Hacker News: bryanlarsen

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 17:14:54 +0000

The true workaholics are a small minority, though. Office workers who do this are part of the small minority. OTOH, it's a regular occurrence for those who work remote: not because they're workaholics, but because they're putting in their eight.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:57:34 +0000

And also likely the highest concentration of workers working after 9PM or before 6AM.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:07:27 +0000

My Dad stopped smoking for 20 years and then died from long cancer.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 05:42:55 +0000

4x the rate is "almost the same"???

https://www.verywellhealth.com/risk-of-lung-cancer-in-former...

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Sticky wage norms and the real wage cost of unexpected inflation"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 04:41:12 +0000

UBI has to be significantly lower than the average taxes paid. If it isn't the books don't balance and eventually inflation kicks in hard and eventually it reaches that equilibrium. If nobody works then taxes are $0 and UBI is $0.

So if you do the math using fairly roughly you'll find that the US can support a UBI of about $1500/month without significant inflationary pressure. That'll pay your rent (if you're sharing an apartment) and cover groceries (if you mostly live on rice and beans). If you want a car, vacations or the latest iPhone you have to work. So most would work and build those cars et al.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 02:47:51 +0000

Smokers don't magically undo the damage they did to their lungs after they stop smoking. Stunned might be hyperbole, but it is at least a little bit surprising.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "What Happens If OpenAI Dies?"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 01:01:17 +0000

That was the main thesis of his earlier writing. He has since acknowledged that AI is useful in a few use cases so has switched to concentrating on the much more plausible economic thesis.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "How a giant battery is transforming a town centre in Cannington, Ontario"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:32:41 +0000

Ontario has a lot of nuclear power, thus a lot of underused power at night. One of the available rate plans provides power at 2.9 cents/kWh at night, making this sort of rate shifting feasible.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "2,500-year-old sculpture discovered at UNESCO site in Turkey"

bryanlarsen — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 22:16:09 +0000

Boudica comes to mind, I'm sure there are other notables.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'"

bryanlarsen — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:17:26 +0000

Without pressure from Firefox Chrome would have removed the hooks extensions need for effective ad blocking a long time ago.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Thanks to social media, canned sardines are a scarcity on the supermarket shelf"

bryanlarsen — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:09 +0000

We actually do have a relatively reasonable way to pass a mostly global carbon tax; Nordhaus won a Nobel Memorial Prize for this plan: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.15000001

AFAICT Germany actually came fairly close to assembling a club but failed because they wanted a club that would include the US but excluded China but couldn't find a reasonable mechanism to include the US. We should try again -- most countries would have no qualms about assembling a club that would exclude the US.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Grok 4.6"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:02:31 +0000

The Chinese do care what the Chinese government does, and are interested in minimizing what the government knows about them, and are well aware of the internet firewall the government operates and that any Chinese company will give the Chinese government whatever they ask for.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:06:10 +0000

Then it'd be a one-time carbon removal, not a continuous carbon removal like is required.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "5th Heat Dome Expands Across Europe: 40°C+ Target Western and Central Europe"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:12:01 +0000

Trees are carbon neutral. They turn carbon into wood while they're growing and then release that carbon when they rot or burn or are eaten. Only a very small number of trees escape one of those fates.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Grok 4.6"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:37:30 +0000

If I was Chinese, I'd probably trust Grok more than a local AI company. Americans would probably trust the Chinese companies more.

It's less about "who is more trustworthy", it's more about "who is more willing and able to affect me".

New comment by bryanlarsen in "More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:59:09 +0000

Yes. There are many people who define "over the hill" as something like "I have to work harder now to improve my fitness than I used to have to".

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:58:16 +0000

Plowing pasture-land to grow soybeans is likely to reduce bio-diversity even more than running cattle on that land. A lot of pasture land is marginal land where a plow is very destructive, and is often a lot closer to the pre-human ecology where the land was grazed by large mammals.

Your primary point still stands -- eating tofu likely has a lower ecological impact than eating beef, but the trade-off isn't obvious, and second order effects can be significant.

If you stop grazing cattle on land, the owner of that land is going to find another use for the land to profit from it. Some of those uses are going to be better for bio-diversity, some are going to be worse. It's highly unlikely to become parkland.

So will going vegan reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase bio-diversity? Probably, but not certainly. This uncertainty shouldn't dissuade people from acting on "probably" though.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "You can't buy 20 pieces of aluminum tube online"

bryanlarsen — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:50:33 +0000

I'm surprised it's not like buying wood. You buy standard lengths and they're happy to cut it for you. They'll keep the off-cuts if you don't want them but you've paid for them so you might as well haul them home.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "More than 10 firms pay up to $100k a month for access to Truth Social posts"

bryanlarsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 22:14:03 +0000

I didn't say the best times in the US were 50-60 years ago.

I said that historians would consider the start of the decline was 1969 or 1973 or similar.

Declines start in the second derivative -- progress is positive, but the rate of progress increases is decreasing. It takes a long time with a negative second derivative to make the first derivative negative, but the decline started when the second derivative turned negative. And the second derivative made an obvious turn around 1970.

And it's also measured relatively. It 1969 it was obviously way better to be an American than a European or a Korean or Japanese. Even than a Russian, although it wasn't as obvious at the time. In 2026 I'd rather be born in Europe than the US if I don't get to choose to be born to rich white parents.

New comment by bryanlarsen in "Nvidia's Risky Business"

bryanlarsen — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:31:01 +0000

Very few consumers are going to spend multiple thousands of dollars to save $10 per month. Companies absolutely will to save hundreds per month per employee, but that's not consumer hardware.