artist will just print more. (although there are ways around it, like different colorways) It definitely makes the item more "collectible".

LargeWu··on US Army to buy 1 million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up
The Army already has a branch specifically devoted to engineering, the Army Corps of Engineers. While its primary focus is civil engineering, training and employing electrical and electronics engineers certainly doesn't seem out of the question.
LargeWu··on US Army to buy 1 million drones, in major acquisition ramp-up
You know who has capital? The US government. It's very plausible that the Army could fund the infrastructure needed for this industry as a national security imperative.
LargeWu··on Amazon says it didn't cut people because of money. But because of 'culture'
There's dysfunction in both, it's just different types of dysfunction.
LargeWu··on Amazon confirms 14,000 job losses in corporate division
There is absolutely nothing in the world I would like less than an AI device listening to all of my conversations at home.
LargeWu··on Tesla is at risk of losing subsidies in Korea over widespread battery failures
And it will be, until it isn't. It certainly isn't on the basis of fundamentals. It's purely vibes, but that won't last forever.
LargeWu··on 'Death to Spotify': the DIY movement to get artists and fans to quit the app
Artists are underpaid because subscription fees are too low to provide adequate payouts. There just isn't enough money to go around. Everybody wants artists to get better payouts but nobody would pay the $200 a month subscription fee it would require.
LargeWu··on Highest bridge unveiled at more than 2,000ft above ground
The problem isn't physically building the rail, the problem is the legal framework in which governments operate in. Multiple rounds of environmental impact statements, eminent domain lawsuits, preferred contractor RFP's, zoning, permitting, endless red tape...
LargeWu··on Highest bridge unveiled at more than 2,000ft above ground
This is the central thesis of Ezra Klein's "Abundance" book. Basically, things like this (or high speed rail, or public housing) don't get built in the USA because the government has hamstrung itself with so many rules and regulations that it becomes prohibitively expensive and/or tied up in lawsuits.

Places like China, for better or worse, are not burdened with the problem of making sure every constituency is accommodated.

LargeWu··on Wealth tax would be deadly for French economy, says Europe's richest man
If real wages stagnate while the ultrawealthy amass wealth at a superlinear rate, I think you could argue it is.
LargeWu··on Wealth tax would be deadly for French economy, says Europe's richest man
What does it even mean that an ultrawealthy person would "leave" a city? One not unreasonable interpretation is that they would no longer have standing to promote their own interests there at the expense of the rest of the population. As a non-billionaire myself this sounds like a pretty good idea to me; what's good for billionaires is often not so good for everybody else.
LargeWu··on Pontevedra, Spain declares its entire urban area a "reduced traffic zone"
Americans might be nice, but they're not necessarily kind.
LargeWu··on OpenAI eats jobs, then offers to help you find a new one at Walmart
If LLM-based tools were such a money printing machine with a big ROI, why would you ever want to downsize? Keep redirecting that excess human capacity into building bigger and better capabilities to generate more revenue. Hire cheap grads to do the work.

Except it seems like the opposite is happening. CS grads have high unemployment. Companies laying off staff.

The rhetoric doesn't seem to add up to the reality.

LargeWu··on We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]
If you view powering people's homes as a lower priority than powering a data center then there is no reasonable discussion to be had here.
LargeWu··on We Found the Hidden Cost of Data Centers. It's in Your Electric Bill [video]
Because they're theoretically regulated and ordered to do so. The market for power is not a free market due to the locally monopolistic nature of it.
← PreviousPage 2 of 32Next →