Hacker News: hyeonwho4

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S."

hyeonwho4 — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 01:23:23 +0000

Was $10k before or after the insurance negotiated discount? Pre-discount prices mean nothing: I had the same tests ordered twice (needed the results urgently), once through my PCP/HMO and once paid to a walk-in doctor's office in cash. The cash price was $700. My PCP claimed a price of insurance $3500, who then negotiated it down to a "discounted" $710. So the worst of both worlds would have been a high deductible plan.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Raccoons are showing early signs of domestication"

hyeonwho4 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 14:02:02 +0000

There use to be "Raccoon cafes" in Seoul. You go buy a drink and pet the raccoons. IIRC animal cafes were banned around 2019 or so.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Homeowner baffled after washing machine uses 3.6GB of internet data a day (2024)"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 03:29:29 +0000

Looks like IoT devices are the next frontier in residential proxies ... or provide spies the next leading indicator into SV business performance.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "NYC's office-to-residential conversions could create 17,000 new homes"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 03:57:26 +0000

I don't know. I don't think that most Asian apartments have central fresh air. Usually the unit owners open windows regularly.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "No vegan milk is equivalent to dairy, nutritionists conclude"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 03:50:49 +0000

Human infant intestines in the ancestral environment are natively colonized by bifidobacterium infantis, which completely metabolizes oligosaccarides present in human breast milk and outputs highly acidic byproducts. This acid kills most other gut bacteria, allowing B. infantis to consist of 50% of the intenstinal microbiome in healthy infants [1]. Oligosaccarides cannot be metabolized by babies without gut bacteria, but human mothers produce more of them than most other mammals we know of, and the specific oligosaccarides present depend on maternal generics [4]. NICU infants untreated with B. infantis are 5x more likely to fall into sepis as a result of necrotizing enterocolitis[2,3], probably due to increased intestinal permeability to pathogens.

But B. infantis is coevolved for the digestion of human oligosaccarides, and those are specifically genetically coded for in human milk [4]. As a result, "vegan baby formula" or even baby formula without the correct oligosacarides could be a disaster for baby intestinal health, and even cow's milk has a different oligosaccaride profile, and we don't know how adaptable the gut microbes are.

[1] doi.org/10.1038/s41390-020-01350-0 [2] doi.org/10.1542/peds.2004-1463 [3] doi.org/10.1038/s41372-019-0443-5 [4] doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45209-y

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "NYC's office-to-residential conversions could create 17,000 new homes"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 18:36:05 +0000

This is called an FCU (fan coil unit) and is common in Asia. It consists of a high efficiency central chiller run by building management, and pipes to bring coolant to each unit. Then in each unit there is a heat exchange coil with a fan to blow the room air through the coil. Hence fan coil unit.

The advantages of this system are that the only sound in the unit is the fan, and air is not circulated between units. The disadvantage is that building management can turn off A/C centrally if they want to save money.

For some reason Americans are slow to pick up HVAC innovations that are common elsewhere: heat pumps, split-system air conditioners, FCU, etc. I guess it is because energy is cheap to them and they don't mind noise.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "NSF faces shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:03:23 +0000

The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "People are losing loved ones to AI-fueled spiritual fantasies"

hyeonwho4 — Mon, 05 May 2025 01:11:40 +0000

The default setting on ChatGPT is to now include previous conversations as context. I disabled memories, but this new feature was enabled when I checked the settings.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Reproducibility project fails to validate dozens of biomedical studies"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:59:06 +0000

That used to be the function of undergraduate and Masters theses at the Ivy League universities. "For the undergraduate thesis, fix someone else's mistake. For the Master's thesis, find someone else's mistake. For the PhD thesis, make your own mistake."

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "TikTok is harming children at an industrial scale"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 20:41:36 +0000

The unfettered computer and internet access was a desktop machine (which needed to run a minimalist distro) on dial-up in a very public room. The fun that taught me tech stuff was getting to distro to work, and there was no privacy. Parents were much more aware of the dangers back then.

Nowdays everythibg on smartphones "just works", and the OS won't even let the user access system files. I meet college students who have no idea what a file system is, or what a DNS server is.

Times have changed, indeed.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "TikTok Is Harming Children at an Industrial Scale"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 16:15:52 +0000

When I was a child, my parents had me work on a lot of puzzles. They saw this as a way to build attention span, ability to focus, and persistence to achieve long term goals (not to mention that we had the coolest, most intricate puzzles). I would probably work with my children work on something a bit more constructive and realistic, but the point is that as children we build intellectual habits and attention span from what we do, and being unable to focus on highly addictive stimuli for more than five minutes is a symptom of a strong deficit. One might even consider it an intellectual disability.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "She Worked in a Harvard Lab to Reverse Aging, Until ICE Jailed Her"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 22:42:45 +0000

This kind of "smuggling" or failure to declare live specimens is very common in biological research on. This is the third time I've heard of international collaborations playing fast and loose with the law. (The other two were finding ways to send live samples by mail.)

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Why I don't discuss politics with friends"

hyeonwho4 — Sat, 05 Apr 2025 22:35:21 +0000

Compromising and using empathy to understand the opposition's views so that you can negotiate for what you need does not satisfy the base, and does not satisfy social media. The (naive) game theory of negotiation says that it is better to stake out an extreme position so that you get more of what you want when you negotiate it away. And the dynamic of primary elections also allows traitors or traders to be punished if they defy the desires of the party too much.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 21:17:19 +0000

That is true. What recently happened is that the Supreme court has determined that speech which benefits a foreign terrorist organization constitutes "material support" to that organization, and providing material support to a terrorist organization is a crime which can get a green card revoked.

Now, I don't think it makes any sense that speech is "material" support, but I also think it doesn't make any sense that speech is "violence," and US culture seems to have repudiated my thoughts on what distinguishes speech from action.

But whatever I think, under current law, speech in support of a terrorist organization is no longer free speech. And certain pro-Palestinian organizations were defined by the previous administration to be terrorist organizations back in November. So it follows that certain pro-Gaza activism is no longer free speech. I don't think this should be the case, but this is the current state of the law.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Among top researchers 10% publish at unrealistic levels, analysis finds"

hyeonwho4 — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 20:47:14 +0000

ICMJE guidelines are frequently cited by other publishers, with the caveat that it depends based on the field. (Which makes sense. A "substantial contribution" to the LIGO collaboration might be much less direct than one in ML or field geology.)

> Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

> Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND

> Final approval of the version to be published; AND

> Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

So you are right. The corresponding author who got funding for the postdoc who designed the experiment for the graduate student that supervised undergradutes and wrote the paper would have a pretty tenuous commection to authorship.

But good luck to everyone else in that chain publishing without them.

Ref: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-respo...

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Children's arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math"

hyeonwho4 — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 16:27:22 +0000

I'm surprised this was published now, given that I saw a talk on this at a math conference in either 2008 or 2009. The memorable anecdote was that they filmed children who worked with cash in the market, brought them to the classroom, and given pen and paper in the classroom they would be unable to duplicate the calculations they had already done in the market. The speaker was promoting VR to simulate the market context in the classroom.

I guess what this paper adds is a higher N and the reverse case, that classroom skills don't transfer to the market.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "The FAA’s Hiring Scandal"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 16:10:50 +0000

I agree that free healthy food for all kids is a great idea. Unfortunately, I have very little trust in US school administrators and school districts to provide healthy meals which nourish children instead of food industry espoused slop which sets them up with an unhealthy eating habits for life.

Here's a comparison of school meals in Korea vs. the US. There are similar comparisons with Japan, France, and Germany. Somehow the US is uniquely unable to feed kids healthy food. I blame political corruption and food industry marketing.

https://www.allkpop.com/buzz/2024/04/what-are-they-feeding-t...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/foodanddrink/foodnews/how-french-s...

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "The FAA’s Hiring Scandal"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:15:07 +0000

Yes.

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "The FAA’s Hiring Scandal"

hyeonwho4 — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 01:13:27 +0000

Personality tests being useful makes sense, but personality tests where candidates are sparse and the training/hiring bottleneck has already been passed by candidates is terrible.

Also, I have a very hard time believing these "correct" answers are representative of the already hired candidates. Worst subject in school was science, worst in college was history, and participated in four or more high school sports, but no correlation on whether they believe it is important to be fast or accurate in their work? Applied to five or six jobs in the last three years? Is bothered "more than most" by criticism from others? [1] I almost find it easier to believe that they were blatantly playing into negative stereotypes of certain minority demographics than that this survey was fit to describe already hired ATCs.

[1] https://kaisoapbox.com/projects/faa_biographical_assessment/

New comment by hyeonwho4 in "Kansas tuberculosis outbreak is America's largest recorded since the 1950s"

hyeonwho4 — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:26:16 +0000

I went skiing in Korea during the next to last weekend of Feb 2020. Best skiing of my time there, because the mountain was already empty of people due to public concern. By that time we were already wearing N95 masks: I remember discovering it was very hard to talk with both a ski mask and an N95 on.

By mid Feb, Korea was already covertly acquiring mask materials and preparing a ramp up in testing. I believe we had working PCR tests in my local hospital by mid March, and mask rationing in April. This made me very skeptical of the competence of the US public health establishment.

Edit: Skiing was Feb 21 to 23, just before Daegu locked down. The Mask rationing started early March: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.asp?newsIdx=292662