Hacker News: boelboel

New comment by boelboel in "Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash"

boelboel — Sat, 07 Nov 2026 20:08:51 +0000

It's actually insane, I can't find anything with more than 5 views for some terms (as in it only shows videos with no views when searching topics which i know are popular). I mostly assume that their management is so awful that different departments somehow make things completely unusable every now and then.

New comment by boelboel in "US voters roundly reject data centers in ballot measures"

boelboel — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 15:21:32 +0000

We had a cake/chocolate factory near my town growing up, on some windy days it smelled really nice.

New comment by boelboel in "US voters roundly reject data centers in ballot measures"

boelboel — Wed, 04 Nov 2026 14:50:55 +0000

Unless you're really ideology driven there's very few things that can be built around your neighbourhood (especially in a suburb) that will make it more valuable or pleasant to live. NIMBY is just not wanting to lose things.

New comment by boelboel in "Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era"

boelboel — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 12:03:48 +0000

Besides for the extra-ordinary performers I think at some point flipping a coin might be better for this sort of problem, and there's some precedent. It actually be more fair than trying to find differences in the sub-top, actually more often than not introducing bias, when there's a lot of competition. Just put the top 3, top 10% or top 20% of those who fulfil a set of requirements in a raffle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_by_lottery

New comment by boelboel in "Egoless Mathematics in the AI Era"

boelboel — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 10:25:47 +0000

If you're in a field with fierce competition the ones who focus on credit/recognition/awards get some sort of boost above their actual potential. Meanwhile those who don't will get punished, the ones who end up doing well despite it likely just had better aptitude (or something else advantageous) on top of having more pleasant characteristics. It's some sort of Berkson's paradox.

New comment by boelboel in "Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament"

boelboel — Sat, 31 Oct 2026 12:19:42 +0000

Not exactly academics but as they were mentioned somewhere in this thread, physicians follow this same sort of path. It's actually a lot less uncertain than academia, it's almost impossible to screw up if you're a mediocre but somewhat bright "good" student. There were people I met in medical school who basically never had to take decisions in their life (which is sort of crazy as they take decisions about the lives of others).

New comment by boelboel in "SS United States to be sunk as largest artificial reef"

boelboel — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:07:50 +0000

It's actually not that expensive if you take an inside cabin, I remember seeing prices of about 900usd at some point, which isn't more than a plane ticket if you take into account the food/entertainment. Right now there's some crossing from the UK to New York starting at about 450 pounds, you have to call though.

New comment by boelboel in "Ask HN: What are your career plans in the age of AI?"

boelboel — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 19:31:51 +0000

Go back to medical school, I'm only very early in my career and in my home country you can restart medical school at any point in time (it's also extremely rare to do so).

New comment by boelboel in "AI promised less work. I've never worked more"

boelboel — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:12:30 +0000

It's like with the music industry, it got easier for anyone to make music/release music in theory. Meanwhile for the last 100 years there's mostly been more concentration/consolidation.

New comment by boelboel in "Root shell on Samsung TV"

boelboel — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 19:40:45 +0000

when TVs were this expensive you didn't have this technology. Furthermore you had less competition from e.g. Korea and China in the TV sector.

New comment by boelboel in "A 10-year-old CNN outperforms frontier LLMs for skin cancer diagnosis"

boelboel — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 19:16:41 +0000

"average human who's read a few books on the subject and is good at bullshitting" seems like a large portion of white collar workers that make bank.

New comment by boelboel in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

boelboel — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:50:46 +0000

Energy sources aren't perfect substitutes

New comment by boelboel in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

boelboel — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 11:47:49 +0000

It's not just a matter of population density, the sichuan basin and most the east coast is just doesn't get much sun/wind. If not for these 'resource provinces' they would've just gone full on coal.

New comment by boelboel in "The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable"

boelboel — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 10:42:08 +0000

The growth of energy use is mostly in countries that are industrializing/developing. Places like India/Indonesia/Vietnam/... are where most energy will be added and they'll all add coal.

New comment by boelboel in "Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark"

boelboel — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:52:54 +0000

The robot thing was also what japan bet on in the 90s

New comment by boelboel in "Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark"

boelboel — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:51:11 +0000

I don't think financial incentives will actually do that much, it's generally seen as something that works only marginally. People get more kids when they get stable/good jobs, have a support network, have a culture that incentivizes births.

South Korea is currently throwing money at the problem, upped parental leave even did some things to make it easier to retire if you got a lot of kids. I'm almost certain these things won't meaningfully change the situation (maybe go from 0.8 to 1.0) as all korean children are expected to get good jobs (white collar, certain professions) , they structure their society towards this and it's impossible to get a high birthrate like this.

I actually read about how something like presence of nuns in your town in italy was quite correlated with birthrates as it basically relieved all women but the nurses of some duties. In Korea you can see how the stability leads to a very significant effect on birthrates as Sejong is by far the highest birthrate region. Interesting since those really obsessed about birthrates also seem to hate the worker protections that make it difficult to fire people. I guess housing is another of those stability factors since renting really ups the risks of children.

New comment by boelboel in "Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark"

boelboel — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:37:50 +0000

I think for most millenials it's an excuse not really the actual reason they don't want/get kids (although i think there's a few actual believers).

New comment by boelboel in "Demographic "doomsday" misses the mark"

boelboel — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 13:25:30 +0000

Although I think there's a good chance that this will happen there's no reason to assume that we'll be better or at most slightly worse in the future just because that's all we've experienced in (recent) human history, it's a sort of survivorship bias.

New comment by boelboel in "AI lab offers free plumbing and HVAC repairs across three cities to train robots"

boelboel — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:27:27 +0000

Besides the AR glasses, this is roughly what already happens when PE rolls up a trade or clinic. One (licensed) expert oversees a bunch of less-qualified staff following a script. Just optimize the revenue and let schmucks pay expert prices.

New comment by boelboel in "AI companies are coming for the plumbers"

boelboel — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:21:12 +0000

It's like if you took some of the challenges of waymo and made them even worse. I imagine it'll take a similar amount of time to get there (although waymo still hasn't rolled out anywhere 'unpredictable' e.g. Naples, Istanbul, Mumbai).