<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Cushman</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Cushman</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Sat, 11 Apr 2026 07:53:22 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Cushman" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I’m still so confused. You’re talking about the article I posted a link to? Did you think I hadn’t read it?<p>Edit: I guess I’ll try to respond in good faith, even though I don’t totally understand why you’re asking <i>me</i> about this. If you click through to the Foreign Policy article, you’ll see Bruce Schneier listed as the first author before Ottenheimer.<p>But really, I’m not trying to imply whatever it is you’re inferring. By all means, draw whatever conclusions you like from Schneier’s authorship!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2025 21:38:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041713</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041713</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43041713</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a peculiarly conspiratorial response to my comment, and I don’t think I’m equipped to respond to it. Did you mean to direct this to me?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:35:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039478</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039478</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43039478</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "DOGE Has Started Gutting a Key US Technology Agency"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I upvoted this due to mass flagging of articles on this topic, but I don’t believe this article is high-quality.<p>I would prefer this one were removed and replaced with Schneier’s article at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035977</a>, currently at 150 upvotes.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:10:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037393</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037393</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43037393</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "DeepSeek's Hidden Bias: How We Cut It by 76% Without Performance Loss"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don’t understand you. What do you mean by this?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 29 Jan 2025 19:20:30 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42869789</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42869789</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42869789</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "In Defense of Y'All"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is amusing. So… <i>if</i> one plans to publish their baroque opinions on English grammar… one should <i>really</i> know that conversational “y’all” is prescriptively a <i>high status</i> marker in the academy.<p>I picked up the habit in Massachusetts, in the mid 2000s, from an Ivy League humanities professor who also expressed support for a student debt strike. He used it very deliberately, in an effort to un-train our public school–addled brains from the inanity that we were somehow <i>smarter</i> than others for having <i>fewer</i> words in hand. In my bones, the thought of not using it as appropriate feels <i>uneducated</i>.<p>Using “y’all” <i>in conversation</i> shows incredible confidence, a way to flex command of formal language in an informal setting. It’s often used with emphasis. It leverages the listener’s discomfort, saying: I know <i>precisely</i> which register I’m speaking in. It’s an “elite” thing to do.<p>What you’ll <i>never</i> hear is one of these people using “y’all” as a <i>formal</i> address— especially as a <i>singular</i>, as in the rote “Y’all been served?” for a dining party of any number. 
There are a number of reasons for that, but number one is simple: It’s a high status signal.<p>Edit to add: Maybe importantly, this doesn’t extend to the casual use of “all y’all” . I think the colloquial academic equivalent would be “you [emphasized pause] all”. If you weren’t familiar you’d probably transcribe it as “you <i>all</i>”, but it’s closer to “you, all”. Looking at it now, I think that’s “intentional abuse” of the formal variant for intensifying, with just enough stress to make it visibly intentional?<p>But I should be clear I haven’t studied this dialect at all, I just learned to speak it :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 19 Dec 2024 15:19:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42462233</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42462233</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42462233</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Gettiers in software engineering (2019)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s not super clear there, but those are examples of a <i>pre-</i>Gettier type of argument that originally motivated strengthening, and externalizing, the J in JTB knowledge— just like you’re doing!<p>Gettier’s contribution — the examples with Smith — sharpens it to a point by making the “knowledge” a logical proposition — in one example a conjunction, in one a disjunction — such that we can <i>assert</i> that Smith’s belief in the premise is justified, while allowing the premise to be false in the world.<p>It’s a fun dilemma: the horns are, you can give up justification as sufficient, or you can give up <i>logical entailment of justification</i>.<p>But it’s also a bit quaint, these days. To your typical 21st century epistemologist, that’s just not a very terrifying dilemma.<p>One can even keep buying original recipe JTB, as long as one is willing to bite the bullet that we can flip the “knowledge” bit by changing superficially irrelevant states of the world. And hey, why not?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 15 Oct 2024 03:53:09 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844783</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844783</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41844783</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "We need more zero config tools"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> If you ever change machine or do pair programming or whatever where you are not using your highly-tweaked config, and you are essentially a frustrated jibbering wreck and barely more competent than a 3 year old using a computer for the first time<p>I was once pairing on the lead’s laptop and switched the keyboard to Dvorak. This was back in 2010 or so, when the input menu wouldn’t show on the lock screen by default. The lead could not type Dvorak, and of course I did not know their password. I remember that moment of silent contemplation keenly…<p>That’s to say, yes, and the sensation of being a frustrated jibbering wreck can be contagious :')</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:55:40 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41719594</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41719594</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41719594</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>As an also low ACE person with high ACE loved ones, I super encourage this!<p>With the serious caveat that ACE score <i>isn’t</i> a great predictor for individuals: if your siblings have ACEs >=3, it’s entirely plausible that that trauma explains none, some, or <i>all</i> of the differences you’re referring to.<p>(If, like me, you grew up thinking socioeconomic status was the gold star predictor of cohort health, the past couple of decades of research here are pretty shocking!)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:54:21 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556726</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556726</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556726</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Ask HN: Former gifted children with hard lives, how did you turn out?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>ACE 1, so I’m qualified to respond :)<p>An important thing for you and I to keep in mind is that we aren’t just talking about psychology.<p>ACEs cause (or exacerbate) depression, anxiety, and so on; they also cause (or exacerbate) cancer, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, and so on.<p>It’s obviously a lot of work to disentangle causation from secondary health impacts of mental illness, but to our shame there is more than enough data, and the work has been done. An appreciable fraction of the damage done by ACEs is physical and irreversible after adolescence.<p>I think this is important for us to remember because it’s easy for us to say, oh, they must need some extra support. And yeah, they do. But it’s too little, too late. They — the children — need us to stop the ACEs from happening.<p>Editing in a caveat I remembered elsewhere: of course the <i>scores</i> don’t cause these things, and of course the individual variance is huge. As a <i>diagnostic</i> criterion, ACE is useful as a screener and that’s about it. As a <i>statistic</i>, it’s revealed a pandemic.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 16 Sep 2024 14:03:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556193</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556193</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41556193</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ouch! Fair cop since we’re nitpicking, but I was trying to be cute about that — the joke started out more like “you’re technically crossing the line to scab as a strikebreaker”. I’m aware that it still doesn’t make sense unless there’s a sympathy action by the strikebreakers’ union, unfunny and unhelpful in the first place, thanks for the correction :)<p>Edit: Ah shoot not again. What I <i>meant</i> to say was “scabbing as an agent provocateur”. Sorry, I’ll quit while I’m ahead!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Sep 2024 21:17:01 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505682</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505682</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505682</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "New York Times tech workers union votes to authorize a strike"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It’s not a shift in usage, it’s a term of art. <i>Informally</i> it could mean just crossing the line to enter the business, but unless you live in a turn-of-the-century company town, no one in the union is expecting anything related to that by default.<p>In <i>labor</i>, “respecting the picket line” is a moral action for <i>union members</i> (or scabs) which by definition couldn’t apply to a spontaneous self-directed consumer boycott.<p>Not to put to fine a point on it: if you show up to someone else’s labor action claiming solidarity, and then independently decide to pivot the action to a totally different set of economic incentives, you are — almost literally! — a scab.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 10 Sep 2024 20:59:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505485</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505485</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505485</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> This is known as a minor fall, I assume<p>Since turnabout is fair play, it’s worth noting this is mostly false; if you google “minor fall music theory” you’ll only find references to Cohen.<p>In (conventional western) analysis, a “fall” wouldn't be something mechanical, it would always imply a contextual interpretation.<p>So it’s a valid reading of the text to say it means something about the chord structure, but — from a purely musical theoretical perspective — just as valid to read it as a reference to the flattening of the minor degree of the scale, or something else entirely.<p>It’s really a lovely song :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 07 Sep 2024 22:55:37 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41476956</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41476956</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41476956</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Gently: The snark you’re getting is undeserved, but you <i>are</i> doing the “but why male models?” thing. You gotta make a left turn here :)<p>Let’s reset: Hey, did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? Did they actually? Despite all the reasons they wouldn’t? If they did, why? Was it a mistake or on purpose? Neither one quite makes sense.<p>Those are interesting questions! But there’s no alleged secrets leak, and there’s nothing else that’s interesting about that specific picture. You could say it’s implied somehow, but in that case you really got got by <i>anti-</i>clickbait. “Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?” is the whole riddle, and the answer is the whole blog post.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 06 Sep 2024 16:03:57 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467345</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467345</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41467345</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Ask HN: Are you still using your Vision Pro?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Surprisingly, yes! 90hz would be considered the minimum here.<p>As a general statement, no, vision isn’t as time-sensitive as hearing, so the timing requirements aren’t as precise. But when it comes to head and hand tracking, the brain’s <i>also</i> doing predictive sensor fusion, and even “unnoticeably” small delays can be disorienting or nauseating. (Ocular fixation is the most sensitive, but hand-eye coordination is also pretty important to the brain!)<p>The important number in VR is “motion-to-photon” latency. 
Over 20ms starts to be noticeable to most people; 50ms starts to make most people uncomfortable. That’s the total budget for sensor fusion, simulation, rendering, and display, and that’s just for the bare-minimum experience that doesn’t make people immediately ill.<p>You can do a lot with prediction and late updates in screen space, which is what makes VR possible at all on current hardware— but it’s hard to make up for having sensor data delayed by possibly 150% of the total time budget :)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 13 Jun 2024 00:23:31 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664643</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664643</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40664643</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Your understanding is correct, more or less[0], but there are two parts to strategy: an inexpert counter is likely to be distracted, and to make errors from perfect play. They’re also likely to lose the count, and make errors in bet sizing. The net of those is worse than a non-counter playing perfectly, whose edge is slightly negative but who still stands a decent chance of making money on a given day.<p>But note that’s a reason for casinos not to <i>overtly</i> discourage counting; they’ll still happily ban a player who is apparently counting well rather than roll the dice on whether they’re counting “well enough”.<p>[0] Sibling points out that counters will make specific deviations from “naive” perfect play depending on the count, but that’s to push earnings up a bit on an already positive edge. There’s also the element of camouflage, where a <i>really</i> strong counter might deviate in ways that don’t hurt their earnings but make their play look less “counter-y”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:11:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918510</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918510</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918510</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Ah, I believe I understand now. No, I’m afraid this risk is not insurable.<p>Any insurer would have to guarantee some share of the 1.05x EV per toss, call that share itself X. The insurer would keep the remainder of the EV as premium, call that Y.<p>X and Y are both positive so it seems at first like you should be able to underwrite this. However, the math will not work out unless you change the dynamics of the model in some way.<p>The fundamental problem is that this is a model for a sequence of N events, and X (and therefore Y) are exponential functions of N. After some finite N, it’s only the insurer’s <i>most recent guarantee</i> that matters to the total payoffs. No previous events are consequential; the brute force of exponential math says the exponent alone dominates.<p>So we can just think in terms of x^N. At some point the insurer must pay out x^N in losses from the previous x^(N-1) in gains.<p>In other words, regardless of the premium charged, or the number of individuals whose risk is pooled, this individual’s status as an insurer doesn’t give them any special exemption from exponential reality that prevents individuals in general from remaining solvent in the limit of this model.<p>(I haven’t totally worked through the outcome table for the author’s proposed solution— I’d encourage you to do that if you think the solution might be flawed. But this does indeed seem to be a situation where any individual who attempts to capture the EV will fail, and only unconditional sharing can succeed.)</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 03 Sep 2023 02:07:56 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367108</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367108</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37367108</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Hmm, I’m still not following exactly what you’re pointing out. What’s the model you mentioned about variance in dice rolls? I assumed we were talking about the coin flip model where all individual payoffs go to zero with probability 1, so no one has any expected income to pay an insurance premium out of.<p>The article is pretty pointedly about wealth redistribution, i.e.  pooling of windfalls rather than of risk, but I don’t think that was lost on anyone... are you talking about a different model where there’s some sort of insurable situation?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 19:59:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364985</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364985</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37364985</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Indifferent to risk, or seeking of risk, or having any other computable utility function on any other measurable that we’d have to accept as equally valid if we want to convince any non-economist that we aren’t just using utility as a weasely word for money :)<p>That’s not even snark, humans preferring both of higher risk and lower payoff is a canonical psycho-economic result. And even the question of whether the <i>concept</i> of a rational utility maximizer is well-founded is the exact subject of this very fine article!</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 12:45:32 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361017</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361017</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361017</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> It should make sense by now that if you lose, and play again, you can expect to lose again, despite still having a positive EV on the toss.<p>Too late to edit but I feel like I should highlight this more, because it looks like the place something would be swept under the rug:<p>Yes, the individual who wins two flips in a row is still ahead even if they lose the next two flips. If they <i>win</i> the first four, they can afford to lose three more.<p>And if they win the first <i>five</i>, they can afford to lose… still only three. Five to four no longer breaks even.<p>That’s the thing that, if it doesn’t seem intuitive, is a meaningful insight. “This +EV dynamics is not ergodic” means:<p>In the limit, a) the individual who wins every single coin flip can afford to pay the losses of everyone else and profit, and b) <i>no other individual breaks even</i>.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 12:19:07 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360842</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360842</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360842</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Cushman in "Pooling and Sharing of wealth makes everyone's wealth grow faster"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Can you say more about that? I can see the loose analogy to socializing risk, but I’d usually think of the concept of insurance along the lines of “many small winners pay for a few big losers”; this looks to me more like “a few big winners pay for many small losers”.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 02 Sep 2023 11:04:03 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360377</link><dc:creator>Cushman</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360377</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37360377</guid></item></channel></rss>