Hacker News: chengiz

New comment by chengiz in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

chengiz — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:37:48 +0000

It is unclear what leaving the city quickly has to do scaling or resources per capita. You seem to value this; most big city dwellers do not.

New comment by chengiz in "Hannah Cairo: 17-year-old teen refutes a math conjecture proposed 40 years ago"

chengiz — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 20:18:06 +0000

> The conjecture was widely believed to be true — if so, it would have automatically validated several other important results in the field — but the community greeted the new development with both enthusiasm and surprise: the author was a 17-year-old who hadn’t yet finished high school.

This article is quite poorly written. Case in point above. If the conjecture was believed to be true, refuting it would be news in itself, deserve more than half a sentence, and have nothing to do with the age of the refuter. It should have been simple to add a line about the "other important results" and not violate show not tell. AlsO I fail to see the relevance of mentioning the Spanish academy? The researcher is from Bahamas/USA, it's just the writer is from Spain?

New comment by chengiz in "Nuclear fusion: it's time for a reality check"

chengiz — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:58:10 +0000

It's more to the point that disruptions tend to be very disruptive, too frequent, not well understood, and the reset takes a really long time. But you're right that this does not quite belong. If we solve the technological problems, the maintenance should resolve itself.

New comment by chengiz in "The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job"

chengiz — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 11:38:39 +0000

He cannot name and shame them because this did not really happen.

New comment by chengiz in "Nokia's internal presentation after iPhone was launched (2007) [pdf]"

chengiz — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:34:15 +0000

Their Lumia with the Windows OS was great too. Unfortunately no market => no apps => death. But I loved it when I had it. They made great phones no doubt.

New comment by chengiz in "Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024)"

chengiz — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:58:25 +0000

Too many. I still write /bin/sh syntax (I know it's a symlink to bash now but I mean the old school sh). Anything that requires bash-that-isnt-sh is usually better written in perl or something else.

New comment by chengiz in "China is the manufacturing superpower"

chengiz — Sat, 04 Jan 2025 16:36:49 +0000

The oil industry is not larger. I believe oil and gas is not even a separately measured category so the numbers you're getting are probably including many sectors across the board and are quoted by some vested interest like the American Petroleum Institute.

New comment by chengiz in "India's food shortage filled American libraries"

chengiz — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 15:28:05 +0000

You're right about the respect part, but it does in fact compute. We (I'm Indian) treat books with respect, but we have no preservation ethic beyond treating them with respect. An old book is in our home until it disintegrates or termites get it. But beyond that, shrug. Humidity control etc, what's that. This is of course partly because India is a poor country, and partly because of corrupt government, but it's also because of the fatalism - we simply do not care about the past as is the norm in the West. You know how even a tinpot town's history is available in the local library in the US? Beyond rarefied academia and the odd hobbyist, India just does not have that culture.

New comment by chengiz in "Lua is so underrated"

chengiz — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:55:59 +0000

It absolutely is. For a language whose biggest selling factor is embeddability with C/C++, that decision (and I'm being polite) is a headscratcher (along with the other similar source of errors: 0 evaluating to true).

New comment by chengiz in "Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT"

chengiz — Thu, 21 Nov 2024 14:05:18 +0000

You mean there's no sliding scale here as in tax brackets? Citation please?

New comment by chengiz in "The Japanese word ikigai refers to a passion that gives joy to life (2022)"

chengiz — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 16:57:11 +0000

Same. But I don't conflate Koolaid with arithmetic.

New comment by chengiz in "The Japanese word ikigai refers to a passion that gives joy to life (2022)"

chengiz — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 23:11:49 +0000

Not entirely. But I do know the meaning of vested in vested interests.

New comment by chengiz in "The Japanese word ikigai refers to a passion that gives joy to life (2022)"

chengiz — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 17:16:48 +0000

Blue zones demographers from https://bluezones.com rebut research against blue zones? Color me convinced!

New comment by chengiz in "Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life"

chengiz — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 16:08:06 +0000

"Recently been shown" by the paper I linked to.

New comment by chengiz in "The Japanese word ikigai refers to a passion that gives joy to life (2022)"

chengiz — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 14:25:00 +0000

Do you know why people in Okinawa and Sardinia have great longevity? Is it Ikigai, or living simple village life, or eating maggot infested cheese? No, it's because of lack of record keeping, specifically families keeping people "alive" to collect pensions:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3

New comment by chengiz in "Cruise ships chopped in half are a license to print money"

chengiz — Sun, 08 Sep 2024 13:18:33 +0000

A lot of responses from people who have never taken a cruise, how typical. There is a lot of nickel and diming but floor plans and room views tend to be shown when you're buying. Even the interior windowless rooms are extremely well designed for space. The lack of windows does not really matter (for budget conscious travellers) since you're going to be only in there for sleeping and using the bathroom. Of course, no room is close to an engine.

New comment by chengiz in "Twitter kills its San Francisco headquarters, will relocate to South Bay"

chengiz — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 17:15:24 +0000

I think you must live in a city. Literally everyone in your 1000 people rural area would be affected by 10 shootings.

New comment by chengiz in "Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder"

chengiz — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 00:09:53 +0000

What? The redesign is way simpler than the original website.

New comment by chengiz in "23% of bachelor's degrees and 43% of master's degrees have a negative ROI"

chengiz — Sun, 12 May 2024 15:48:42 +0000

Irrelevant. The article is about ROI, not about happiness. Income isn't the only measure of, I don't know, longevity, calorie intake, hair color, number of children, etc., either, but we're not talking of any of those things.

New comment by chengiz in "Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm"

chengiz — Sun, 17 Mar 2024 14:38:45 +0000

You must be in some good writers' microcosm. A lot of human technical writers really write like that.