Hacker News: mcmoor

New comment by mcmoor in "Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau"

mcmoor — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 05:02:06 +0000

This is why I don't trust libertarians in office. They're incentivised to do a bad job.

New comment by mcmoor in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

mcmoor — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 07:40:28 +0000

There are a lot of ocean, but limited shores. I guess that's the only economical place to build it, but of course it blocks scenery. If people truly built it in open ocean, less people will complain.

New comment by mcmoor in "A crime doesn't make a child an adult"

mcmoor — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:27:12 +0000

> I wish people would stop using the word “child” in an effort to minimize criminal behavior by young adults. A 16 or 17 year old isn’t a “child.”

This reminds me of a horrific study (that keeps getting repeated over and over!) that claims that child death rate of covid is actually not as low as people thought. Then it turns out that their definition of child is 0-18, and in the data there's a really sharp turn in death rate for age <10, precisely what people already thought.

New comment by mcmoor in "A crime doesn't make a child an adult"

mcmoor — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 07:22:07 +0000

The theory is that people commit most of their crimes in their prime age of ~15-30. If you lock someone until out of that age, their crime rate will go down on their own. Whether or not this is cruel is another discussion.

This is actually a problem for rehabilitation studies, since now they have to sanitize this effect out of their data on how much rehabilitation treatment actuality works. This and other flaws have tainted some claims that a rehabilitation process is successful.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...

New comment by mcmoor in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

mcmoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:02:26 +0000

Yeah but then each of those websites would only have 1 audience, which would be economically ruinous. Even HN has >1M daily view which is quite a lot of eyes to cater.

I guess there can be a sweet spot in a certain amount of MAU. And this is why I prefer medium-sized subreddit.

New comment by mcmoor in "1worldflag: A blue dot on a transparent background"

mcmoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:38:18 +0000

Seems like his work now is just keep changing thumbnails of his old videos to bait me into rewatching it.

New comment by mcmoor in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

mcmoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 03:09:17 +0000

I think it can be argued that, because human interests are so different and fractal, there's only so much damage that can be done with non-personalized algorithm. Ads for a certain demographic will just alienate the other demographic. But with personalized algorithm, the poison can be customized for each person and be more fatal.

New comment by mcmoor in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

mcmoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:54:38 +0000

I've been forced to do it once for reddit, with the API fiasco, and I don't really notice improvement but I do notice reduced quality of life. Almost no other websites have easily accessible niche memes.

YouTube recommendation is never that good to me. I frequently just scroll desperately and ended up not watching anything, and when I'm peak bored I resort to rewatching my list of liked videos. That's why I feel weird whenever I see projects that want to make YouTube less engaging, it's already not engaging enough for me.

New comment by mcmoor in "Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate social media feeds"

mcmoor — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 02:45:33 +0000

Yeah there is argument that reddit wasn't social media, but currently is trying to be

New comment by mcmoor in "The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games"

mcmoor — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:55:39 +0000

Well there's kind of motte-bailey going around where the law effort is of course focusing on the thing they might win, while common commenters demand vastly more unrealistic things.

New comment by mcmoor in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

mcmoor — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:15:55 +0000

What interesting is that unlike other nations in that list, Indonesians already love soccer to death, literally. But they're still very underrepresented in the world stage.

New comment by mcmoor in "Why isn't the U.S. better at soccer?"

mcmoor — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 01:08:16 +0000

I thought the concrete ground is much more important for basketball, otherwise the ball would bounce all over the place. In comparison, muddy ground for soccer is part of the fun.

New comment by mcmoor in "4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time"

mcmoor — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 09:05:32 +0000

There's so many variants of prisoner's dilemma at this point which have their own winner I give up tracking. I've heard the most "realistic" one have titfortat as winner, but I've also heard that in certain population mixture, the one who defect more wins.

New comment by mcmoor in "Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target"

mcmoor — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:23:30 +0000

Elon Musk seems like an ultimate counterexample of a person that "deserves" his dozens of billions of dollars. Because his name alone for some reason raises the percepted value of a company by that much amount. No amount of one person's or even dozens' hard labour will be able to match this. Of course it may come crashing anytime and Ponzi also had a similar kind of "productivity", but it really shows that not all labours are equal.

New comment by mcmoor in "4K years ago, Mohenjo-daro grew more equal over time"

mcmoor — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 02:39:47 +0000

It's exactly the opposite. With languages/standards, both parties has incentives to have mutual understanding so they don't need anyone else to enforce symbol equality. But with these weights, or money in general, there's huge incentive to deceive each other, so someone has to enforce the equality. That someone can be the parties themselves, but if one party lack the ability, it necessitated the creation of third-party enforcer, which can grow to be a state.

Even then, with languages, whenever there's incentive to deceive it also immediately unravels. See: exaggeration, and necessity to create whole new language of legalese for contracts.

New comment by mcmoor in "I made my phone slow on purpose"

mcmoor — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 01:12:40 +0000

When the reddit API fiasco happened, I'm forcibly stopped from using it. What I found out is that my life quality just decreases without appreciable compensation. Finally after one year, I found out a way to still use those API so I just go back.

It helped that the infinite scroll was never really infinite for me. I run out of content easily and it just makes me stop scrolling for the day. Same in YouTube. Admittedly I don't use Instagram or tiktok so I don't know how bad it'll be.

New comment by mcmoor in "Project Hail Mary – Stellar Navigation Chart"

mcmoor — Fri, 22 May 2026 07:00:23 +0000

I thought orbital mechanics would still create those "shipping lanes" as the most efficient way to go from A to B. Of course with enough fuel you can go anywhere, but shipping specifically will love those reduced costs.

New comment by mcmoor in "Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)"

mcmoor — Thu, 21 May 2026 01:04:34 +0000

I mean there's a reason why USSR got to develop nuclear bomb so quickly.

New comment by mcmoor in "1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries"

mcmoor — Wed, 20 May 2026 02:09:48 +0000

Yeah I mean whoever hosts the server can add some (tiny?) expenses to host a "static" version of their server. Though I'm not sure why spectator mode isn't sufficient.

New comment by mcmoor in "1024000^2 Blocks, 2B2T Minecraft Server World Download Project, and Discoveries"

mcmoor — Tue, 19 May 2026 06:13:10 +0000

Whoever host the server? The difference is instead of only serving 50 people before lowering fps, instead now it can serve much more.