Hacker News: praxulus

New comment by praxulus in "One-Electron Universe"

praxulus — Sun, 20 Sep 2026 16:46:02 +0000

Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.

New comment by praxulus in "EV demand up 50% in France and Germany since Iran war"

praxulus — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 22:31:05 +0000

We're commenting on the fact that demand has surged in the last few months. Russian and American behavior from a decade ago didn't (directly) cause that.

New comment by praxulus in "We Will Not Be Divided"

praxulus — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 06:28:58 +0000

The government can refuse to buy a fighter jet that runs software they don't want.

Is it really reasonable to refuse to buy a fighter jet because somebody at Lockheed who works on a completely unrelated project uses claude to write emails?

New comment by praxulus in "A flawed paper in management science has been cited more than 6k times"

praxulus — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 19:30:02 +0000

It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems.

However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.

New comment by praxulus in "Why did Crunchyroll's subtitles just get worse?"

praxulus — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:27:09 +0000

>A customer actually has no competitor to move to - crunchyroll has a defacto monopoly (barring piracy).

When fansubs were good, Crunchyroll was forced to compete with them on quality. It's hard to convince people to pay when the alternative is both free and much higher quality.

Now that they've driven fansubs groups "out of business", they no longer face the same degree of competitive pressure to deliver a quality product.

New comment by praxulus in "States and cities decimated SROs, Americans' lowest-cost housing option"

praxulus — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 20:03:06 +0000

I know a lot of Gen Z and even Millennial adults who are still living at home well after finishing school. I'm sure plenty of them would love to get out of their parents' homes but can't afford current rents, but might be able to afford an SRO.

In general I don't think many homeless people are going straight from the street to their own market rate unit. However some of them might be able to move into a sibling's spare bedroom after their adult nephew moves out.

New comment by praxulus in "Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? (NBER)"

praxulus — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 15:01:02 +0000

Yes, part III section C is all about the effect of house prices on fertility. There's certainly an effect, but previous studies have shown that housing costs can only account for a small share of the drop in fertility.

New comment by praxulus in "Google Fit APIs get shut down in 2025, might break fitness devices"

praxulus — Tue, 07 May 2024 12:30:54 +0000

How is this creating value for shareholders? They wasted a bunch of engineer and pm salaries building useless products that never made (and now never will make) any significant money.

New comment by praxulus in "The Seattle Public Library is reducing maximum digital holds"

praxulus — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 03:22:11 +0000

Is there reason to believe authors aren't getting a cut of the library license costs?

I used to buy my ebooks until I realized libraries had ebook catalogues. A large portion of the books I've borrowed are sales the author lost, they ought to be compensated somehow.

New comment by praxulus in "Whistleblower alleges Booz Allen was overcharging U.S. taxpayers for losses"

praxulus — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 15:21:05 +0000

You can, it's called an Alford plea. You maintain your innocence but accept the plea deal anyway.

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

New comment by praxulus in "The gamification of reading is changing how we approach books"

praxulus — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 22:08:19 +0000

I've been aiming for 12 books a year for the last 5 years or so. Sometimes I'll go months without picking up a book, and the challenge is helpful for getting me back into it.

New comment by praxulus in "If we want a shift to walking we need to prioritize dignity"

praxulus — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 04:45:35 +0000

I'm an anti-car urbanist, but this kind of comment makes me embarrassed to be one. Different people like different things. The fact that something is bad for the climate doesn't magically make it unpleasant for everyone. That remains true even if they accept the climate impacts.

It's true that the inevitable conclusion is that we can't rely on individual voluntary actions to solve climate change, but the obvious plan B is government regulation, not vigilantism.

New comment by praxulus in "Construction Time Again: The quality crisis in American building"

praxulus — Wed, 05 Jul 2023 05:52:24 +0000

I moved into a house with a yard last year and since the spring it has been nothing but a source of extra chores. Even my dog doesn't care much for it, he's happier going for a walk around the neighborhood.

Different people have different tastes and preferences. Of the ~30,000 municipalities in the country, we have exactly one that resembles the high density walkable/transit-oriented city described above. Do you really think that ratio accurately reflects Americans' preferences?

New comment by praxulus in "My friends who cheated in interviews are getting promoted (2022)"

praxulus — Wed, 10 May 2023 12:57:54 +0000

How is spitballing a presentation cheating? It's the equivalent of taking a test without studying, not presenting somebody else's work as your own.

New comment by praxulus in "The Vietnamese military has an actual troll army and Facebook is its weapon"

praxulus — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:30:59 +0000

The occupy movement had a leader?

New comment by praxulus in "Five Books: The best books on everything"

praxulus — Mon, 08 May 2023 02:13:29 +0000

The first category in the "education" section is a list of the five best novels set in boarding schools. I don't think they're suggesting that reading those books will make you an expert on how to operate/regulate/attend a boarding school.

It's just a bunch of lists of good books for people looking for something to read, arranged by subject. There's nothing wrong with that.

New comment by praxulus in "Why are lithium prices collapsing?"

praxulus — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 13:31:42 +0000

Most Americans already have electric stoves, and its disproportionately higher income people who still cook with gas.

I know this is all based more on vibes than facts though.

New comment by praxulus in "'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco"

praxulus — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 06:17:45 +0000

If anything free education allows you to raise your standards. The group of applicants who are academically qualified should be strictly larger than the group that's both academically qualified and willing to pay tuition. With a larger pool of qualified applicants you can afford to reject more of them.

(Caveat: This doesn't work if the point of your university is mostly to signal that its graduates came from a family wealthy enough to send them to your university.)

New comment by praxulus in "'Algebra for none' fails in San Francisco"

praxulus — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 01:01:36 +0000

I live in Seattle, not San Francisco, but we have some similar issues with our schools. I'd really prefer to send my son to our local public schools, but if they aren't challenging him appropriately then my wife and I obviously aren't going to just give up on his education. We'll either pay for extracurricular enrichment like the person in this article, move to a wealthy suburb, or send him to a private school instead.

That's a much worse outcome from an equity lens, but there's only so much you can expect people to voluntarily sacrifice for the greater good. Asking higher income parents to risk their children's future is a lot.

New comment by praxulus in "Electricity Prices by Country"

praxulus — Sat, 08 Apr 2023 19:08:40 +0000

I guess you could call Uranium nuclei star fossils?