Hacker News: gweinberg

New comment by gweinberg in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

gweinberg — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 01:16:58 +0000

Hey, that's today's smbc https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/r The problem is, there's no good reason to think the concept of 彊 in your mind is at all similar to the concept of 彊 in my brain. After all, we (probably) don't pronounce it the same, right?

New comment by gweinberg in "A spectre is haunting Unicode"

gweinberg — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 20:27:07 +0000

It occurs to me that we can use 彊 to mean "a completely unknown concept that cannot be named". For example if you ask, "when Cthulhu rises from its slumber, what is thefirst thing it will do? Probably it will 彊.

New comment by gweinberg in "Most countries provide between 20 and 40 paid days off"

gweinberg — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:11:25 +0000

Of course, nobody really gets paid for days off, anywhere, ever. Salaries are prorated, people are paid for the days they actually work.

New comment by gweinberg in ""Uncensored" open LLMs are measurably more optimistic than their base models"

gweinberg — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:16:21 +0000

Should have kept the original title.

New comment by gweinberg in "Humans haven't stopped evolving"

gweinberg — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 19:54:58 +0000

"Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection."

There has never been the slightest shred of evidence to that effect, anywhere, ever.

New comment by gweinberg in "What's the most popular number in Hacker News titles?"

gweinberg — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:23:29 +0000

I imagine "one" is usually spelled out in titles.

New comment by gweinberg in "Ancient Roman Board Game"

gweinberg — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 20:50:51 +0000

The symmetry is restored if you say you're playing a two game match and the winner is the one that survives longer as the hares. But the game seems simple enough that I imagine it shouldn't be too hard to play optimally.

New comment by gweinberg in "Mystery behind Moana: After 1,700 years, why did Polynesians suddenly sail east?"

gweinberg — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:49:30 +0000

Okay, but you not only have the question of why they did it when they did it, but also why they didn't in the previous 1700 years. We haven't been to Mars yet because the technology isn't ready, not because nobody has the hankering.

Maybe there is no real reason, at some point the cool kids started doing it and the wanna-be's imitated the cool kids. Or maybe not.

New comment by gweinberg in "Why study Diophantine equations?"

gweinberg — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 18:14:53 +0000

Wait, are you saying they can't be solved by a Turing machine, but they can be solved some other way? If so, how?

New comment by gweinberg in "Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows"

gweinberg — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 16:53:52 +0000

OP claimed relativistic effects explain why mercury is liquid at room temperature. That may be part of the story, but it isn't the whole thing, since other heavy elements are not liquid at room temperature.

New comment by gweinberg in "Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark"

gweinberg — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:28:47 +0000

They don't. LEOs will routinely conduct searches without any warrant or probable cause and if they find anything and the defense tries to have it thrown out, the LEO will say the search was "voluntary". Similarly, they will say people were "voluntarily detained" if they don;t know to ask "am I free to go?"

Calling yourself a sovereign citizen will get you nowhere. Saying "I don't consent to this search" will not prevent a search. But it will allow you to get anything found suppressed, unless a judge decides there was probably cause or the body cam happens to fail and so there is no record of your refusal.

New comment by gweinberg in "Show HN: Gerrymandle - Daily puzzle game where you redraw electoral districts"

gweinberg — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 20:07:26 +0000

I get the same error, and chrome fails also.

New comment by gweinberg in "US stock market to stop shrinking for first time in 23 years"

gweinberg — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:40:09 +0000

The idea that the stock market has been shrinking in any meaningful sense is kind of silly. Market cap means something, but the number of shares in a company by itself is meaningless.

New comment by gweinberg in "How turkey hacked the hair-transplant industry"

gweinberg — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:39:35 +0000

Yes! I originally read the headline as "a turkey" because of the lack of a capital T.

They can call themselves what they want, but it unreasonable of the Turks to expect English speakers to write their country's name with characters which are not part of our alphabet.

New comment by gweinberg in "Only 17% of all 64-bit Integers are products of two 32-bit integers"

gweinberg — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 18:27:49 +0000

Ok so I think I understand your insight: the number of 64 bit numbers you can get from multiplying two 32 bit numbers is the number of distinct results. I guess it follows that, of those 64 bit integers that can be written as the product of 2 32 bit ints, on average they can be factored into 32 bit ints 6 different ways. The only ones that could possibly be written as such a product exactly one way are the prefect squares.

New comment by gweinberg in "The real cost of owning a home"

gweinberg — Tue, 26 May 2026 21:00:10 +0000

It stands to reason that owning must be cheaper than renting an equivalent place over the long term, unless the guy renting to you made a poor investment. But you're usually not comparing equivalent places when you make the comparison.

New comment by gweinberg in "Men who stare at walls"

gweinberg — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:22:41 +0000

Is the title a reference to "Men Who Stare at Goats"? If so, I think few people got it.

New comment by gweinberg in "My phone replaced a brass plug"

gweinberg — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 00:25:58 +0000

Yeah, given the nominal precision it's surprising how far off some of the numbers are. A .38 is the same diameter as a .357.

New comment by gweinberg in "Is math big or small?"

gweinberg — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 19:05:40 +0000

Obviously a torus is the size of a doughnut.

New comment by gweinberg in "Mario and Earendil"

gweinberg — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:22:41 +0000

I thought it would be a team-up between two. Presumably the elf would help fight turtles and donkey kong, since what good is a plumber in a world without plumbing?