Hacker News: dluan

New comment by dluan in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

dluan — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:11:00 +0000

Reportedly, last year ~10% of California vineyards were uprooted, some grapes like Pinot Noir production is down 30%. Growers are going to keep trimming until they get back into the black, or prices fall down far enough for consumers to come back, whichever happens first. And it's not going to be just CA, it will be NY, TX, WA, OR wineries too, all areas that had big capex expansion over the past 10 years.

You can see it happening in real-time, right this moment. Go to your local Costco wine section, look for the clearance markdowns where the price ends in $0.97. That means it's marked for clearance and won't be coming back, and there's some screaming deals right now.

New comment by dluan in "California farmers are struggling to sell grapes as demand for wine drops"

dluan — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 02:59:12 +0000

Because of years of trade war, American wine industry is taking a beating around the world and a lot of Australia, NZ, and South Africa is picking up that slack. Even niche producers like Chinese and Japanese wine industry are very quickly maturing into real home-grown industries. The biggest market for California has always been Asia, and it's been near impossible to stumble into Opus One the way you used to be able to in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Beijing, etc.

Old world has always been able to be flexible, eating these kinds of punches by pivoting into NA or brandy during gluts, and demand has less fluctuations. This contraction, like a lot of everything else happening in the US, maybe was already coming because of some trends overlapping, but policy threw gasoline onto a combustible and fragile situation.

New comment by dluan in "When did Google get so weird?"

dluan — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:51:26 +0000

I used to use search commands with "quotes", triple quotes, and +exact word search, I noticed last weekish that those no longer work.

New comment by dluan in "Nissan's third generation e-POWER powertrain"

dluan — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 04:44:57 +0000

Like putting in the final optimizations in the crossbow right as others have figured out machine guns.

New comment by dluan in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

dluan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:16:52 +0000

Taiwan did not have anywhere near the land distribution occur under CKS/CCK, nor the same veracity of landlord clique ownership. And, you're further wrong in that a big part of white terror was specifically due to 外省人 owners of factories and farms, from land stolen from the aborigines. The white terror wasn't by any means less violent and senseless than cultural revolution.

New comment by dluan in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

dluan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:12:51 +0000

My point is that a single land value tax would have the same effect as piecemeal improvements to current tax portfolio - none of it would fix the inertia already priced and baked into the system.

New comment by dluan in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

dluan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 23:08:10 +0000

Famine along the yellow river and yangtze river has been happening for thousands of years across all dynasties, its specifically what land distribution was meant to fix, and since 1960s there hasn't been a famine since. My parents and grandparents lived through it and left cities to work in countryside fields during the cultural revolution. You tell me how the famine fits in and I'll let you know if you're accurate or not.

New comment by dluan in "California is chasing wealth that has feet"

dluan — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:57:27 +0000

The greatest feat that Mao achieved was to take the land that had been tightly gripped by generations upon generations of owners and to shake up the distribution of it so that the land could produce again. People naturally want to work the land, but you end up with suboptimal inertia because owners just end up letting it sit fallow if it doesn't immediately return. It's how you turn a billion serfs into a billion entrepreneurs.

We're already way past the point where a creative cocktail of 10 different progressive taxation schemes could feasibly fix the root of the problem, and you feel this especially if you were born after the year 2000. You're more likely to see results if you pick up a red scarf than if you pass a higher wealth tax, sales tax, land tax, consumption tax, estate tax...

New comment by dluan in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

dluan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:26:30 +0000

You can move your alipay card into apple wallet and have it as the default payment method, so do you don't even have to swipe or turn on your phone, it will even work in low-power/off mode.

New comment by dluan in "Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card"

dluan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 20:23:39 +0000

I much prefer convenient over fast, being able to just tap my phone's uploaded IC card/alipay without having to open it up or switch cards is maybe 200ms slower, but I don't have to think or change what I'm doing. Plus with alipay it will just autodeduct so I don't ever have to think about that as well, though Apple wallet Suica makes it easy to reload too.

New comment by dluan in "The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding"

dluan — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:23:02 +0000

Americas cultural revolution

New comment by dluan in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

dluan — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 05:57:49 +0000

I don't know enough about climate science, but south swell usually is the result of west-to-east storms coming off of Australia. In Hawaii, this summer's south swell has been extremely consistent big swells. I imagine it's something like the west coast off South America heating up causes the balance of the southern hemisphere off Africa to counteract that.

New comment by dluan in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

dluan — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 05:54:24 +0000

I'm currently sitting in the middle of 100mph gusting winds as every island in Hawaii is under hurricane or tropical storm warning, with at least 100k people without power right now. Hurricane season in Hawaii is usually in Sept/Oct.

New comment by dluan in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

dluan — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 05:37:00 +0000

Temporarily, all of the middle east oil infrastructure will be rebuilt because their biggest customer still has no real tangible plan to wean itself off.

New comment by dluan in "Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter"

dluan — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 03:29:17 +0000

China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.

The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.

New comment by dluan in "Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified"

dluan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 19:02:09 +0000

Here's one where you can probably make out what's happening lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0tyEhRWAHs

And foraging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDzi0odGy4M

New comment by dluan in "Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified"

dluan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 08:12:05 +0000

These are pretty famous mushrooms in China. Right now Yunnan mushroom hot pot is all the rage, basically in every city in the country. It's also led to lots of tourists in Yunnan wandering around foraging for wild mushrooms. The problem is that there's hundreds of different types of mushrooms with varying levels of toxicity, and unless you grew up in the area and know what you're doing it's easy to get mixed up. There's plenty of videos on chinese social media of people giggling in hospital beds geeked out their gourds pointing at little people.

New comment by dluan in "Show HN: Distilling DeepSeek into GPT-OSS doesn't transfer censorship. Try it"

dluan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:50:48 +0000

It'd be interesting to use this technique to create a running tally across all models of which models are censored on what topics

New comment by dluan in "NSF pilots 4-year PhDs with industry research placements"

dluan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 04:56:13 +0000

China actually started piloting the "industry Phd" in 2025, and took inspiration from Japan, Germany, and UK where some programs do industry experience as part of Phd training. A lot of the Chinese programs are in agriculture, engineering, and biotech. China's Ministry of Education actually published the "suggestion for experimentation" (loose translation) in 2023, and it trickled out from there as each province level government and university system started designing their own systems.

http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A22/moe_826/202312/t20231218_1...

New comment by dluan in "Show HN: Physically accurate black hole you can put in your room"

dluan — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:37:58 +0000

It was actually after that VR experience with large black circle that now when I look at photos of the inside of Hagia Sofia I get a little heeby jeeby creeped out lol.