Hacker News: Noumenon72

New comment by Noumenon72 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:36:27 +0000

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise.

I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:30:31 +0000

You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:26:02 +0000

If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:09:16 +0000

"Sticky" is what I was saying. It currently can't be done because of path dependence from historical regulation to industry structure to attitudes. No broader reason. I felt your post was setting up "If there's no logical reason, it must be because people with property are greedy". Sometimes things are the way they are because they got that way.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:49:54 +0000

I don't think you fully grasped the concept of an option, which is why it isn't illustrative for you; no one is purchasing the right to see a movie regardless of how much it turns out to cost to show. It's the movie maker that would love to buy an option that makes you promise to buy a ticket, even if the movie turns out bad.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:43:30 +0000

This comment is confusing because it refers to the first paragraph and also assumes when you checked your insurance you didn't find transport there. Since the parent did have transport and good insurance and a second paragraph, it sounds like you're asking "And then do what after your hospital jet flies you home, quit your job and find better insurance?"

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:40:09 +0000

The article explains why; regulators sometimes can't foresee that their decision to consider something fee for service will eventually prevent it from being considered as a communal expense.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why American ambulance rides are so expensive"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 23:36:19 +0000

"Medicare pays too little" is based on the "fee for service" model; it only makes sense if you believe the group of people who actually use the ambulance should pay its full cost.

The options model matters: if you model an ambulance ride as a roulette wheel, you only expect to pay if you get very unlucky. If you model it as an option, you expect to pay even if you never use it. The former doesn't imply "everyone else should have to pay for my bad luck"; the latter does. It's effective persuasion.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:21:27 +0000

Yes, I disagree with Pangram on this. It's a very familiar style, so familiar that things that might look like LLM-isms in another context actually give a smooth feeling of fitting the style exactly.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 20:08:08 +0000

If the problem was as simple as a few individuals and had no benefits it would not persist -- this is a Hollywood view of the world that won't help you understand your opposition.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:07:55 +0000

It would be better to make the Constitution unamendable than to let people like you get their hands on it. People are just not smart enough to foresee the consequences of their choices, so it's better to stick with choices that at least worked once.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Exercise intensity influences body composition in healthy older adults (2025)"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:03:20 +0000

My experience is that every movement pattern causes "injuries" like a sore tendon, wrenched back, inflamed shoulder that surface with every 20 pounds of added weight until I figure out what about my form is incorrect. Usually not something a trainer would see like "don't flare your elbows", internal stuff like "use your glute medius to help push" or "elbows in line with the torso on squats" that might be in 1 of 20 YouTube videos.

I use the weight training to surface the injuries to make me aware of what I'm doing wrong in daily movements. I might finally be past this and able to just go in and push weights but it's taken years. I feel like it's down to the body I'm living in and what I consider a pain threshold, not any risk taking or lack of information.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:30:55 +0000

That page says that eight years after the supposed lawsuit "Batt admitted that the alleged legal dispute had been a publicity stunt and that he had actually only made a donation of £1,000 to the John Cage Foundation."[1] I guess that he plagiarized it is sure even if the copyright claim was not litigated.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995

New comment by Noumenon72 in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:46:01 +0000

Yup. I was disappointed that Quake was a graphics downgrade from Doom and went back to playing Doom wads.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Eyewitness at the Triangle (1911)"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 05:15:18 +0000

Direct link to the oral histories: https://trianglefire.ilr.cornell.edu/primary/survivorIntervi...

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Stealing Is a Skill"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 15:20:40 +0000

ChatGPT guesses "heroicize".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "How to earn a billion dollars"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 23:58:46 +0000

For the same reason Stephen King wouldn't write another book if it meant that he stopped receiving royalties from _The Shining_ as soon as he started another one. He would earn money from the work he put into the new book, but he would only break even or do worse. And he wouldn't be able to use the proceeds from his first book to take risks like quitting his day job to write more books.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:27:57 +0000

I wonder if the ideological censorship described in your link is part of why Noam decided to leave.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 22:23:47 +0000

Wow, he was using AI to solve problems in 2000 already, that spell corrector being trained on the Web and becoming the first widely used AI tool. Decades ahead.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The Competitive Moat That AI Can't Replicate"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 23:28:43 +0000

Yes, but "AI generated about a true story" is different from "AI generated and completely false". Putting business ideas in people's heads that have never worked actually harms them, worse than just wasting their time.