Hacker News: LargeWu

New comment by LargeWu in "Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story"

LargeWu — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:24:14 +0000

I think the differentiating feature is that capitalism used to be tethered to producing things that were useful. The current model of wealth acquisition, so called "late-stage" seems to have shifted more towards rent seeking and extraction.

New comment by LargeWu in "Entities enabling scientific fraud at scale (2025)"

LargeWu — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 15:59:55 +0000

Is there a viable career path for researchers who choose to focus on replication instead of novel discoveries? I assume replications are perceived as less prestigious, but it's also important work.

New comment by LargeWu in "I baked a pie every day for a year"

LargeWu — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:42:55 +0000

For one thing, yeast was in short supply, so if you wanted to bake regularly, sourdough was a good option if you could keep it going.

New comment by LargeWu in "How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post"

LargeWu — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 20:53:11 +0000

Billionaires are allowed to have their cake and eat it too in the form of loans backed by their stock holdings. This is how they get to have $500MM yachts without having to actually sell their stock and lose control of their companies. It's how they pay themselves without having to pay taxes, because it's treated like debt and not income. Treating these like capital gains would be a start.

New comment by LargeWu in "Waymo seeking about $16B near $110B valuation"

LargeWu — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 19:55:50 +0000

> LLM-based “chatty mode” where you can talk to the AI personality of your choice

I'm genuinely baffled that people would want to do this.

New comment by LargeWu in "U.S. Formally Withdraws from World Health Organization"

LargeWu — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 03:27:33 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis"

LargeWu — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 16:19:00 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Scott Adams has died"

LargeWu — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:34:56 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Scott Adams has died"

LargeWu — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 22:20:46 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Scott Adams has died"

LargeWu — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:20:51 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Scott Adams has died"

LargeWu — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 18:15:26 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

LargeWu — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 17:10:10 +0000

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

New comment by LargeWu in "Efficient method to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere"

LargeWu — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:40:29 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits"

LargeWu — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:48:06 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "Kenyan court declares law banning seed sharing unconstitutional"

LargeWu — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 19:01:17 +0000

Not even just selling seeds. Saving seeds from the crop you planted from the previous year can also lead to infringement lawsuits.

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

LargeWu — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:19:49 +0000

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.

New comment by LargeWu in "We're committing $6.25B to give 25M children a financial head start"

LargeWu — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:49:03 +0000

The number of people who would do that has got to be less than a rounding error.

New comment by LargeWu in "Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America"

LargeWu — Sat, 29 Nov 2025 23:19:42 +0000

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?

New comment by LargeWu in "Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from Earth"

LargeWu — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:19:52 +0000

Seems like the problem OP is trying to solve for here is not latency, it's signal power and redundancy.

New comment by LargeWu in "'Fear really drives him': is Alex Karp of Palantir the world's scariest CEO?"

LargeWu — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 15:31:23 +0000

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.