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gweinberg

1,879 karma · joined May 15, 2010

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gweinberg··on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics
Yes, exactly. If you just look at death statistics adjusted for age and sex and race and whatever and you notice how many people die in hospitals, you might think "wow, hospitals are super dangerous, avoid them at all costs".
gweinberg··on When did Google get so weird?
In the future every Hnn post will be famous for 15 minutes. And we are living in the future.
gweinberg··on The Hierarchy of Money
There may be some value in this, but it is fundamentally wrong from first to last. First: There never was a great age of barter, you needed to have money before you had a lot of specialization. The idea that you could have brewers trying to pay for everything in beer doesn't resemble anything that did or could have happened. Last: Fiat money wasn't something people voluntarily accepted, it's something governments forced on people. Governments required people to pay taxes in fiat money, governments required people to accept fiat money as payments for debts, governments forced people to "sell" their gold.
gweinberg··on Turns are Better than Radians (2022)
Here's an even better idea: instead of turns, use degrees!
gweinberg··on A spectre is haunting Unicode
Hey, that's today's smbc https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/r The problem is, there's no good reason to think the concept of 彊 in your mind is at all similar to the concept of 彊 in my brain. After all, we (probably) don't pronounce it the same, right?
gweinberg··on A spectre is haunting Unicode
It occurs to me that we can use 彊 to mean "a completely unknown concept that cannot be named". For example if you ask, "when Cthulhu rises from its slumber, what is thefirst thing it will do? Probably it will 彊.
gweinberg··on Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off
Of course, nobody really gets paid for days off, anywhere, ever. Salaries are prorated, people are paid for the days they actually work.
gweinberg··on "Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models
Should have kept the original title.
gweinberg··on Humans haven't stopped evolving
"Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection."

There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.

gweinberg··on What's the most popular number in Hacker News titles?
I imagine "one" is usually spelled out in titles.
gweinberg··on Ancient Roman Board Game
The symmetry is restored if you say you're playing a two game match and the winner is the one that survives longer as the hares. But the game seems simple enough that I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to play optimally.
gweinberg··on Mystery behind Moana: After 1,700 years, why did Polynesians suddenly sail east?
Okay, but you not only have the question of why they did it when they did it, but also why they didn't in the previous 1700 years. We haven't been to Mars yet because the technology isn't ready, not because nobody has the hankering.

Maybe there is no real reason, at some point the cool kids started doing it and the wanna-be's imitated the cool kids. Or maybe not.

gweinberg··on Why study Diophantine equations?
Wait, are you saying they can't be solved by a Turing machine, but they can be solved some other way? If so, how?
gweinberg··on Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows
OP claimed relativistic effects explain why mercury is liquid at room temperature. That may be part of the story, but it isn't the whole thing, since other heavy elements are not liquid at room temperature.
gweinberg··on Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark
They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"

Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.

gweinberg··on Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts
I get the same error, and chrome fails also.
gweinberg··on US stock market to stop shrinking for first time in 23 years
The idea that the stock market has been shrinking in any meaningful sense is kind of silly. Market cap means something, but the number of shares in a company by itself is meaningless.
gweinberg··on How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry
Yes! I originally read the headline as "a turkey" because of the lack of a capital T.

They can call themselves what they want, but it unreasonable of the Turks to expect English speakers to write their country's name with characters which are not part of our alphabet.

gweinberg··on Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers
Ok so I think I understand your insight: the number of 64 bit numbers you can get from multiplying two 32 bit numbers is the number of distinct results. I guess it follows that, of those 64 bit integers that can be written as the product of 2 32 bit ints, on average they can be factored into 32 bit ints 6 different ways. The only ones that could possibly be written as such a product exactly one way are the prefect squares.
gweinberg··on The real cost of owning a home
It stands to reason that owning must be cheaper than renting an equivalent place over the long term, unless the guy renting to you made a poor investment. But you're usually not comparing equivalent places when you make the comparison.
gweinberg··on Men who stare at walls
Is the title a reference to "Men Who Stare at Goats"? If so, I think few people got it.
gweinberg··on My phone replaced a brass plug
Yeah, given the nominal precision it's surprising how far off some of the numbers are. A .38 is the same diameter as a .357.
gweinberg··on Is math big or small?
Obviously a torus is the size of a doughnut.
gweinberg··on Mario and Earendil
I thought it would be a team-up between two. Presumably the elf would help fight turtles and donkey kong, since what good is a plumber in a world without plumbing?
gweinberg··on Why it takes you and an elephant the same amount of time to poop (2017)
So the reason it takes a human and an elephant about the same amount of time to poop is, the ratio of our poop lengths is about the same as the ratio of our poop velocity? That sounds more like a tautology than an explanation to me.
gweinberg··on Zuckerberg's "fix" for child safety could end anonymous internet access for all
Had to wade through a lot of text to find out that apparently Zuckerberg and OP both apparently think the internet is something you access through phones.
gweinberg··on The Popper Principle
Not sure how that's possible. Laws may have a lot of strict marriage laws, but in Republic there is no marriage, the state assigns you sex partners in a rigged lottery, and requires the participants to be wearing masks so they can't form anything like an emotional bond. Really.
gweinberg··on Robert Duvall has died
Pretty sure he was asking about "Passengers".
gweinberg··on What's the Entropy of a Random Integer?
If an integer is drawn from an n bit space, it has n bits of entropy. Yes it really is that simple.
gweinberg··on Show HN: Interactive California Budget (By Claude Code)
Yes! They can choose to leave California!
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