Hacker News: maest

New comment by maest in "A recent doubling of global warming rate signals a 1.5°C breach by 2028"

maest — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 02:26:57 +0000

Very exciting!

New comment by maest in "Results from the ASIC puzzle"

maest — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 02:37:36 +0000

> Yes, it's a profitable business for HFT

Wait till you see what the exchanges make.

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

maest — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:32:39 +0000

Rents are already as high as renters can bear. If a tax is introduced, you'd expect landlord competition to drive down the landlord margins, not increase rents.

New comment by maest in "Tutoring company tells parents to save their money and 'use AI instead'"

maest — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 22:26:05 +0000

In what world is a square not a rectangle?

I don't understand how your wife interrogated the AI to be told a square is not a rectangle.

And how can two tutors disagree on this?

New comment by maest in "Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy"

maest — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 02:23:08 +0000

There's an "open only" button?

New comment by maest in "Meet the Ig Nobel Prize Winners"

maest — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:47:41 +0000

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ignoble

New comment by maest in "Fable 5.1 World Modeling"

maest — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 01:17:05 +0000

oh, it's "play war pact".

I read it as "play, warp, act"

New comment by maest in "Playa Phone"

maest — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:33:38 +0000

> sarcastic burner humor.

Give me a break...

New comment by maest in "The Tariff Cost: analysis of the costs to Americans from new tariffs on Canada"

maest — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 02:01:03 +0000

It's not wild to imagine Canada wants to protect a domestic food producing industry.

Same how all countries, including the US, heavily subsidize and protect their agricultural sector.

I'd call this strategic, not political (although ofc it involves lobbying, again, like in every other country including the US)

New comment by maest in "U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications"

maest — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 01:08:20 +0000

Btw, this is analogous to the argument for positive discrimination:

Preferentially treat one group of people (non-white/women/Americans) even if in the short term the revealed preference of businesses is to hire a different group of people (white/men/immigrants), such that, in the long term, the first group of people can develop the necessary skills to compete with the second group.

Short term pain for long term gain.

New comment by maest in "Paging Through a Parquet File in DuckDB: File_row_number or Offset?"

maest — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:56:56 +0000

You handle this by paginating inside a transaction

New comment by maest in "Our position on open-weights models"

maest — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:58:29 +0000

The US routinely goes to war to secure cheap oil, so I didn't think that's a good example

New comment by maest in "SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status"

maest — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 13:45:44 +0000

A much larger percentage of bond traders are institutional, compared to equities, where retail is very active in some names.

So I wouldn't really give too many points to "the general public" for this one.

New comment by maest in "The Tower Keeps Rising"

maest — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:44:15 +0000

> two orders of magnitude more productive

Shipping 100x more features per day?

New comment by maest in "GPT-5.6"

maest — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 22:44:37 +0000

omp.sh is unreadable. I've tried understanding what exactly this is and it's just a wall of edgy sounding slop.

New comment by maest in "A global workspace in language models"

maest — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 11:50:53 +0000

Dozens of GBs of compressed text is an unfathomable amount of information from a human POV.

New comment by maest in "Should DayQuil Be Legal?"

maest — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:30:21 +0000

Btw, the cosmetics industry functions similarly, but worse. Although I suppose the health dangers are lower (the monetary ones are not).

For anti aging stuff, the workhorse ingredient is retinol (with a few formulation variations).

However, it is very difficult to buy _just_ retinol - most beauty brands bundle up retinol with a bunch of other ingredients. This has a couple of issues:

1. You won't know your retinol dosage. These creams almost never tell you the retinol proportion and concentration.

2. You're overpaying by _a lot_. The luxury name brand cream will cost maybe 10x more than the similarly sized $9 bottle of retinol from the ordinary, but it will only contain some fraction of retinol.

Tbf this has been slowly changing and I see even La Roche Posay sells retinol bottles for $50. Insane markup, but smaller than what was the case 5 years ago.

This is all compounded with the fact that it's very difficult to tell if your anti aging cream is actually working from your own experience:

- its effect is slow acting

- it's difficult to compare the result with the counterfactual, unless e.g. you only use it on half your face

New comment by maest in "The 100k whys of AI"

maest — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:01:39 +0000

> the biblical whitewashed tomb.

What does this mean?

New comment by maest in "Kirkland Roundabouts"

maest — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:54:34 +0000

I'm all for hating bad infrastructure, but this roundabout seems pretty straightforward? Maybe it's different when you're actually driving on it, but from a topdown view it's clear it's a central roundabout with some extra sidelanes to avoid the roundabout if you're immediately turning right.

New comment by maest in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

maest — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:00:09 +0000

"fair" involves a value judgement and requires a moral system. "even" is pure mathematics.

> I think it's fair to say that some jobs do actually deserve to be compensated more highly?

Agreeing with that is easy. Agreeing with which jobs should be compensated more highly is hard. Because everyone has different morality systems.

> To me it seems that the problem is how much wealth is concentrating in such few hands

I know people who strongly believe Bezos and other billionaires are being compensated for the value they've brought to their customers via their businesses.