Hacker News: oivey

New comment by oivey in "NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead"

oivey — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 06:37:06 +0000

Pretty good odds we’ll all be dead in 100 years, and whatever guess we make about what the long game entails will be wrong.

New comment by oivey in "Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions"

oivey — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 22:28:21 +0000

That’s not at all how lawyers or businesses work. The job of the lawyer is to represent the client. Lawyers didn’t ultimately decide to use the ToS in this way, Disney did. Disney estimated the reputational risk and calling attention to their morally (and legally) questionable ToS was worth the risk.

Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.

New comment by oivey in "Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions"

oivey — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:25:04 +0000

1. There doesn’t have to be a blank screen. Major League Baseball’s streaming service, for example, plays highlights or a placeholder video saying a commercial break is in progress.

2. What? They own ESPN which is producing the content, right?

Baseball literally has an ad-free tier for its live streaming service. I’m sure it’s not the only live service that does.

None of your points seem well considered. Why run interference for these companies?

New comment by oivey in "Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions"

oivey — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 12:19:38 +0000

Incredibly irrelevant. By asserting their ToS this way, they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.

New comment by oivey in "Human brain is two separate organs, Stanford Medicine-led research finds"

oivey — Sat, 19 Sep 2026 09:03:07 +0000

Possibly making matters worse, this is from Stanford where they had the university president caught engaging in fraud on Alzheimer’s research.

New comment by oivey in "Felony charges for citizen deleting phone data at US Border"

oivey — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 19:26:53 +0000

Not sure what way you’re trying to land with this rhetorical question, but the Republicans, right? Biden took office in January 2021, and vaccines began to roll out around April.

New comment by oivey in "NSF pilots 4-year PhDs with industry research placements"

oivey — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 03:50:08 +0000

I guess people doing night school maybe? That’s pretty clearly not what this is.

New comment by oivey in "Post-Mythos Cybersecurity: Keep calm and carry on"

oivey — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 19:58:59 +0000

Will the intelligent agents be plugging the infected USB sticks in?

New comment by oivey in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

oivey — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:12:07 +0000

Bonkers to call college graduates deadbeats. These aren’t addicts or slackers. They had to have some level of achievement their whole lives and managed to finish a degree.

New comment by oivey in "New U.S. college grads now have higher unemployment than the average worker"

oivey — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:05:03 +0000

Getting on disability is insanely difficult and pays jack shit. That is not a US equivalent by any measure.

New comment by oivey in "Maryland citizens hit with $2B power grid upgrade for out-of-state AI"

oivey — Mon, 11 May 2026 05:43:21 +0000

> Excess solar power generated by ordinary consumers is probably being priced correctly

Do you have any evidence for this position? Is this just regulations giving you bad vibes? I’m pretty sure everyone was quite aware the sun doesn’t shine at night whenever the previous rules and regulations were written. Your analysis isn’t breaking new ground.

New comment by oivey in "New US phone network for Christians to block porn and gender-related content"

oivey — Sat, 02 May 2026 16:54:55 +0000

No? Christianity, for example, has changed massively over time. You can pick any denomination, and it’s true.

You can also look at new religions, denominations, or sects popping up. The purpose of religion is at its core supposed to be spirituality.

New comment by oivey in "US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid"

oivey — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 15:07:57 +0000

At a certain point, grades become arbitrary and won’t necessarily select for the best candidates. Obviously the current system doesn’t, either.

The actual solution is to increase the number of slots for training doctors to match the huge number of qualified applicants. It makes even more sense given that there is a shortage of doctors and health care costs are astronomical.

New comment by oivey in "FSF trying to contact Google about spammer sending 10k+ mails from Gmail account"

oivey — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:04:08 +0000

It’s free, but it’s not like they’re running Gmail as a charity, either. It has revenue and contributes to their other businesses.

New comment by oivey in "15 years of FP64 segmentation, and why the Blackwell Ultra breaks the pattern"

oivey — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 05:16:54 +0000

Even that is arguably not lucky, it just followed a non-obvious trajectory. Graphics uses a fair amount of linear algebra, so people with large scale physical modeling needs (among many) became interested. To an extent the deep learning craze kicked off because of developments in computation on GPUs enabled economical training.

New comment by oivey in "Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems"

oivey — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 03:33:50 +0000

Again, the old car comparison is demonstrably untrue. To put the same example forward, computer modeling has wildly changed and accelerated car design in ways that were impossible for any sum of money in the 70s.

I think part of why this is hard to believe is that people strongly believe in the concept that time is money. On the margins for decisions like hiring someone to mow your lawn, it is true. For large scale things, you often cannot accelerate processes no matter how much money you dump into it. A good example of this is how long it has taken China to industrialize.

To be clear also, you have to prove your point that #2 is outpacing #1. The fact that the price keeps going up is not proof as there are other explanations. The poor quality of domestic manufacturers and their bad business practices, for example.

New comment by oivey in "Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems"

oivey — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:29:21 +0000

> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.

You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”

When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.

New comment by oivey in "Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems"

oivey — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 07:34:43 +0000

I don’t think this is true. Advancements in technology often make things possible that previously were not at any price. Engines, for example, are better than ever in part due to computer modeling that would have been impossible in the 70s. Same deal with aerodynamics, safety features, and a million other things. In the 70s, you couldn’t have those things for any price. They required decades of development in other sectors to open possibilities for automobiles.

New comment by oivey in "Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality"

oivey — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:34:31 +0000

That is a low n, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. Surely random anecdotes (n=1) are even less powerful?

New comment by oivey in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

oivey — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:23:57 +0000

That’s a strange comparison to make. Those are entirely different sectors and sorts of engineering projects. In this example, also, SpaceX built all of that on Earth.

Why not do the obvious comparison with terrestrial data centers?