Hacker News: mcguire

New comment by mcguire in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

mcguire — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:29:21 +0000

Out of curiosity, what if the "can be useful" part is Gell-Mann Amnesia?

New comment by mcguire in "Silicon Valley billionaires want the impossible"

mcguire — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:22:22 +0000

"They actually have a great contempt for expertise. They don't see it as necessary because they think that they're the smartest people who've ever lived, because they're the wealthiest people who've ever lived. If they were wrong about anything, then why would they have been so financially successful? This is also where you get the obsession with things like prediction markets. They believe that there are super predictors, that expertise is not necessary to understand or predict what's going to happen in the world, and that they themselves must be experts because they have enormous amounts of money.

"There's a Homer Simpson quote that I like for thinking about this. It's just something that Homer blurts out when someone's talking about someone who lived 150 years ago. He says, "If he's so smart, how come he's dead?" When faced with expertise, they'd be like, "Well, if he's so smart, how come he's poor?" They believe that everything can be quantified, like the utilitarian dream, the eugenicist's dream, a person's IQ, and that money is a good measure of how much someone is worth. So they must be the best and smartest and greatest people who have ever lived."

New comment by mcguire in "Silicon Valley billionaires want the impossible"

mcguire — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:21:31 +0000

"Adam Becker: I've got a magnet on my fridge right now that says the heat death is coming. Certain Silicon Valley visionaries hate the laws of thermodynamics. Others claim that their ideas are thermodynamically inevitable because they've misunderstood thermodynamics. But either way, they've got to grapple with it because it's the ultimate source of these limits. If nothing else stops you, thermodynamics will stop you because entropy is always going to increase."

Silicon Valley billionaires want the impossible

mcguire — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 15:20:11 +0000

Article URL: https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/04/youre-not-going-to-mars-and-you-wont-live-forever-exploding-silicon-valleys-ideology/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44952598

Points: 8

# Comments: 6

Gender bias towards women entrepreneurs by VCs – a randomized response survey

mcguire — Wed, 21 May 2025 15:58:07 +0000

Article URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691066.2025.2493049

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44052850

Points: 16

# Comments: 4

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 01:00:26 +0000

Don't forget that people don't really want factory jobs, which suck; they want union jobs that pay well and don't kill them.

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:57:24 +0000

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Mercantilism.html

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:50:18 +0000

Don't confuse the Goldman Sachs branch of the Democratic party with Musk/Bezos/et al bankrolling the Republican party.

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:37:20 +0000

Well, now, that depends on when and who exactly is involved in large scale protests against the Trump administration.

If they call out the active duty military against middle-aged, white, protestors, they'll have a problem. If it's against students and minorities,...

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:34:48 +0000

This is the biggest lesson of the first quarter of the 21st century.

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:29:53 +0000

https://apnews.com/live/donald-trump-news-updates-4-29-2025#...

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:27:49 +0000

That is what Amazon said in their comments disavowing the additional information.

New comment by mcguire in "Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume will plummet 35% next week"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:25:58 +0000

Amazon reportedly threatened that this morning.

They backed down immediately after Trump (or someone at the Whitehouse) called Bezos.

New comment by mcguire in "Retailers will soon have only about 7 weeks of full inventories left"

mcguire — Thu, 01 May 2025 00:05:37 +0000

The usual HN response to wealth inequality is "why do you care how much they have?" The answer is, of course, that money is power and the power that many of the wealthy are exercising is not to the benefit of most people.

New comment by mcguire in "The cultural divide between mathematics and AI"

mcguire — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:27:29 +0000

Fundamentally, mathematics is about understanding why something is true or false.

Modern AI is about "well, it looks like it works, so we're golden".

New comment by mcguire in "The cultural divide between mathematics and AI"

mcguire — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 20:24:27 +0000

Many years ago I heard a mathematician speaking about some open problem and he said, "Sure, it's possible that there is a simple solution to the problem using basic techniques that everyone has just missed so far. And if you find that solution, mathematics will pat you on the head and tell you to run off and play.

"Mathematics advances by solving problems using new techniques because those techniques open up new areas of mathematics."

New comment by mcguire in "First ammonia-fueled ship hits a snag"

mcguire — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 19:51:55 +0000

The only confirmed example I know of is Harley-Davidson, roughly during the boom of cruiser motorcycles (1995-2010?): They only ran one shift, but the PR of waiting lists and extremely high instant resale prices made the choice appealing in the face of the capital costs.

New comment by mcguire in "Truth Functional Logic for Hackers"

mcguire — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 19:14:34 +0000

The important part is at the end of the article: "For those interested in building a stronger foundation in logic, the Open Logic Project provides excellent free educational resources on propositional and predicate logic, formal proof systems, and other topics such as modal logic and set theory - all targetted towards a non-mathematical audience."

https://openlogicproject.org/

New comment by mcguire in "CDC data are disappearing"

mcguire — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:48:55 +0000

See maternal mortality in Texas.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/12/06/texas-maternal-morta...

New comment by mcguire in "String of recent killings linked to Bay Area 'Zizians'"

mcguire — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 00:39:20 +0000

So, like Hacker News?