Hacker News: elgenie

New comment by elgenie in "Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?"

elgenie — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 13:48:33 +0000

Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.

New comment by elgenie in "90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective"

elgenie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:40:15 +0000

That works mainly because the money comes with a heavily implied threat: don't vote the way we want and the money spigot stops, or even reroutes into the coffers of your opponent.

But if that all happens, including the opponent funding, and those opponents get routed, then the bluff's been called and the lobby's hand has been found wanting.

New comment by elgenie in "90% of crypto's Illinois primary spending failed to achieve its objective"

elgenie — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 20:35:22 +0000

In jurisdictions in which there's a large imbalance between the parties the general election is a foregone conclusion; the primary of the dominant party becomes the real election. Primaries still have lower turnout and feature candidates with less name recognition, so the potential impact of money is quite high.

New comment by elgenie in "U.S. had almost no job growth in 2025"

elgenie — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 17:10:58 +0000

The US tracks six different unemployment metrics plus overall labor force participation rate. You’re talking about U6 and/or labor force participation rate.

Just because U3 is the measure typically quoted doesn’t mean the others don’t exist.

New comment by elgenie in "The Waymo World Model"

elgenie — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 22:07:23 +0000

Isn't there a great deal of gaming going on with the car disengaging FSD milliseconds before crashing? Voila, no "full" "self" driving accident; just another human failing [*]!

[*] Failing to solve the impossible situation FSD dropped them into, that is.

New comment by elgenie in "Code is cheap. Show me the talk"

elgenie — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 02:13:48 +0000

No code is as easy to maintain as no code.

No code runs as fast as no code.

New comment by elgenie in "Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law"

elgenie — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 20:10:58 +0000

QA efforts can whack-a-mole some issues, but the mismatch of problem and solution is inherent in any situation in which a generator of plausible-sounding text gets pointed at an area where correctness matters.

New comment by elgenie in "'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)"

elgenie — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:10:59 +0000

Discomfort is present only if you suspect they're a Guesser and thus one of you has greatly misjudged the relationship and social context.

If you know or suspect they're an Asker the discomfort disappears because you say "No" and they say "OK, cool".

New comment by elgenie in "'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)"

elgenie — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:07:18 +0000

The usual dichotomy / terminology for this stuff as it relates to painting national and business cultures with broad brushes is "high context" versus "low context". In a high context culture like Japan people would be expected to code switch between Asking and Guessing behaviors depending on their audience, relative status, social rapport, etc.

New comment by elgenie in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

elgenie — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:43:14 +0000

The top five countries in the world by Muslim population are not in the Middle East/North Africa region: Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria.

New comment by elgenie in "Jakarta is now the biggest city in the world"

elgenie — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 21:35:48 +0000

They're #4 by population, and the world's most populous Muslim country, but are also only a quarter century removed from a corrupt authoritarian regime.

They have very little in the way of exported cultural products ("The Raid" films?), are much worse in sports than would be expected based on population, spend relatively little on their military and don't do much in the way of regional power projection, and are growing economically but not remarkably, so there just aren't that many avenues for them to make international news.

New comment by elgenie in "Where do the children play?"

elgenie — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:10:27 +0000

This working is a function of density. First, imagining a park at the corner is a huge assumption.

Second, if the park isn't within shouting distance of the necessary number of kids, half of the ones within shouting distance are at parent-scheduled activities, and half of the remainder aren't allowed to brave street crossings because of the six-foot-tall hoods and inattentive drivers of passing ChildMurker1050s, no amount of park yelling will be sufficient.

New comment by elgenie in "Where do the children play?"

elgenie — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 21:02:35 +0000

That feeling of shared societal responsibility probably has at least something to do with the birth rate. Japan is down to just 686K babies born per year from a population of 123 million.

New comment by elgenie in "LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger"

elgenie — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:09:05 +0000

Now consider what's happening to the learning process of the (rather large) subset of current college students choosing to replace that struggle for detailed understanding with LLM queries.

New comment by elgenie in "PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program"

elgenie — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 21:19:52 +0000

Spelling things out helps with the euphemisms.

Anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion forces turn out to be (gasp) against all of diversity, and equity, and inclusion.

New comment by elgenie in "Designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization"

elgenie — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:47:50 +0000

This is an incoherent blog post.

1. The concept of "domestic terrorist organization" not a thing under any US law. Further, there exists no such organization in observable reality.

2. "All relevant executive departments and agencies shall utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations" is … nothing, because that's what federal law enforcement is already charged with.

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

elgenie — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:52:11 +0000

You’re attempting to argue that “revisions exist” is somehow strong evidence for the proposition that “no aspect of particular revision X was politically motivated”.

That is gaslighting.

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

elgenie — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 20:46:35 +0000

These are numbers compiled by this administration about a period immediately before Trump imposed some very very very economically stupid tariffs. It's quite suspicious to have such a big drop timed precisely as if to serve as a handy baseline to minimize the perceived impact of that idiocy; it comes out of an agency (BLS) whose previous head was fired for the sin of a displeasing report and was replaced with a commissar.

Note that survey data about the present is collected and aggregated piecemeal by a sizable bureaucracy and is thus hard for a dedicated ideologue to systematically revise without that leaking. However, when the data about today comes in below estimates the number of people involved in reconciling and dating the discrepancy to ascribe it to the past is much smaller.

New comment by elgenie in "Financial lessons from my family's experience with long-term care insurance"

elgenie — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 21:27:54 +0000

Like 5-10% of the US's total GDP gets wasted annually on the layers and layers and layers of healthcare middlemen… for worse outcomes.

New comment by elgenie in "The anti-abundance critique on housing is wrong"

elgenie — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:33:19 +0000

De-densification isn't required; a one-for-one knocking down and rebuilding of a single family residence suffices.