Hacker News: mjh2539

New comment by mjh2539 in "Magnifica Humanitas"

mjh2539 — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:14:28 +0000

The problem with Galileo is that he did not yet have good enough evidence to assert what he was asserting (even though what he was asserting turned out to be true).

New comment by mjh2539 in "Magnifica Humanitas"

mjh2539 — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:06:51 +0000

The point of the Chinese room is to show you that the guy who has memorized the standard responses to various questions in Chinese does not in fact know Chinese. He's mindlessly parroting things.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Magnifica Humanitas"

mjh2539 — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:02:31 +0000

All living things have souls. For most Ur-Platonists (which includes nearly all orthodox Christians, Muslims, Jews, and pagan Greek and Roman philosophers/theologians until the Enlightenment), the soul is:

* what makes a thing what it is (it's form/eidos/essence/universal/nature)

* what makes a thing a living thing at all

* what unifies and coheres the many disparate parts of a living thing

The relevant difference between those of us with human natures and those beings who lacked human natures is that our human nature (i.e. our souls) has the power to come to know universals/natures/forms themselves (albeit imperfectly), whereas other beings do not. For a dog, their senses are acquainted with many instances of cats, but they never are able to go from these individual sense impressions to the form/nature/universal of cat, or ficus carica, or what have you.

New comment by mjh2539 in "A case against Boolean logic"

mjh2539 — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:40:57 +0000

> An example of a programming language with true Boolean logic is APL, where the logical truth values are the numbers "1" and "0" (which is very handy in expressing conditional operations on arrays), while all the programming languages that use "true" and "false" do not use Boolean logic, despite claiming to do so.

So Bash could be considered the red-headed, left-handed sibling to APL?

New comment by mjh2539 in "The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics"

mjh2539 — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:08:31 +0000

If Malaysia can't obtain 30% of its fuel because of the Hormuz closure, they don't just reduce their consumption of fuel by 30%, but make up for most of the deficit by buying it for a higher price somewhere else. But the fuel they buy to make up for the deficit simply means there's less fuel for other folks buying in that market to purchase, which drives up prices. This process repeats until prices stabilize worldwide, which ultimately results in higher prices for fuel in the UK.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Tennessee man jailed 37 days for Trump meme wins settlement after lawsuit"

mjh2539 — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:22:04 +0000

When trying to obtain evidence, investigators or regular officers will make frequent recourse to lies and intimidation to get you to admit to things that you may or may not have done. For example, "If you don't tell us where you were that day, CPS will take your kids away" or "Look, if you just admit what you did, we can let you go" or "We've already detained your wife/brother/mother/father and they've fessed up; just yadayada."

New comment by mjh2539 in "What Gödel Discovered (2020)"

mjh2539 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 03:35:38 +0000

This is the most apt answer I've read thus far.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching"

mjh2539 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 15:37:10 +0000

Perhaps there is a stronger causal relationship between attractiveness in males and intelligence/academic performance than in women.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Lenovo’s new ThinkPads score 10/10 for repairability"

mjh2539 — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 04:35:03 +0000

> One of the biggest repairability wins: fully modular, individually replaceable Thunderbolt ports.

I think I'm going to cry...happy tears. :')

New comment by mjh2539 in "Mammals have evolved into ant eaters 12 times since the dinosaur age – study (2025)"

mjh2539 — Mon, 19 Jan 2026 23:41:02 +0000

Except, as a rule, Jews, Muslims, and some Hindus.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Parental controls aren't for parents"

mjh2539 — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 22:51:06 +0000

In Germany, the state intentionally put children in the custody of pedophiles: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/07/26/the-german-exp...

I have absolutely no faith in German intuitions regarding what is appropriate or inappropriate about the care of children. Ask me again in a century and I will reevaluate my opinion.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Tell HN: Merry Christmas"

mjh2539 — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 05:59:30 +0000

Tidings and good cheer to all.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Big GPUs don't need big PCs"

mjh2539 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:31:11 +0000

I only ever see him on HN. He's smart, kind, and talks about interesting things. Are you sure what you're feeling isn't envy?

New comment by mjh2539 in "Baumol's Cost Disease"

mjh2539 — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 06:46:40 +0000

The cost of services will only decrease if labor inputs decrease in that particular sector more rapidly than the cost of labor increases (due to increased productivity).

New comment by mjh2539 in "IT consultant arrested after posing with gun on LinkedIn"

mjh2539 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:18:19 +0000

Feel free to leave the West Yorkshire police department a message: https://www.westyorkshire.police.uk/form/leave-an-officer-a-...

New comment by mjh2539 in "Pakistan says rooftop solar output to exceed grid demand in some hubs next year"

mjh2539 — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 15:59:59 +0000

Without load balancing, AI datacenters are very swingy (which is bad).

New comment by mjh2539 in "Rats filmed snatching bats from air"

mjh2539 — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:15:42 +0000

The skin of cucurbits is usually fairly high in cucurbitacins (usually much higher than the flesh).

New comment by mjh2539 in "22M Geniuses – China's Greatest Asset and America's Missed Opportunity"

mjh2539 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 15:26:07 +0000

I'm not sure if this helps or hurts your point, but the IQ bump is only for Ashkenazi Jews, and not the Mizrahim, Sephardim, Temanim, Beta Israel, etc. So it's actually more remarkable.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Using Emacs as a TUI"

mjh2539 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 15:54:59 +0000

I usually use emacs-nox when running inside of a terminal. Not sure on how it's related exactly to emacs -nw. I do know it's a separate binary, so infer from that what you will.

New comment by mjh2539 in "Using Emacs as a TUI"

mjh2539 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 02:45:59 +0000

There are dozens of us running it outside of a terminal. Dozens!