Hacker News: mutatio

New comment by mutatio in "Eels are fish"

mutatio — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:25:47 +0000

I think it's not about diversity, but lineage. The phenotype for "fish" is so tight and well defined; a salmon is closer related to a human in the tree of life than to a coelacanth even though both are categorised as "fish".

New comment by mutatio in "A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages"

mutatio — Sat, 02 Aug 2025 08:02:30 +0000

Crab mentality, the closer proximity to your profession / place in society the more resentment/envy. This is a win for some of us in tech, it's just not us, so we cannot allow it! Article even mentions the age of "24" as if someone of that age is inherently undeserving.

New comment by mutatio in "The US island that speaks Elizabethan English"

mutatio — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 08:32:38 +0000

As a Brit it's really quite amazing how strong the West Country accent has been retained, almost like a comedic caricature.

As a segue I'll recommend "Time Team", if you listen to Phil Harding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Harding_(archaeologist)) you can hear the similarities.

New comment by mutatio in "Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting"

mutatio — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 21:42:21 +0000

Make no mistake, this display was a disgrace, but... after the annexation of Crimea the EU (Germany) moved ahead with Nord Stream 2, we are culpable too, massively. Ironically there's a famous video of none other than Trump lambasting the Germans about it.

New comment by mutatio in "No Bitcoin ETFs at Vanguard? Here's why"

mutatio — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 18:16:37 +0000

I've worked on such a platform: Hyperledger from IBM et al. It was generic enough we could deploy our own "smart contract" / business logic layer via a Lisp dialect built in Go.

New comment by mutatio in "Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza"

mutatio — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 14:25:14 +0000

That aligns with my point, rather than make it moot.

New comment by mutatio in "Israel, Hamas reach ceasefire deal to end 15 months of war in Gaza"

mutatio — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 13:10:45 +0000

Because it's a cultural arms race. What kind of nation do you think is capable of manifesting in those local conditions, a progressive social democracy like Sweden?

New comment by mutatio in "U.S. math scores drop on major international test"

mutatio — Wed, 11 Dec 2024 07:32:10 +0000

There's probably high genetic kinship (Britain) for Canada and Australia amongst 'white' people, the US too has a large body of genetic kinship with Britain, it's definitely not your 180.0.

New comment by mutatio in "The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms"

mutatio — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 19:12:33 +0000

Likely because some core components of health care cannot be comoditised via technology, there's still vast human involvement from diagnosis to surgery, all the way to social support of the aged. Everything is getting stretched at the edges by aging populations in most of the developed world meaning medical and technological advances don't even touch the sides.

I'm in the UK (NHS), I don't see a bright future for systems like the NHS or mostly private systems like the US. There's an extreme core cost which "systems" cannot make disappear.

New comment by mutatio in "UK workers must keep all customer tips under new law"

mutatio — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:15:13 +0000

Since the Tudors, before the US as we know it.

New comment by mutatio in "Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules"

mutatio — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:26:09 +0000

Ireland having tax sovereignty was doing what it felt was best for itself, the low tax ecosystem it has fostered is in its benefit. Much like car and farming tax incentives favour Germany and France respectively.

Now perhaps the EU as a entity is moving towards collective taxation policies, but it's not there yet and there's still an aspect of getting away with certain fiscal policies depending on any member nations "clout". Perhaps Ireland is mostly guilty of not having said clout.

New comment by mutatio in "Apple must pay 13B euros in back taxes, EU's top court rules"

mutatio — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 09:12:19 +0000

Because tax incentives do not exist in the EU, like the German car industry.

New comment by mutatio in "Baseline pupil size related to cognitive ability in proper lighting conditions"

mutatio — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 07:58:35 +0000

I think it's an Americanism to think humans in Africa are a monolith. At least here in the UK the idea of having the most genetic diversity goes hand in hand with correlating with lots of races within.

New comment by mutatio in "Baseline pupil size related to cognitive ability in proper lighting conditions"

mutatio — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 07:55:36 +0000

Isn't the actual idea that any given individual has more genetic points of difference to any other random individual, even within a racial group, than genetic differences between races. So I don't understand the assertion that the idea that there aren't some foundational genetic correlations tied to race - there are. I'd be intrigued to get a measure of genetic distance between individual chimpanzees vs. humans to see if the standard deviation shows a similar pattern, of sexual selection selecting for diversity between individuals.

New comment by mutatio in "Google is the only search engine that works on Reddit now, thanks to AI deal"

mutatio — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 16:07:26 +0000

It's funny in the context of Google's past motto of "don't be evil". I feel the right thing for Google here would have been to decline any deal regarding exclusivity, then Reddit wouldn't have pulled the trigger with its robots.txt update. The entire manoeuvre required both parties.

New comment by mutatio in "Jiff: Datetime library for Rust"

mutatio — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 07:12:23 +0000

Looks like it should be supported: https://docs.rs/jiff/latest/jiff/struct.Span.html#impl-Add%3...

New comment by mutatio in "Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments"

mutatio — Fri, 21 Jun 2024 21:46:02 +0000

But it's a one time event. What comes next and what if there are negative externalities?

It feels like a land grab, the real failure here is a lack of construction, and that isn't the fault of people renting via Airbnb.

New comment by mutatio in "IPC in Rust – A Ping Pong Comparison"

mutatio — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 05:29:56 +0000

Is shared memory access naturally async like IO/io_uring? If not, asking for async is misplaced and any implementation would be synonymous with wrapping sync calls in `async fn` wrappers.

New comment by mutatio in "Don't name packages common nouns"

mutatio — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 15:07:17 +0000

My preference is common nouns, generally it's the most concise and precise naming, I understand the issue in Go however, so the argument carries weight. What I would say is redundant verbosity is a fair halfway house.

Namespacing in languages such as Rust (modules) are probably most favourable to me, i.e. f64::min/max ~ u64::min/max or a hypothetical crypto::rand() math::rand().

New comment by mutatio in "HMRC offers a Linux version of Basic PAYE Tools, but it recently stopped working"

mutatio — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 14:02:47 +0000

I get it, it feels like a regression to me too, but there is method to the madness, their MTD idea is that you don't just plop numbers into some boxes, that they are a product of accountancy software (so that they're accurate).

I've seen some tools bypass this and still allow you to input numbers manually but just via the vendor API.