Hacker News: Reasoning

New comment by Reasoning in "China is run by engineers. America is run by lawyers"

Reasoning — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 21:47:13 +0000

Yup, a lot of engineers here letting their egos be stroked. "Lawyers are bad people unlike me, a noble and rational engineer. If I controlled the government I would do things right, because I'm an engineer."

New comment by Reasoning in "The Chrome VRP Panel has decided to award $250k for this report"

Reasoning — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 08:46:20 +0000

Money laundering, give the money to a shell company and have them report it as income. Obviously not that simple but that's the basic explanation.

New comment by Reasoning in "A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union"

Reasoning — Sat, 09 Aug 2025 19:50:19 +0000

> Communism has no future so long as it's supporters refuse to understand that Marx's magnificent philosophical and political system rejects borgeous human rights.

Stalin couldn't have put it better himself.

New comment by Reasoning in "Moonbase Alpha: That time NASA made a meme video game"

Reasoning — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:15:07 +0000

Glad to know I was a fool for ever joining the military...

New comment by Reasoning in "Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge"

Reasoning — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 05:19:42 +0000

From contemporary ethnologists who used the term to refer to the proto-indo-europeans? Because the term aryan is common amongst the languages descended from the proto-indo-european language (Arya, Iran, Alans, Arios)?

Nazi philosophy grew out of 19th century ethnology which was heavily influenced by Darwinism. They believed the proto-indo-european ("Aryan") homeland was in northern Europe and that the spread of "Aryan" language was do to "Aryan" immigration to those regions and that in ancient times those regions were led by an "Aryan" "master race" who ruled over the "lesser races" do to their natural superior genes developed through generations of natural selection in the harsh northern climate.

To be clear, I believe that is all BS but I wrote all that to clarify that the Nazis didn't steal the term Aryan from the Hindu, it's a term used by the Indo-Iranians to self-designate which was erroneously misattributed to the proto-indo-europeans by early European ethnologists.

New comment by Reasoning in "Denmark's Archaeology Experiment Is Paying Off in Gold and Knowledge"

Reasoning — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 04:22:19 +0000

Did it have to be written? Who's the hypothetical person who is confused that a 1,500 year old gold disk is older than the Nazi era.

New comment by Reasoning in "Working on databases from prison"

Reasoning — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 22:08:22 +0000

Definitely a manipulative framing on his part. He originally was convicted for MDMA and marijuana, was released on probation and then was convicted for synthetic opioids. He's probably serving time right now for the marijuana for breaking his probation but he's not in prison now because of it.

New comment by Reasoning in "Working on databases from prison"

Reasoning — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 22:02:35 +0000

I'll add on, he mentions in his blog that he was making "tens of thousands of dollars a week" selling drugs. He was not a small time dealer and certainly wasn't just buying drugs for himself.

His current sentence also (15-30 years) isn't his first prison sentence. He was released and reoffended which absolutely contributed to the longer sentence.

New comment by Reasoning in "Working on databases from prison"

Reasoning — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 21:51:33 +0000

MDMA and weed was his initial sentence. He's in prison now for selling synthetic opioids.

New comment by Reasoning in "Working on databases from prison"

Reasoning — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 21:44:48 +0000

Are you concerned that if you make prison too expensive society might resort to capital punishment to reduce prison costs? Or we end up releasing prisoners who are legitimate dangers to society.

And to be clear, I'm opposed to capital punishment and dangerous conditions in prisons. I'm just pointing out that I don't think your argument is very good. If you think we as a society are willing to flippantly put people in prison because it's cheap I don't see how you can trust us to no resort to other flippant measures if the cost was high.

New comment by Reasoning in "Working on databases from prison"

Reasoning — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 21:37:01 +0000

If my employer payed for my housing and food I would not consider it unreasonable that my paycheck reflected that.

> Why are they paid

Because people have expenses other than food and lodging. Prisoners do to, some save money for after they leave prison others spend it at the commissary.

New comment by Reasoning in "Prohibition and ice cream in the US Navy"

Reasoning — Wed, 28 May 2025 20:03:46 +0000

> You see this in the data for smoking as well, as smoking decreases, you tend to see caloric intake and obesity rise at the population level.

Nicotine is an appetite suppressor so that relationship is probably pretty direct.

New comment by Reasoning in "I salvaged $6k of luxury items discarded by Duke students"

Reasoning — Tue, 27 May 2025 22:44:30 +0000

Can confirm it's common in the upper Midwest as well. My college apartment was furnished mostly with stuff we got from curbs. Never heard of the police taking issue with it.

New comment by Reasoning in "The Decline of Usability: Revisited (2023)"

Reasoning — Sat, 24 May 2025 19:22:28 +0000

Spotify just made the 'brilliant' decision to remove the "Add this song to the playlist" button. Now to add songs that Spotify itself recommends based on the playlist you're listening to you have to, right-click the name, select "Add to playlist", scroll to find the playlist you're currently listening to and select it. Before there was a single button to do this.

But at least I got more whitespace on my screen now...

New comment by Reasoning in "The Decline of Usability: Revisited (2023)"

Reasoning — Sat, 24 May 2025 19:14:10 +0000

I don't have a strong preference either way but the argument is the scrollbar isn't just for moving your position on the page but also for communicating to the user where they are on the page. If you hide it you're removing half it's functionality.

New comment by Reasoning in "Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)"

Reasoning — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 20:36:31 +0000

I'd also add to that:

- Neural Machine Translation

- English as the lingua franca

New comment by Reasoning in "Fake images that fooled the world"

Reasoning — Sun, 13 Apr 2025 19:25:03 +0000

"By the 1940s, the image without the groom had become the standard version, and it created the enduring visual signs of the strongman leader – when Nigel Farage makes a speech atop a tank, or Vladimir Putin displays his bare chest, both are drawing on iconography developed by the Italian fascist."

Ah yes, equestrian portraits, something famously invented by the fascists. Someone should dig up Jacques-Louis so we can tell him he's a fascist now.

New comment by Reasoning in "We're Still Not Done with Jesus"

Reasoning — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:35:26 +0000

> Countries with strong secular foundations regularly top global indexes of well-being, prosperity, and social progress.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...

Only 1 of the top 5 countries in this list have neither blasphemy laws or a state church. 2 of them have both.

New comment by Reasoning in "We're Still Not Done with Jesus"

Reasoning — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:24:59 +0000

The Church of Norway became independent of the State in 2017. The Church of Sweden in 2000.

New comment by Reasoning in "We're Still Not Done with Jesus"

Reasoning — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 23:28:16 +0000

> I can’t wait till we talk about Jesus and God in the same way we talk about Hades and Zeus.

> When societies cling too tightly to the faith traditions they’ve inherited—by accident of birth—they often impede critical thinking, open inquiry, and evidence-based governance.

It's pretty clear he's talking about atheism.

And a secular state is definitionally a state without a state religion. Sweden and Norway both had state churches until very recently. A closely related country, Denmark, still has an official state church.

You can also look to Belarus, a secular state with a high rate of non-religiosity.