Hacker News: ctchocula

New comment by ctchocula in "SpaceX files to go public"

ctchocula — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 09:39:30 +0000

Tesla IPO'd at 1.7B and is worth 1.4T today. Giving you the benefit of doubt since it would be closer to a 1000x gain rather than the 100x gain that you didn't buy right at IPO, I will point out that there's a world's difference buying in at 1.7B, because there's still room for the stock to 1000x, but there's not much gain to be had buying in at 1.7T valuation.

Even the most highly company in the world Nvidia is less than 3x that valuation, so it's not a good comparison with Tesla's IPO.

New comment by ctchocula in "Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica"

ctchocula — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 10:32:06 +0000

That article also has its own rebuttal on statistical grounds. See https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-absolutely-do-know-that-...

New comment by ctchocula in "I'm Being Prosecuted for the Opposite of Insider Trading"

ctchocula — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:42:09 +0000

Direct indexing will soon be able to provide that functionality of giving you S&P 500 stocks minus A, B and C companies you don't want to hold. However, cheap and reliable direct indexing brokerages aren't out there yet. Hopefully more competitors show up and help lower the prices for everyone.

New comment by ctchocula in "Drawbot: Let's hack something cute (2025)"

ctchocula — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 05:38:00 +0000

This reminded me of those booths they have at company holiday parties where they take a photo of you, convert it to a line drawing and have the robot draw it out for you to keep. Very cool hack!

New comment by ctchocula in "Scott Adams has died"

ctchocula — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 04:37:30 +0000

I had this same feeling. Same with reading a biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Before reading it, I thought of them in idealistic ways. They had multiple affairs and weren't such great people, even though they both wrote really, really well.

New comment by ctchocula in "BYD Sells 4.6M Vehicles in 2025, Meets Revised Sales Goal"

ctchocula — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:49:56 +0000

https://panamapapers.org/case-study-china

New comment by ctchocula in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

ctchocula — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 10:30:00 +0000

Thanks for the info! I don't have a Zhihu account to check myself, but I believe you.

I think it would be helpful to dispel any confusion if you added somewhere on the Substack post (e.g. at the bottom) the above message you are the author of the Zhihu post.

New comment by ctchocula in "Growing up in “404 Not Found”: China's nuclear city in the Gobi Desert"

ctchocula — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 06:46:09 +0000

+1 The long gap between 2016 when the original article was written in Chinese and 2025, the fact that the Substack article does not cite the original Zhihu article (until someone other than OP linked it in this thread), not linking previously English translations of this article, and the financial incentive of the LLM-translated article being on Substack make OP's claim of authorship of the Chinese article very sus.

New comment by ctchocula in "McDonald's is losing its low-income customers"

ctchocula — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:00:52 +0000

You can't finish your comment without sharing some of your favourite recipes =P

New comment by ctchocula in "U.S. added 911k fewer jobs in year through March than reported earlier"

ctchocula — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 02:23:26 +0000

Bogleheads [1] gives better financial advice than HN. Every time I peruse some threads there, I learn something new about personal finance I didn't know about.

[1] www.bogleheads.org/forum

New comment by ctchocula in "Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)"

ctchocula — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 01:52:30 +0000

My read of "pre-2016 playbook" was referring to someone using a traditional campaign like Hillary (rather than Trump using his pre-2016 strategy), and that they were saying Trump changed the entire game in 2016 so that shameless strategies would be the winning strategy going forward. So I don't see a contradiction.

New comment by ctchocula in "Project Hyperion: Interstellar ship design competition"

ctchocula — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:21:27 +0000

>During mitosis and meiosis, microtubules depend on a stable magnetic field to orient the mitotic spindle and ensure accurate chromosome segregation — processes critical for embryonic growth. A spacecraft lacking any magnetic field would halt human reproduction, dooming both the mission and the survival of the colony.

That seems wrong to me. The last time I calculated it out, the Earth's magnetic field isn't that strong, and for someone on earth's surface is dwarfed even by high voltage power lines. This is due to the Earth magnetic field radiating out from the iron core which is much farther away at the surface compared to the power lines, and declining by the square root law.

New comment by ctchocula in "The Art of Fugue – Contrapunctus I (2021)"

ctchocula — Wed, 28 May 2025 02:47:35 +0000

"It's very hard to perceive counterpoint, and there is a limit to how much we can perceive at once. 2 voices is hard and takes practice, 3 voices is even harder, but you can have these flashes where you hear clearly voices playing off one another and its like getting a glimpse into the divine."

I've always wanted to learn how to listen to counterpoint. Anyone have good tips on how to appreciate it and know what it means to perceive counterpoint?

New comment by ctchocula in "What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)"

ctchocula — Mon, 19 May 2025 07:47:15 +0000

What you're talking about sounds a lot like the post-scarcity world that Gene Roddenberry envisioned in the Star Trek universe, where everyone has enough to live on, so social status is attained by prestige and doing admirable things (i.e. working for Starfleet). However, there's a lot of work to be done getting from here to there.

New comment by ctchocula in "4chan Sharty Hack And Janitor Email Leak"

ctchocula — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 05:19:19 +0000

Essentially the plot of "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut. An American spy sent to Germany before WW2 who works there as a radio host, but who ends up spreading even more anti-semitic messaging than Nazi members themselves. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

New comment by ctchocula in "Americans die earlier at all wealth levels, even if wealth buys more years"

ctchocula — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 05:54:57 +0000

This is good info. Thanks for sharing!

New comment by ctchocula in "Tencent's 'Hunyuan-T1'–The First Mamba-Powered Ultra-Large Model"

ctchocula — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 19:45:17 +0000

You do need one now if you are not a chinese national. See https://www.tibettourism.com/tibet-travel-permit.html

New comment by ctchocula in "[dead]"

ctchocula — Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:37:58 +0000

As this gets more and more serious, the "Kompromat Hypothesis" starting to look like the only remaining explanation.

New comment by ctchocula in "Basketball has evolved into a game of calculated decision-making"

ctchocula — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 04:17:20 +0000

> (1) intentional fouling to get an advantage. It’s the only major sport where fouling can often work to your advantage.

nitpick: This happens in soccer as well. Oftentimes it's late in the game and you see the opponent has a counterattack that has a high probability of scoring. In that case, it's better for you to tactically foul them by taking them down before they reach your box and take the yellow card.

New comment by ctchocula in "Arsenal FC AI Research Engineer job posting"

ctchocula — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 11:16:18 +0000

There's a pattern of referees giving unreasonable red cards to Arsenal, and those same referees getting lavish trips to the Dubai, which is where the owners of our title race rivals for 2 previous seasons are located.

It's a similar conflict of interest, if not outright corruption as Justice Clarence Thomas getting free all expenses paid fishing trips and other goodies from a billionaire who wants to influence Supreme Court decisions.