Hacker News: pasttense01

New comment by pasttense01 in "Alzheimer's Blood Tests Offer New Promise to Diagnose and Predict the Disease"

pasttense01 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:40:43 +0000

Considering the very poor treatment options available, I would rather live in blissful ignorance.

New comment by pasttense01 in "US House lawmakers release draft bill to prohibit state AI rules"

pasttense01 — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:23:26 +0000

The best solution is to have uniform federal regulation with no state laws.

The not as good solution is to have state regulation. Note this means companies will generally adopt policies nationally to meet the requirements of the big, restrictive states (California, etc)

The worst solution is the House approach which will ban state regulation accompanied by the status quo of no federal regulation.

New comment by pasttense01 in "The dead economy theory"

pasttense01 — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:58:55 +0000

Only a very small percent of cases go before a jury; the vast majority are decided by a judge by himself.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

pasttense01 — Thu, 28 May 2026 20:32:04 +0000

Something many people here miss: UCSD is a selective institution. UC San Diego’s most recent published first-year acceptance rate is about 28.4% for fall 2025, based on 136,740 applicants and 38,846 admits. UCSD’s own admissions page also summarizes this as a 28% admit rate. The lousy students aren't even going to apply since they know they will be rejected. So we are not talking about an open enrollment institution where you would expect a significant number of students to need remedial math help; we are talking about the cream of the crop of California high school graduates many of which don't know high school math.

New comment by pasttense01 in "California high-speed rail price tag jumps to $231B, nearly 7x 2008 estimate"

pasttense01 — Fri, 01 May 2026 02:24:15 +0000

"Turning a whole lot of flights into energy and carbon-saving train trips is a huge benefit."

It's a question of what gets the most bang for the buck. Suppose you spent $230 billion on replacing fossil fuel with renewables for electricity generation, on switching to EVs from gasoline powered cars, on insulating houses? I think you get a lot more bang for the buck from these or lots of other activities.

New comment by pasttense01 in "U.S. at Fault in Strike on School in Iran, Preliminary Inquiry Says"

pasttense01 — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:46:04 +0000

In this case they were using very expensive munitions which go exactly where they were targeted to go; they were not using cheap, dump bombs which have a wide margin of error.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Anthropic AI tool sparks selloff from software to broader market"

pasttense01 — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:38:07 +0000

So why doesn't ChatGPT rely on higher quality sources as a default?

New comment by pasttense01 in "Amazon closing its Fresh and Go stores"

pasttense01 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 22:55:52 +0000

Walmart bought out jet.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet.com

New comment by pasttense01 in "Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'"

pasttense01 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:46:40 +0000

Natural resources aren't that important anymore. Look at Singapore with essentially no natural resources, but a high standard of living for example. And the U.S. has strong natural resources, but they represent a fairly small portion of the economy.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Mozilla's new CEO is doubling down on an AI future for Firefox"

pasttense01 — Tue, 16 Dec 2025 17:16:25 +0000

Switch to an AT&T MVNO that gives you a lot more than 5 GB of hotspot for less than $80/month:

https://prepaidcompare.net/

New comment by pasttense01 in "Brexit reduced UK GDP by 6-8%, investments by 12-18% [pdf]"

pasttense01 — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 21:37:45 +0000

Haven't you followed Trump's tariffs policies at all? He wants big tariffs against Canada and Mexico and almost everyone else.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Stephen Miller's Quota Likely Drove Korean Arrests in Immigration Raid"

pasttense01 — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 14:40:14 +0000

The battery plant was just to make batteries for EVs. The Trump administration has made clear it is anti-EV, so the Trump administration would not consider this a significant loss.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office"

pasttense01 — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 01:59:41 +0000

But only a small percent of people work in those highly specialized jobs.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Why are we pretending AI is going to take all the jobs?"

pasttense01 — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 17:13:44 +0000

While companies will raise prices as much as they can, remember there are many competitive AI companies--so free market competition will keep prices in check.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Man wearing metallic necklace dies after being sucked into MRI machine"

pasttense01 — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 15:24:50 +0000

The people getting MRIs are sicker than the general population so the facility should have people available to help getting people up after being scanned.

New comment by pasttense01 in "'Universal cancer vaccine' trains the immune system to kill any tumor"

pasttense01 — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:58:07 +0000

All we want is accurate titles, not clickbait ones.

New comment by pasttense01 in "'Universal cancer vaccine' trains the immune system to kill any tumor"

pasttense01 — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 02:54:20 +0000

If you ask: out of all the studies which have done well in mice what percent lead to successful drugs for humans: the answer is a very small percent.

New comment by pasttense01 in "NASA Is Worth Saving"

pasttense01 — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 02:38:28 +0000

There are several rocket launch companies; Blue Origin looks like it may be the closest competitor.

New comment by pasttense01 in "RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines"

pasttense01 — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 05:54:18 +0000

What I read elsewhere is that members of the committee serve a 4 year term. Since Biden's term was 4 years this means that all members' terms ran out sometime during Biden's term--so either new members were appointed by him or existing members were re-appointed by him.

New comment by pasttense01 in "Federal agencies continue terminating all funding to Harvard"

pasttense01 — Sun, 18 May 2025 01:10:31 +0000

The President of Harvard University is a Jew. Do you really think he is going to allow Harvard to engage in anti-Jewish policies?