Hacker News: oa335

New comment by oa335 in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

oa335 — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:14:38 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

New comment by oa335 in "The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan (2015)"

oa335 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 02:26:16 +0000

that websites estimates are definitely too low - e.g. there are definitely more than 40 Uzbek people in Chicago... I've been to 3 uzbek restaurants in Chicago proper myself.

New comment by oa335 in "The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan (2015)"

oa335 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 21:25:42 +0000

"There's apparently only ~2000 Uzbek-Americans in all of northern IL"

where did you get this number? does that include chicago, because i live in Chicago area ... seems low.

New comment by oa335 in "SWE-1.7 Reach Near GPT 5.5 and Opus Intelligence"

oa335 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:57:01 +0000

> "A company whose first demo was completely fraudulent"

Could you expand on this?

New comment by oa335 in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

oa335 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 19:24:51 +0000

Agree 100%. Costco exemplifies american dream... recent immigrants perusing well-stocked aisles, friendly employees, ample parking, cheap tasty hot dogs, etc.

New comment by oa335 in "GLM 5.2 beats Claude in our benchmarks"

oa335 — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 22:21:40 +0000

> it costs >1000% to run inference

do you have a source for this claim? i thought LLM providers earn high margins from inference (charged by token). is this no longer the case?

New comment by oa335 in "Total Iran Economic Damage Estimate"

oa335 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 22:00:29 +0000

"Our most likely estimate is that replacement costs are approximately $91 billion. Military and strategic assets — nuclear facilities, missile and drone production infrastructure, air bases, naval vessels, and air defense systems — make up roughly half that total, at approximately $46 billion, which is equivalent to 4-6 years of Iran’s pre-war defense budget"

How exactly did they arrive at this estimate? I would like to see a building-by-building breakdown, or at least a methodology. Feels very vibe-researched tbh.

New comment by oa335 in "There Is(Ǝ) – Such That (∋)"

oa335 — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:56:37 +0000

as a math major i had the same confusion; for such that i use "s.t.". but apparently peano used ∋ to mean such that:

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/15455/backwards-eps...

New comment by oa335 in "pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution"

oa335 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 17:25:45 +0000

> 8 queries implies 8 tables, which is well under the limit for both Postgres and MySQL where the planner may give up and choose a suboptimal plan.

I'm not sure thats true for Postgres. optimal join ordering is np-hard, and finding an optimal join requires exhaustive search through n! combinations (n=number of joins) - thats why postgres generally uses heuristics to figure out join order. 8 is also the default value of "join_collapse_limit" setting in postgres, so it can't ever reliably optimize over 8 joins at a time. Additionally, postgres starts using "genetic algorithms" aka testing random combinations of joins with 12 joins by default (geqo_threshold setting).

I generally agree its better to use database to its fullest, but I would say 8 joins is probably the "limit". Internally at work I've advised teams to try to avoid anything more than 6 joins for "hot-path" queries.

New comment by oa335 in "Dopamine Fracking"

oa335 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 13:13:23 +0000

why doesnt hackernews count as social media?

New comment by oa335 in "Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level, sources say"

oa335 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:17:35 +0000

compare list of conflicts in europe to those in middle east over past from 1000 AD - 1900AD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe

in particular state formation in late medieval and early modern europe saw immense bloodshed and turmoil.

middle east was comparatively peaceful in contrast, especially post mongol conquest.

e.g. compare 1700s and 1800s europe to middle east

New comment by oa335 in "pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution"

oa335 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:24:30 +0000

Can anyone explain why I would want to use this over an orchestration tool that lives outside the DB? Read through the Readme and some of the examples, I still don't get it.

New comment by oa335 in "Why China got rich and India didn't"

oa335 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:57:04 +0000

> Those numbers also show why the “wealth transfer from India” is mostly fake. India and China were both at a subsistence level. There was no meaningful wealth to transfer.

Can you expand? What was the EIC doing in India?

New comment by oa335 in "Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target"

oa335 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:32:45 +0000

Not an Elon fan, but markets dictate the value, not analyst reports or "fundamentals". The stock is simply worth whatever people will pay for it. The fact that people are paying an implied valuation of 2T for it currently is a strong signal IMO.

New comment by oa335 in "Show HN: Streambed – Stream Postgres to Iceberg on S3, Supports Postgres Wire"

oa335 — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:21:05 +0000

nice work! we have handrolled something similar at work.

do you have any perf metrics? throughput, end-to-end latency, etc?

New comment by oa335 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

oa335 — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:03:44 +0000

only when rhetorically convenient i suspect

New comment by oa335 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

oa335 — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:49:10 +0000

> Just because Bangladeshis have the right of self determination doesn't mean we have to or want to live in a country with them.

why do you believe you and and your family (parents and sibling) belong in the USA?

New comment by oa335 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

oa335 — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:44:44 +0000

it depends greatly on the majority though. e.g. he believes democracy should be suppressed ("crushed") in Muslim- majority nations, etc.

New comment by oa335 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

oa335 — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:41:15 +0000

> People really need to read their history.

agreed.

but i bet i can make a bunch of confounding factors appear.

from 1800 to 1870 gdp per capita growth rate was about 1.1 percent.

from 1870 to right before great depression growth rate was about 1.6 percent.

from start of great depression until 2022 it was about 1.8 percent.

economy and standards of living have gotten better faster as the state has gotten more bureacratic.

source: Maddison project database, see excel file here: https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/relea...

New comment by oa335 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

oa335 — Sun, 31 May 2026 19:34:38 +0000

> same progressives that gave us eugenics

ray, why are you now cosplaying as someone who doesn't believe in racial hierarchies?