Hacker News: davidgay

New comment by davidgay in "What will our economic future look like?"

davidgay — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:18:54 +0000

I could've sworn that malpractice insurance cost is viewed as one of the driver's of high health care costs, and that it's expensive precisely because medical lawsuit payouts are large...

New comment by davidgay in "Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives"

davidgay — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 22:58:41 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.

So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

New comment by davidgay in "Evidence of Fraud in an Influential Study About Procrastination"

davidgay — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 01:43:09 +0000

I'll very happily (as a significant benefactor) take this century's medicine over the last. And the one or two centuries before that aren't even worth starting to think about. So something must be working wioth mainstream medicinal research.

New comment by davidgay in "Anthropic's ‘watermark’ text adulteration in Claude is a perversion of writing"

davidgay — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:36:40 +0000

Editing is fine as long as you keep the signed original for validation purposes.

New comment by davidgay in "U of Michigan drops first-semester grades to ‘curb mental health crisis’"

davidgay — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:08:39 +0000

> Children are part of hobbies.

That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in <100 years. And the last of those years would be painful for those still alive.

Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.

New comment by davidgay in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

davidgay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 21:11:01 +0000

Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.

New comment by davidgay in "U.S. used 'virtually all' of its long-range precision missiles during Iran war"

davidgay — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:18:02 +0000

I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?

Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.

New comment by davidgay in "Memory safety absolutists"

davidgay — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 21:50:04 +0000

> Like, of course you can prevent all memory safety errors by using a garbage collector. That has been known since the 90s.

No, it's been known since GC was invented.

> In fact, there was a good two decades after Java released where all the research on memory safety just stopped, because the standard answer became "use a GC".

Having done all of my research on memory safety after Java was released, I find this statement a little exaggerated... (e.g., https://barnowl.org/research/pubs/98-pldi-regions.pdf, https://barnowl.org/research/pubs/07-hotos-linux.pdf)

New comment by davidgay in "Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown"

davidgay — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 02:58:35 +0000

For homework: if you make homework results not count towards the final grade, then there's no reason to use an LLM - the point then just becomes to have practice problems and feedback on how well you are doing.

This is what my university (EPFL) was doing ~40 years ago. And yes, some students didn't bother with the homework, and mostly paid the price at the final exam...

New comment by davidgay in "Fired by Google for creating the Google workspace CLI"

davidgay — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:31:07 +0000

The open source policy described above was in place 16 years ago (I went through it to continue working on some existing projects), and I doubt it was very new then.

New comment by davidgay in "Roughly a quarter of American professionals hit a wall in their careers"

davidgay — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:53:01 +0000

You can proportionally reduce the time in the role;) Though the most senior people wouldn't be there long...

New comment by davidgay in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

davidgay — Fri, 29 May 2026 03:10:20 +0000

There's about 500k kids in California each year. The 100th smartest is undoubtedly smarter than you or me.

New comment by davidgay in "Waymo in Portland"

davidgay — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 22:45:29 +0000

This is an extremely simplistic view. For instance, the US moves more of its freight (by percentage) than all western European countries except Switzerland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

New comment by davidgay in "Re-creating the complex cuisine of prehistoric Europeans"

davidgay — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 03:52:41 +0000

Not to mention India without the spicy peppers...

New comment by davidgay in "Iran students stage first large anti-government protests since deadly crackdown"

davidgay — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 17:41:00 +0000

I don't think the other governments that collapsed in 1989 in the face of public protest could be honestly described as "relatively liberal".

New comment by davidgay in "Use protocols, not services"

davidgay — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:12:45 +0000

> Only as a last resort. If possible, governments, just like any other organizations, should have absolutely no say about anyone’s identity.

An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc

[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church

New comment by davidgay in "Anthropic raises $30B in Series G funding at $380B post-money valuation"

davidgay — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 04:59:59 +0000

No, this is bunk. App Engine and GCE, the earliest components of GCP predate Kubernetes.

[I've been there for nearly all the relevant time]

New comment by davidgay in "I'm going to cure my girlfriend's brain tumor"

davidgay — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 04:47:30 +0000

Not intrinsically or commonly deadly. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas... says "1 in 10 people will develop a pituitary adenoma in their lifetime" - pituitary adenomas is the more general class of these benign tumors, as the pituitary gland produces multiple hormones.

New comment by davidgay in "Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89"

davidgay — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 05:00:26 +0000

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur wins this one, though.

New comment by davidgay in "Amazon cuts 16k jobs"

davidgay — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 05:20:54 +0000

> Even unemployment, which is your top line, seems... fine?

The unemployment one is interesting because if you look at that graph, the universal pre-2022 pattern is basically a spike of unemployment during recessions followed by a gradual drop.

The recent pattern is a gradual increase.

I'm not a big fan of "numerical only / shape of graphs" analyses, but this does seem strange. Of course, the 2020 Covid spike is also unusual, so...