Hacker News: Noumenon72

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Show HN: Pardonned.com – A searchable database of US Pardons"

Noumenon72 — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 15:31:50 +0000

That link is entirely about the East Wing ballroom expansion. I don't see any criticism of anyone there.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Git commands I run before reading any code"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:01:23 +0000

You can't use the remote reflog to revert what you force pushed, can you? But I agree that having your local reflog means you're never totally lost. I still just make a branch before major edits so I can go back.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 02:01:54 +0000

The wikipedia for "Recorded history"[1] draws the distinction this way:

- Before writing: prehistory

- After writing: recorded history

- Both together: human history[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorded_history

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:11:50 +0000

I'm confused by what you're saying. Can you help me reconcile your first post

> It feels to me like the unstated conclusion is recovered memory can’t be trusted, which is a popular understanding but a very wrong one put out by the now defunct and discredited False Memory Syndrome Foundation.

with

> Recovered memory therapy was a discredited hypnotherapy

I read your first post as standing up for recovered memory therapy and I can't find how the discussion of dissociation makes a difference. Does Fontain have it right that by "recovered memory" you mean "things people happened to remember on their own"?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "My Experience as a Rice Farmer"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:37:38 +0000

I think specifying "recorded history" would remove the confusion. Human history could refer to the history of anatomically modern humans, including before farming.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:24:07 +0000

"The cure for cancer" as a phrase doesn't include those solutions. If the headline was "Pope discovers the cure for cancer" and those were his solutions you would say "No he didn't." OP was referring to AI discovering the cure for cancer that cancer research is working towards.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:18:55 +0000

When things reach a certain level of popularity they constitute "mental real estate". Your audience has heard of Groundhog Day, so there is an opening for a movie with that title to make money -- your film will start out already having name recognition and some understanding of what the movie is about.

Thus it is a writer's job not to make references they find appealing to reveal their good taste, but to know what references their audience will find appealing and use them to help communicate concepts. If this bothers you it's because they're insulting you by saying you might be part of the audience that watches Marvel, and you had hoped reading the New Yorker would signal that you aren't.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

Noumenon72 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:58:06 +0000

I think you're describing all the ways that your social class is written all over everything. You could leverage your paycheck to try to change some of this, but your social class influences your decision not to bother.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Employers use your personal data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept"

Noumenon72 — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 12:55:00 +0000

Presumably this also means if you don't get a raise, they don't raise your rent as much, knowing it would make you more likely to move. They no longer have to guess about your ability to pay.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The underrated benefits of always having oatmeal at lunch"

Noumenon72 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:30:43 +0000

I add a little bit of protein and fat with a tablespoon or two of crunchy peanut butter and a handful of walnuts. Then banana or raisins for flavor.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "StackOverflow: Retiring the Beta Site"

Noumenon72 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:49:54 +0000

I don't care about the visuals of Reddit, but copying the design of "this is a site for commenting, answers are just top-level comments with no distinction" seemed like they did not see the difference between Stack Overflow and a subreddit.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "What if the browser built the UI for you?"

Noumenon72 — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 13:52:04 +0000

What your intro gif describes is "I can ask the chat to build a todo list" (not too novel, and I don't believe it would happen that fast). I feel like what you're actually trying to describe is "I can ask the chat to build a Kanban view of my todo list and the Abject, not the chat, takes over and asks the todo list for its data." You need little popups showing the messages going back and forth. If I've understood your idea at all, which is pretty difficult.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Oracle files H-1B visa petitions amid mass layoffs"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 21:43:49 +0000

Your [3] shows that the government enforces paying H1-Bs competitive salaries, not that it cares about the Americans they replaced.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Cursor 3"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:54:20 +0000

The instructions for say, https://cursor.com/docs/configuration/worktrees are for the 3.0 version now, and the version 2 docs lack images in Wayback Machine. Is there a way to see the old docs if you haven't upgraded?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Car Seats as Contraception"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:33:19 +0000

This policy only reduces the birthrates of wealthy people who follow laws, so it's self-defeating, in that the future generations of poor people who don't care about laws also won't care about reducing their ecological impact.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Car Seats as Contraception"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:26:16 +0000

I know people doing this in Prince William County, Cheyenne, and Minnesota college towns. It just takes ordinary frugality, no deprivation that I can see.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Why the US Navy won't blast the Iranians and 'open' Strait of Hormuz"

Noumenon72 — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 12:15:56 +0000

Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and now all their enemies are gone (disarmed and Armenians expelled) which presumably makes their citizens better off once they move into the empty territory.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Founder of GitLab battles cancer by founding companies"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 18:16:05 +0000

That's not a "but". Because he developed wealth and access, this is possible for one person when before it wasn't possible for anyone. This is how societies developed everything from refined sugar to rockets, as they passed various thresholds where individuals could afford to try things out.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "End of "Chat Control": EU parliament stops mass surveillance"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 13:29:45 +0000

Site guidelines: "Please don't fulminate."

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

Noumenon72 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:38:24 +0000

> allows engineers to start closer to the state of the art

This reminds me of the Slate Star Codex story "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis"[1], where it took almost an entire lifespan just to learn what the earlier alchemists had found, so only the last few hours of an alchemist's life were actually valuable. Now we can all skip ahead.

1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/