Hacker News: fallingfrog

New comment by fallingfrog in "40% of lost calories globally are from beef, needing 33 cal of feed per 1 cal"

fallingfrog — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 20:42:44 +0000

Ok but don't cattle often browse on land that is too marginal for farming? And don't they eat grass? I don't know if this argument holds up.

New comment by fallingfrog in "The looming college-enrollment death spiral"

fallingfrog — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 14:06:38 +0000

Well this has been essentially the plan since the 70's. The 60's scared the bejeezus out of the ruling class and they began taking steps to bring the people to heel from the 70's onward. In the words of Ronald Reagan's education advisor, Roger Freeman: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

New comment by fallingfrog in "Intelligent people are better judges of the intelligence of others"

fallingfrog — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:26:58 +0000

I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).

New comment by fallingfrog in "Smart people recognize each other – science proves it"

fallingfrog — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:14:51 +0000

Well, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny"

fallingfrog — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:24:07 +0000

Having proof on video of trump sexually assaulting a minor would still be significant, I think. Such footage probably exists and would make great leverage.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Mystery jump in oil trading ahead of Trump post draws scrutiny"

fallingfrog — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:20:12 +0000

And who was the person or group who made correct predictions in advance of the announcement? Why not just say who it was?

New comment by fallingfrog in "Tech companies defeat bill as AI drains local water supplies"

fallingfrog — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:13:49 +0000

It's funny that in movies like the matrix they imagine that humanity would fight back against the machines. In reality the first thing ai will do, which it has already done, is capture our governments through the application of money, and then the humans would first have to defeat their own institutions before they can even begin to fight the machines. Neoliberalism is profoundly unable to deal with threats if the threats produce short term profits. That goes for housing shortages, global warming, health care costs, falling birth rates, across the board if it produces short term profits that can be used to bribe politicians its impossible to address. AI is no different.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs"

fallingfrog — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 15:11:00 +0000

Yeah at my last job at a larger organization they would occasionally get us all in the big auditorium and start showering us with this sort of language. I would excuse myself to use the restroom then go back to my desk and get some work done. Peace and quiet! Never got called out on it, they don't need me sitting there rolling my eyes and grimacing through the whole thing anyway.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Dyson Spheres on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram"

fallingfrog — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:24:51 +0000

Personally I very much doubt that any civilization would build Dyson spheres in their naive spherical shell form, because the gravitational field inside a hollow shell is zero and therefore nothing would stick to the inner surface and would instead drift towards the host star. (Proved by sir Issac newton)

But more than that- the concept of the sphere is making a ton of hidden assumptions about the desirability of always wanting more and more space and energy which are probably a side effect of the kind of authoritarian power structures that rule most humans currently. But that may not be common.

Cool work though- good to know what to look for

New comment by fallingfrog in "Bitcoin tumbles below $70K, heavy losses in cryptocurrencies in last three weeks"

fallingfrog — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:13:46 +0000

Well the reason people buy bitcoin at 100k is because they think it will someday be worth a million. If it's never going to be worth a million, then it's not worth 100k either.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Oregon raised spending by 80%, math scores dropped"

fallingfrog — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:52:40 +0000

Have we looked at nutrition? Economic crises lead to sharp spikes in poor nutrition especially when social safety nets have been stripped back. A generation whose growth is stunted by malnutrition is a plausible outcome of "tough love" welfare reform. A lot of people either lost their jobs or had to quit to take care of their children during the crisis. And there was a much degraded safety net to catch them.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Heritability of intrinsic human life span is about 50%"

fallingfrog — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 16:20:21 +0000

My male ancestors died of cancer in their 70's and 80's but my great grandmothers lived to 93, 103, 99, and died in childbirth. I actually remember meeting my great great grandmother when I was 8 or 9 and she was 102.

New comment by fallingfrog in "1 kilobyte is precisely 1000 bytes?"

fallingfrog — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:35:57 +0000

Yeah so I realize that at some point manufacturers of hard drives started to cheat and claim 10gb hard drives that were actually a bit less, using a 1000kb megabyte as their rationale, but that's just the marketing team engaging in false advertising. There's no reason to dignify such deception by inventing new words. They just lied. A mb is 1024 kbytes and a gb is 1024 mb. Sorry thats just how the math works out. A 16 kb address space can access 64kb or 65536 unique memory locations.

New comment by fallingfrog in "What Most People Miss About Getting Promoted"

fallingfrog — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:46:56 +0000

Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?

Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018"

fallingfrog — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:27:35 +0000

Yes this is absolutely true. Difficult to impossible, I would say.. my prediction of "2 to 3 years" could very well be totally wrong.

The dominant narrative around bitcoin right now is "hodl because in the long term it always goes up." Thats the core premise that the bitcoin price is based on. If that premise were to crack, bitcoin could drop to near zero for all we know.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Bitcoin Looks Set for Longest Monthly Losing Streak Since 2018"

fallingfrog — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:43:07 +0000

As far as I can tell, bitcoin, having no intrinsic value, is priced entirely by vibes. Right now the vibes are generally negative. The latest bubble of interest has faded. I would wait, the world could become interested again but it may be 2 or 3 years. The bottom will probably be around 70k.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Tesla is committing automotive suicide"

fallingfrog — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 07:54:06 +0000

I wonder if he has some kind of dementia brought on by excessive consumption of ketamine? Or perhaps it's just that he has surrounded himself with people who will never tell him no. Sort of like a lot of dictators do where they have executed everyone around them who could give them pushback and therefore they end up living in a fantasy world while their people starve.

What I'm wondering at this point is why the investors in Tesla are still riding this crazy train. Blaming simple market manipulation seems far fetched. Mass hysteria and delusional beliefs are common enough in the stock market but reality eventually sets in and this bubble has been inflating for a long time. The people who lose the most are going to be the small investors- the really ruthless hedge fund bros will probably walk away unscathed.

New comment by fallingfrog in "The Rebirth of Pennsylvania's Infamous Burning Town"

fallingfrog — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 23:25:35 +0000

I visited Centralia about 20 years ago, I remember that we stopped the car on the way into town because there was a crack going all the way across the road with smoke coming out of it. But we kept walking and found a few abandoned houses and empty streets. We were too intimidated by all the scary signs to wander far off the road but took some pictures on a disposable camera and eventually returned home.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Alarm overload is undermining safety at sea as crews face thousands of alerts"

fallingfrog — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 17:11:31 +0000

Any equipment eventually fails. Designing it to fail safe- in a way that does not threaten the human operator- costs money. But a little warning message costs nothing and ensures that the human can be blamed when something goes wrong. The company can point to the message and say, "see, you should have known."

The message was never intended to help the human operator. It was intended to allow the company to avoid responsibility for cutting corners.

If the goal of the message was to communicate something important to the human operator, extraneous messages would be a serious problem. But if the goal is simply to cover the ass of the company, then extra error messages are not a problem at all. Thats why they never get fixed or pruned.

New comment by fallingfrog in "Danish pension fund divesting US Treasuries"

fallingfrog — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 06:14:16 +0000

If we do simply print money to make the debt go away- foreign holders of that debt would benefit from being the first to sell for a more stable currency. The last to sell would be left holding the bag, would they not? Wouldn't this cause a run on the dollar and destabilize the world financial system?