Hacker News: dkural

New comment by dkural in "M 7.4 earthquake – 100 km ENE of Miyako, Japan"

dkural — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 19:58:15 +0000

Some of the Istanbul earthquakes felt like that for me.

New comment by dkural in "NASA Force"

dkural — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 08:22:31 +0000

This part: Let's now adjust for inflation so you can see the budget squeeze. $19.2 billion in 2016 dollars is worth $26.4 billion and change, once adjusted for inflation, in March 2026. Feel free to do it yourself. Magic of compounding.

24.4 for 2026 is notably less than 26.4. Budget squeeze.

New comment by dkural in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

dkural — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 20:47:02 +0000

I agree with you - I was saying that members of the military & their families have treaty-defined standards of being in the country & thus required to behave a certain way, whereas a regular visitor or student visa comes with a different set of rules and not regulated by a military cooperation treaty.

New comment by dkural in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

dkural — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:17:55 +0000

Different rules apply to members of the military stationed on a treaty-based foreign military base.

However, as a thought experiment, let's go with your flawed analogy: Even then, this person was acting like a guest -- it is a long-cherished American tradition to exercise our constitutionally-protected right to free speech, assemble, and yes, protest. Nothing's more American than speaking against Government oppression and overreach.

The government is not your owner. The government is not your father. You are a participant in the affairs of your country, and take responsibility in its direction. Civic engagement and right to protest are important tools to make our government accountable. These are fundamental American values. And you're welcome to bring friends. It's legal.

New comment by dkural in "Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data"

dkural — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:08:55 +0000

One of the attractions of a country for scientists and scholars, and visitors generally, is an atmosphere of freedom. The right to protest is a constitutionally protected right. He was well within his rights. The current administration is purposefully curtailing freedoms to intimidate ordinary people to keep quiet as they plunder the country. Google is now going along with it. Your advice is to just study and enjoy the experience, which is what most people do. Luckily there are others who can be loud for those who can no longer speak, their cities bombed and families killed; with the hope that the world will eventually notice and listen. Civic engagement, and a free press is one of the most important tools at our disposal to fight those who seek to exploit the weak - that is why every wanna-be dictator and corrupt politician is so keen to curtail these rights.

New comment by dkural in "What life looks like on the most remote inhabited island"

dkural — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 17:40:25 +0000

"The area is so remote that, since no regular marine or air traffic routes are within 400 kilometres (250 mi), sometimes the closest human beings are astronauts aboard the International Space Station when it passes overhead.[23][24] "

New comment by dkural in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

dkural — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:25:50 +0000

You realize that is far too recent to show up in cancer death rates for under-40 year olds right? It takes 10-15 years for a change-in-behavior to show up in incidence and even longer for deaths. As a classic example, see the shift (i.e. the delay) in curve of reduced smoking and reduced lung cancer.

New comment by dkural in "Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging"

dkural — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 21:05:22 +0000

How much of the rise do the listed later on (endurance athletes, obesity, sugary drinks, sedentary lifestyle) explain the relative youth rise? After all, some of this was an issue in 2006 as it is in 2026. Does it explain most of the relative rise, or is there a major missing piece / a mystery still to be explained? I doubt the % of endurance athletes changed meaningfully population-wide, to be a major contributing factor, for example.

New comment by dkural in "Like digging 'your own grave': The translators grappling with losing work to AI"

dkural — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 11:04:32 +0000

I don't doubt translators face massive job losses. I hate this "personal interest" style anecdotal news stories though, because it gives me no actual sense/data on how fast/slow this transition is, how widespread etc. It's basically junk food.

New comment by dkural in "HPV vaccination reduces oncogenic HPV16/18 prevalence from 16% to <1% in Denmark"

dkural — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:32:06 +0000

A lot of viruses insert themselves into your DNA, they may mess up the 3D structure, or during DNA repair result in misrepair / duplications, or simply insert somewhere and break something important. All of these are ways that can contribute to kickstarting or accelerating cancerous growth.

New comment by dkural in "Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work"

dkural — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:51:47 +0000

I've really seen both I suppose. A lot of devs don't take accountability / responsibility for their code, especially if they haven't done anything that actually got shipped and used, or in general haven't done much responsible adulting.

New comment by dkural in "Zebra-Llama – Towards efficient hybrid models"

dkural — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 23:10:03 +0000

Look up Jevons Paradox, when something becomes more efficient, consumption can goes up, often due to price elasticity.

Think of like this: Imagine car prices go from $200,000 to $$20,000 - you wouldn't sell 10x the amount of cars, you'd sell --- In fact I just looked up the numbers - worldwide only 100K or so cars are 200K & higher, whereas roughly 80 million cars are in that affordable category.

So a price drop of 90% allowed sales to go from 0.1M to 80M!! I think this means we need more engines, tires, roads, gas, spare parts.

New comment by dkural in "1D Conway's Life glider found, 3.7B cells long"

dkural — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:46:31 +0000

Only about 1.5% of the human genome is protein coding. The human genome is about 3 billion base pairs long.

New comment by dkural in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

dkural — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:32:41 +0000

I agree with all of what you're saying.

I think the biggest lever is completely overhauling healthcare. The USA is very inefficient, and for subpar outcomes. In practice, the federal government already pays for the neediest of patients - the elderly, the at-risk children, the poor, and veterans. Whereas insurance rakes in profits from the healthiest working age people. Given aging, and the impossibility of growing faster than the GDP forever, we'll have to deal with this sooner or later. Drug spending, often the boogeyman, is less than 7% of the overall healthcare budget.

There is massive waste in our military spending due to the pork-barrel nature of many contracts. That'd be second big bucket I'd reform.

I think you're also right that inflation will ultimately take care of the budget deficit. The trick is to avoid hyperinflation and punitive interest rates that usually come along for the ride.

I would also encourage migration of highly skilled workers to help pay for an aging population of boomers. Let's increase our taxpayer base!

I am for higher rates of taxation on capital gains over $1.5M or so, that'll also help avoid a stock market bubble to some extent. One can close various loopholes while at it.

I am mostly arguing for policy changes to redistribute more equitably. I would make the "charity" status of college commensurate with the amount of financial aid given to students and the absolute cost of tuition for example., for example. I am against student loan forgiveness for various reasons - it's out of topic for this thread but happy to expand if interested.

New comment by dkural in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

dkural — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:19:46 +0000

Global datacenter spending across all categories (ML + everything else) is roughly 0.9 - 1.2 trillion dollars for the last three years combined, I was initially going to go for "quarter of the federal budget", but picked something I thought was more conservative to account for announced spending and 2025 etc. I pick 2022 onward for the LLM wave. In reality, solely ML driven, actual realized-to-date spending is probably about 5% of the federal budget. The big announcements will spread out over the next several years in build-out. Nonetheless, it's large enough to drive GDP growth a meaningful amount. Not large enough that redirecting it elsewhere will solve our societal problems.

New comment by dkural in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

dkural — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 22:13:06 +0000

I agree with you 100%! Any additional surplus will be extracted as rents, when housing is restricted. I am for passing laws that make it much easier for people to obtain permits to build housing where there is demand. Too much of residential zoning is single-family housing. Texas does a better job at not restricting housing than California, for example. Many towns vote blue, talk to talk, but do not walk the walk.

New comment by dkural in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

dkural — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:28:10 +0000

Anthropologists measure how civilized a tribe or society was by looking if they took care of the elderly, and what the child survival rates were. USA leads to developed world in child poverty, child homelessness, and highest rate of child death due to violence. Conservatives often bring up the statistic by race. It turns out bringing people over as slaves, and after freedom, refusing to provide land, education, fair access to voting rights, or to housing (by redlining etc.) - all policies advocated by conservatives of time past, was not the smartest thing to do. Our failure as a civilized society began and is in large part a consequence of the original sin of the USA.

New comment by dkural in "IBM CEO says there is 'no way' spending on AI data centers will pay off"

dkural — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 19:21:49 +0000

[ This comment I'm making is USA centric. ]. I agree with the idea of making our society better and more equitable - reducing homelessness, hunger, poverty, especially for our children. However, I think redirecting this to AI datacenter spending is a red-herring, here's why I think this: As a society we give a significant portion of our surplus to government. We then vote on what the government should spend this on. AI datacenter spending is massive, but if you add it all up, it doesn't cover half of a years worth of government spending. We need to change our politics to redirect taxation and spending to achieve a better society. Having a private healthcare system that spends twice the amount for the poorest results in the developed world is a policy choice. Spending more than the rest of the world combined on the military is a policy choice. Not increasing minimum wage so at least everyone with a full time job can afford a home is a policy job (google "working homelessness). VC is a teeny tiny part of the economy. All of tech is only about 6% of the global economy.

New comment by dkural in "Nano Banana Pro"

dkural — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 19:24:00 +0000

Do you know of some tools with a parameter that asks it to be "weird" and increase diversity of outputs?

New comment by dkural in "The Case That A.I. Is Thinking"

dkural — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 18:31:00 +0000

I am arguing against Searle's Chinese Room argument, I am not positing that LLMs are minds. I am specifically refuting that your brain and the Chinese room can be both subject to the same reductionist argument Searle uses - if we accept, as you say, that you are a mind inside a body, which neuron, or atom does this mind reside in? My point is, if you accept Searle's argument, you have to accept it for brains, including your brain, as well.

Now, separately, you are precisely the type of closet dualist I speak of. You say that you are a mind inside a body, but you have no way of knowing that others have minds -- take this to it's full conclusion: You have no way of knowing that you have a "mind" either. You feel like you do, as a biological assembly (which is what you are). Either way you believe in some sort of body-mind dualism, without realizing. Minds are not inside of bodies. What you call a mind is a potential emergent phenomenon of a brain. (potential - because brains get injured etc.).