Hacker News: a_cardboard_box

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "US and Iran agree to provisional ceasefire"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 16:12:37 +0000

Insider trading. People surrounding Trump like when he does crazy stuff that shifts markets, so they influence him to do so. And Trump is really easy to influence.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"

a_cardboard_box — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 15:06:31 +0000

The paper doesn't even use it consistently. At first it uses "all-cause mortality" to mean "all causes except COVID", and then in the results section it uses the same phrase to mean "all causes including COVID". The whole purpose of terms of art is to increase the specificity of language, but they're not doing that here. Their usage of the term is confusing.

Edit: I'm wrong. I could have sworn it said that the groups had similar all-cause mortality, but it doesn't.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Covid-19 mRNA Vaccination and 4-Year All-Cause Mortality"

a_cardboard_box — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:14:40 +0000

Yes, but they incorrectly called it all-cause mortality under Findings. "Mortality" on it's own would be fine. "Mortality from other causes" would be better.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "The New AI Consciousness Paper"

a_cardboard_box — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 14:39:33 +0000

According to your view, the text you have written has nothing to do with consciousness.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "I made a 10¢ MCU Talk"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 21:17:41 +0000

The NES DPCM runs at up to 33kHz, so it actually has double the bitrate of the 2-bit 8kHz encoding used in the article. If you run it at 16kHz to match the bitrate, it will sound much worse.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';"

a_cardboard_box — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:20:28 +0000

The post doesn't blame individual Americans. There is no irony.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Why do some gamers invert their controls?"

a_cardboard_box — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 01:16:22 +0000

The stick is the player character's head. Pull back their head and they look up.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs"

a_cardboard_box — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 17:53:26 +0000

You seem to misunderstand the proposal. The proposal is that after they have done everything that is already legally required (advertise an open position for some amount of time etc), then they must amend the posting to include that the position is filled by an internal/external/H-1B hire. There is still a period of time when the position is advertised as open.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately"

a_cardboard_box — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 00:01:31 +0000

Because I have plenty of opportunities that don't involve dancing for a micromanaging sociopath.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "The Math Is Haunted"

a_cardboard_box — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 14:34:16 +0000

It's possible you could at least mitigate the problem by checking that what you've proven isn't trivial. If you slightly change a mathematical statement, it frequently becomes either trivially true or trivially false. So if you accidentally proved the wrong thing, there's a good chance that your proof can be shortened to a point that it becomes obviously wrong. For example, if you accidentally put "there exists" instead of "for all" in Fermat's last theorem, the proof is 1^3 + 1^3 != 1^3. That is obviously too short to prove FLT - it would have fit in Fermat's margin.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns"

a_cardboard_box — Mon, 23 Jun 2025 02:46:34 +0000

> As humans can be reduced to physics, and physics can be expressed as a computer program

This is an assumption that many physicists disagree with. Roger Penrose, for example.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018)"

a_cardboard_box — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 19:19:52 +0000

"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "100 years of Zermelo's axiom of choice: What was the problem with it? (2006)"

a_cardboard_box — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 17:14:31 +0000

> Note that it's not necessarily simple to pick an element from a set. For instance, how would one pick an element from the set of uncomputable numbers?

In ZF without choice, you can pick an element from any non-empty set, so it actually is simple to pick an element from a set. Choice is only needed when you have an infinite number of sets to pick elements from.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data"

a_cardboard_box — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 15:52:25 +0000

> All of these produce valid video output and show dynamic or structured data.

While they will usually produce video on old CRTs, the video signal they generate is technically not valid. The VSync signal needs to be generated in software, and random programs are unlikely to do so correctly. Different TVs will behave differently (usually rolling on old TVs, blank on new TVs), and probably none would look like what the emulator is showing.

I tried running the game-like ROM in Stella and couldn't get it to work. It seems to depend on the startup state, which means it likely wouldn't run on an actual console.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Machine Code Isn't Scary"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 16:17:03 +0000

> I once, for a side gig, had to write a 16-bit long-division routine on a processor with only one 8-bit accumulator. That was the point at which I declared that I'd never write another assembly program.

This is exactly the kind of job I'd enjoy! A perfectly doable technical challenge with clear requirements. Some people like solving Sudoku puzzles, I like solving programming puzzles.

I guess I'm just not "the overwhelming majority of programmers".

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Accidentally Turing-Complete"

a_cardboard_box — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 13:25:52 +0000

Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic"

a_cardboard_box — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 21:00:42 +0000

Awesome [hunted [___ crackers are ironically vegan]]! I found the d[[not amateur, abbreviated]gramming construct preceding "else"]ficulty just [___ to remain [___ but deadly]].

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Airline demand between Canada and United States collapses, down 70%+"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:36:30 +0000

They could allow you to enter and then detain you when you land in the US.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "Regularly eating eggs supports a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 19:10:33 +0000

> Background/Objectives: Egg consumption in adults has been linked with a modestly increased risk of all-cause and CVD mortality. However, evidence on adults aged 65 y+ is limited.

So, according to the authors of the study, it has already been established that egg consumption in adults is linked with increased mortality, but they wanted to see if this is still true for those 65 years and older.

The study found lower mortality in those who reported eating eggs weekly compared to those who ate eggs never or infrequently. It did not establish causality. So it could be that eggs improve the health of the elderly, or it could be that healthy elderly people are more able to cook for themselves, and people who cook for themselves are more likely to eat eggs. The study does not distinguish between these possibilities.

New comment by a_cardboard_box in "US Travel Assoc Warns of Tourism Disaster as Canadians Cancel Trips"

a_cardboard_box — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 03:09:29 +0000

As a Canadian I've never seen us so united on anything political. Canadians are extremely proud of how slightly-not-American we are. It's our defining cultural identity. Telling us we should become the 51st state, threatening a trade war, and being impolite about it? Oh you betcha we're mad.