Hacker News: ctchocula

New comment by ctchocula in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

ctchocula — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 07:56:57 +0000

Thanks!

One follow-up: Any recommended go servers to play on? OGS, Fox, Pandanet?

New comment by ctchocula in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

ctchocula — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 03:43:28 +0000

Given all the interest in sudden interest in go in this thread, anyone have a sure-fire method to improve at go from double-digit kyu to single-digit kyu and amateur dan level?

New comment by ctchocula in "Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things"

ctchocula — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:28:16 +0000

Certitude can be framed a bit more positively.

For example, someone on HN said they work out every day, not because they think it will make them super buff, but because they consider it a virtuous thing to do. If they miss a day, they will forgive themselves and try their best to pick it up the next day. They consider doing this virtuous act to be the end in and of itself, while treating any health benefits as a bonus.

I quite like this mental model for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe it's the similarity to virtue ethics, which was always for elites and I have an elitist streak.

New comment by ctchocula in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

ctchocula — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 07:33:14 +0000

That article's TL;DR is bad theories "external invasion" and "volcanoes", and sets against it the current historian consensus: "climate" and "internal instability".

That sounds a lot like what Wilson is implying.

New comment by ctchocula in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

ctchocula — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:07:50 +0000

[1] is a nice intro into what the current scientific consensus in what caused the Bronze Age collapse is, written by historian Bret Devereaux. The view he paints pretty much aligns with what Wilson wrote about there being no such thing as the "sea people".

[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...

New comment by ctchocula in "How to read more books"

ctchocula — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 06:23:41 +0000

A fascinating read. Thank you for sharing!

New comment by ctchocula in "Chess invariants"

ctchocula — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:27:19 +0000

> Let's start from the other end. Just a pawn and two kings. It's possible to describe some quite succinct rules for when that's a draw versus a win for the side with the pawn. Agreed? Club players know these by heart. You could write that doen as invariants. As long as the side with the pawn stays inside the "green zone" of the state space, there is nothing the other side can do to void mate.

The flaw in this line of reasoning is that it's easy to come up with a theorem that works for KP vs K. However as the number of pieces increases, it becomes impossible to distill all the branches of possible moves into a simple theorem like that. If what you said were possible, endgame would be a simple flowchart, but look at how much time even GM players use in endgame and how often mistakes are made, and you'll recognize Chess endgame is not distillable into a simple flowchart when there are even as few as 7 pieces on the board.

Given the above, the only option is enumeration, if you want to prove that in all cases the outcome is White win or draw.

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?