HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

wanoir

12 karma · joined May 18, 2026

submissionscomments
wanoir··on Google's AI Is Confused About Fish and the Days of the Week
Thank you for all the fish
wanoir··on Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?
Building from scratch is much easier / when you can demolish everything that pre-exists.

I don’t think this is realistic in already-developed areas where home values may already be very high.

Not aware of the Gary story! Would be curious to see how that’s going and if there’s local support / resistance.

wanoir··on Where are the economies of scale in homebuilding?
One thing that can’t be scaled is “prime location”

There will be locations that are more desirable than others, and even if you keep building houses where there’s space, the need to congregate in particular areas (such as for work) will result in particular locations being more desirable.

And, it’s hard to increase the density of an area once the housing supply is already built out.

So instead, that supply stays fixed, demand increases, and the price increases in turn.

This actually made me think then that an accelerator for scalability could be: public transit into population centers that ensure areas with abundant space (and cheaper housing supply) can still easily access the areas that would otherwise be hugely expensive to live near

I believe this was done near DC where the public transit buildout helped foster further housing development in those emerging areas. Not sure if other HCOL areas, e.g. CA Bay Area, have similar things going on for East Bay mobility / other cross-county transport

wanoir··on Boston and Bermuda
Might be missing some details, but it feels more like remembering the past than writing a journalistic report

It has a personal memoir style that I like

wanoir··on Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference
This also kinda makes me think back to how most of the influential thinkers we know didn’t make their impact in the structures we know today. Makes me wonder if most of the prestige and “remnants” of those eras are actually just competitive pressure cookers that may not provide the environment anymore for the achievements they once enabled.
wanoir··on On Labubu and the Hyperreal
Once something catches on, jumping on the bandwagon gives people a sense of community.

But, the nature of what makes something viral, like how the article mentions pandemic, seems agnostic to what actually becomes viral. Why did labubus go viral and not something else[1]? It’s luck and timing, and we can try to reverse-engineer it, but it’s just being prepared & luck. We’re seeing a survivor bias and thinking the survivor is special inherently.

So what enabled Pop Mart to be prepared?

[1]Actually, there’s also sneaker hype, meme stocks, etc.

wanoir··on Taking a walk may lead to more creativity than sitting, study finds (2014)
I especially despise sitting down right after lunch to get back to work.

I must take a walk first.

Taking a walk right after eating helps stabilize blood sugar and digestion.

Highly recommend.

wanoir··on The electric Ferrari is here and it's fugly [video]
Ooof. But hey, tastes could change!

I’m really curious how the brand reputations will carryover in the EV era…

All the reputations that car brands have are from their legacy of existing products. Who’s to say if they will continue in the same way for their new manufacturing processes, supply chain, branding, performance, positioning, etc. for their new EV offerings

It’s a new world!

I almost wonder if they should just start over with new brands.

wanoir··on Hawaii just found a way around Citizens United. Other states are following
Fascinating! But does this only apply if the company is incorporated in that particular state? If there is any state that doesn’t adopt the new law structure, then companies will just re-incorporate to that other state.

Of course, not every company may find it worthwhile to do that. So on the whole, it will probably mean companies that aren’t that involved in political spending will become even less involved. But, the largest spenders may find it worthwhile to re-incorporate so they can continue to do it.

wanoir··on What I Learned About Loss While Skateboarding at Costco
It’s behind a paywall so I can’t read it :(

But glad to see more discourse around the desire for more connection and presence

wanoir··on Hacker News front page as a site
Would be cool to see different column layouts too!
wanoir··on Google Declaring War on the Web
My admiration of Honda and Toyota comes from their hybrid offerings, probably the most practical kind of car to get.

EVs have the charging requirement, so it’s a lifestyle / home setup adjustment. Plus, other trade-offs like being way heavier due to the battery, and higher risk of being totaled if the battery pack is even slightly damaged.

Slight aside: I only recently learned how much easier it is to total an EV. A small accident can be fine for a gas car, but for an EV, if it does anything to the battery, and requires replacing the battery or going deep inside to try and figure out what’s wrong with it, it’s just not worth it anymore, and gets declared totaled by the insurance company. Not great! Felt it was worth including in my expected cost calculation for whether or not to get an EV.

And regular cars haven’t gotten MPG improvements in years.

So I have a good impression of the hybrid technologies they’ve developed! Though their electrification strategy seems completely different. Toyota/Lexus I think are in the hybrid lineup still. Whereas Honda went full electrification and shut down a lot of production so as to refit their factories. I believe one of the reasons that Honda sales plummeted recently, since they had just ramped down production.

Maybe that technology will be lost someday, I wonder how well-documented it is and if it’d be easy to ramp back up

wanoir··on Google's Antigravity bait and switch
Really unfortunate, totally agree they should give an option not to install, or have more communication around changing it in such a big way.
wanoir··on Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
> even if you get oxygen back it's gone, you're already a vegetable

I think that's the part that might get people though. Since a comatose brain is not necessarily fully gone

So I guess the question is what differentiates a comatose brain from one that is no longer capable of consciousness?

wanoir··on Google Declaring War on the Web
> still seek out the good quality stuff at as good a price as he can manage and fix it up if it were broken.

I think that's a nice story to highlight, being able to do things well and preserving that knowledge

While there can be benefits for mass producing things, what actually is produced is going to be limited by what techniques are conducive to automation. So the techniques that are hard to automate are lost from the market of provided goods and then human capital for it also gets lost (can't think of any concrete examples off the top of my head, but maybe the techniques for some elements of clothing that are now only found in couture/custom pieces). Another related idea is how there are much fewer color variations in manufactured goods now, simply because it simplifies the mass manufacturing process.

wanoir··on To study how chips work, MIT researchers built their own operating system
> The MIT team disclosed its M1 findings to Apple's product security team. In an unusual reversal, Apple's engineers also examined Fractal.

Would love to study it too if it's generally available.

wanoir··on Ask HN: Transition from Engineering Manager to IC
Which one are you more excited about?
wanoir··on Standard Charter CEO Replaces 8000 "Lower Value Humans" with AI
Oof. Maybe/hopefully a translation error
wanoir··on Google Declaring War on the Web
> the Vimes Theory of boots (rich people buy boots that last generations, poor people buy boots every year)

This made me think of a fascinating exception to this

Luxury-brand cars usually get turned over every couple years so as to avoid their inevitable maintenance cliff

wanoir··on Not alive, but not dead: disembodied human brains used for drug testing
This is an interesting point

I think for direct comparison, the way of re-animating the brain described in the article would need to be attempted on the cardiac arrest patient as well so as to be sure it isn’t a “revival”-capable method

Might already be an obvious answer to practitioners in the field

wanoir··on Technology creates an illusion of control that risks robbing us of meaning
> the ethos of control, the determination to have complete awareness of one’s environment, to anticipate every adverse outcome and manage it in advance, is, if anything, more insidious than surveillance capitalism — for we experience it not as something imposed on us from without but as something that arises from within.

Agreed, optimizing has a limit beyond which it starts to reduce quality and enjoyment of life

wanoir··on Your Most Improbable Life
> But it can be even more improbable. You can align yourself with this grand arc moving from the expected to the unexpected and aim to become the most improbable person you can be.

Also reminds me of the social media trend for “don’t let them predict your next move”

wanoir··on I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers
So cool! This reminds me I wanted to try setting a custom video background with some footage i had. Didn’t even realize it wasn’t natively supported till i saw this!
wanoir··on WriteUp: 16 Bytes of x86 that turn Matrix rain into sound
Very cool! Was super surprised the sound actually sounded coherent, versus something like static or noise. Was it unexpected for you too or do you think there could be property of the computation that would suggest it?