Hacker News: Gimpei

New comment by Gimpei in "Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America"

Gimpei — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 01:44:27 +0000

I don’t understand this attitude. There’s zero evidence that South Park had any effect on any political outcome of any kind. South Park is a comedy show and they make fun of things, liberals and progressives included. I thought people were supposed to speak truth, or is that only the case when they say what you want them to hear.

New comment by Gimpei in "Is The Economist Always Wrong?"

Gimpei — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 12:25:42 +0000

The Pravda parallel is a stretch. It's definitely opinion, but they do consult actual research and more so than most other English language publications. As a social scientist I think they do a better job of treating research than the NY Times or the New Yorker. Often I get the sense the journalists at those publications haven't seen a number since high school. That being said, if you think the kind of statistics based research that comes out of social sciences is all bunk, we live in different worlds and will have to agree to disagree.

New comment by Gimpei in "Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]"

Gimpei — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 08:40:35 +0000

Terrible article title and framing. This is just about a QJE article, the QJE by the way is famous for being a little more out there. The article takes a standard gravity equation from economic geography and finds that it fits well to a dataset they created from Bronze Age slates. In general the gravity equation is one of the successes from economics so this isn’t super surprising, but it is welcome and notable. That’s pretty much it.

New comment by Gimpei in "Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed"

Gimpei — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 21:03:02 +0000

To be pedantic, the Roman Empire did not fall in 472. It lived on in the eastern Mediterranean for another one thousand years. The Eastern Romans even took back a fair amount of western Roman holdings for a bit. The people who actually killed the Roman Empire were the Franks, permanently weakening it during the Latin occupation.

New comment by Gimpei in "How to Earn a Billion Dollars"

Gimpei — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 15:06:40 +0000

You could also interpret this statement in a way that has nothing to do with exploitation. A lottery winner doesn’t exploit anyone, but they don’t “earn” their money either. I’ve always thought of the founder path to a billion as a bit like a lotto game where you can shift the odds through hard work and natural ability. I don’t think this process necessarily involves exploitation (although it certainly could). You’d have to believe in the labor theory of value for that. And I’m not convinced that even Marx would, were he alive today. It was supposed to have a scientific basis, after all, and that evaporated a long time ago.

New comment by Gimpei in "The desperation of NYTimes"

Gimpei — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:33:39 +0000

My gripe is that they constantly spam me with overlays about purchasing a family account. As far as I can tell this is unblockable. So annoying.

New comment by Gimpei in "Elixir v1.20: Now a gradually typed language"

Gimpei — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:40:16 +0000

I don’t understand this question at all. Types are there to prevent human programmers from making a certain class of mistakes. But is the same true for AI. Because if not, static types are just needless cruft.

New comment by Gimpei in "The worst job interview I ever had"

Gimpei — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:12:18 +0000

I’m inclined to believe that you are being too charitable to the interviewers. This is an early stage mental health startup. They totally could have been asking very personal questions. I believe this used to be standard when interviewing psychoanalysts. They could have stopped the author at any time too. That would be the most natural thing. I’m inclined to believe that it was a clown show and they conducted borderline abusive interviews. Shame on them. But also, beware early stage startups. It’s a real roll of the dice and the dice are weighted against you.

New comment by Gimpei in "A message from President Kornbluth about funding and the talent pipeline"

Gimpei — Thu, 14 May 2026 15:08:22 +0000

If Europe wants to pick up the slack, it needs to start pumping an order of magnitude more money into its universities than it currently does. US universities dominate because they are rich. As a holder of a PhD from a European university, I don’t see this ever happening. But I would love to be proved wrong.

New comment by Gimpei in "I Won't Download Your App. The Web Version Is A-OK"

Gimpei — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 14:56:06 +0000

My gripe is how iOS allows these companies to constantly bug us to use their stupid apps. I ended up installing the NYTimes app, not because I use it, but just to shut it up. I switched to duck duck go because I was sick of being bugged to install chrome. How many times do I need to say no?

New comment by Gimpei in "Cursor 3"

Gimpei — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 22:06:07 +0000

I used to have a pro-cursor subscription, but it was way too expensive because I'd always hit my limit. I realized I could just use claude code + the free version of cursor for autocomplete and it worked even better. At this point, I'm not understanding the value that cursor is bringing. A souped up claude code? All I have to do is wait a few months and anything useful will be in claude code or codex or whatever.

New comment by Gimpei in "British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time"

Gimpei — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:21:37 +0000

I’d guess that there is less of a need for light at the beginning of the day since most people don’t farm. Personally I prefer more light at the end of the day.

New comment by Gimpei in "Film students who can no longer sit through films"

Gimpei — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 17:20:10 +0000

I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.

New comment by Gimpei in "Euro firms must ditch Uncle Sam's clouds and go EU-native"

Gimpei — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 16:28:04 +0000

Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.

New comment by Gimpei in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

Gimpei — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 18:01:13 +0000

Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.

New comment by Gimpei in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

Gimpei — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:29:56 +0000

I like zed. I just wish they’d support running multiple agents at once + chat history. If they did, I’d pay for zed just to support them.

New comment by Gimpei in "Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”"

Gimpei — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 04:30:25 +0000

I think people need to chill out on this thread. LLMs are neither pure slop nor the end of the programming profession. They are immensely useful tools, particularly for tedious tasks or for quickly getting up to speed on a new API or syntax. They’re great for catching bugs too. Every now and again I’ll give an LLM a prompt and it will knock it out of the park, but that’s exceedingly rare. Most of the time, though, it just allows me to focus on the more interesting parts of my job. In short, for now at least, it is a big productivity booster, not a career ender.

New comment by Gimpei in "New Kindle feature uses AI to answer questions about books"

Gimpei — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 20:52:00 +0000

Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.

New comment by Gimpei in "Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled?"

Gimpei — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 03:22:17 +0000

You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.

New comment by Gimpei in "The death of tech idealism and rise of the homeless in Northern California"

Gimpei — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 03:12:52 +0000

I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.