Hacker News: schemester

New comment by schemester in "James Watson has died"

schemester — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:23:35 +0000

Nonsense. By 2007 it was already a settled matter. There had been decades of attempts to tease out environmental influences. We’d seen that no amount of education funding, government employment, government schools, adoption by white parents, or any other way of approaching the matter would boost black test scores close to whites’ in America. Nor could blacks find a way themselves to do it, not in any locality. It was also clear by that time that serious environmental influences on individuals were small relative to the observed performance differences between blacks and whites, which meant the theory that its environment would imply insane levels of deprivation that weren’t happening. Social scientists had already given up.

New comment by schemester in "PSF has withdrawn $1.5M proposal to US Government grant program"

schemester — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 02:16:39 +0000

th asserts “If 500 people submit talks and 394 are men, then ~79% will likely be by men.”

I didn’t misunderstand. That is simply nonsense.

New comment by schemester in "Google does little to reduce advertisers' costs"

schemester — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:46:56 +0000

The FTC doesn’t have that power.

New comment by schemester in "The Pentagon’s $52k trash can"

schemester — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 17:35:29 +0000

No, of course not, if your military doesn’t develop tech faster than the competition then you lose.

New comment by schemester in "Elon Musk Silences Tesla Critics by Deactivating Twitter Accts,Calling Employers"

schemester — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 06:46:34 +0000

Why don’t you complain about Facebook and YouTube doing this?

New comment by schemester in "Vasectomies rose after the end of Roe"

schemester — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 10:11:07 +0000

No, political ideology is genetic.

New comment by schemester in "US banking crisis: Warren Buffett says bosses should face ‘punishment’"

schemester — Mon, 08 May 2023 03:54:21 +0000

He and Buffett (among many others) have often talked about these misaligned incentives in the past. He is not sharing any novel insight here.

New comment by schemester in "US banking crisis: Warren Buffett says bosses should face ‘punishment’"

schemester — Mon, 08 May 2023 03:52:29 +0000

How much more money do engineers or engineering firms make by designing dams that fail and boats that sink?

New comment by schemester in "US banking crisis: Warren Buffett says bosses should face ‘punishment’"

schemester — Mon, 08 May 2023 03:29:13 +0000

Banks are a specific situation where employees can get one-sided rewards for increasing exposure to tail risks with other people’s money. It’s to avoid misaligned incentives with delayed (by years) feedback.

New comment by schemester in "SSD as Long Term Storage Testing"

schemester — Sat, 01 Apr 2023 02:14:01 +0000

Those are powered on when the laptop is on.

New comment by schemester in "Japan births fall to record low as population crisis deepens"

schemester — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 05:55:37 +0000

East Asia is also depopulating.

New comment by schemester in "Tesla announces unlimited overnight charging for $30 per month"

schemester — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 05:54:44 +0000

You don’t. It’s one choice in the electricity market.

New comment by schemester in "Seattle could become the first city to ban caste discrimination"

schemester — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 10:34:42 +0000

Being homeless is better when there’s less crime.

New comment by schemester in "Man charged in killing at Arizona Intel facility"

schemester — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 07:15:11 +0000

Derrick Lemond Simmons had a prior conviction for aggregated assault with a deadly weapon in 2001, according to another article (not just an arrest: https://www.azfamily.com/2023/02/18/man-accused-killing-cowo...

This is not about “mental health” and employers just need to pay employees money. Employees can take up the burden of not being a murderous psycho on their own time.

New comment by schemester in "An intutive counterexample to the axiom of choice"

schemester — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 08:46:06 +0000

The sets {x+n : n in Z} where x in R are almost entirely sets comprised of only noncomputable elements. We don’t even need AoC to choose an element from each: pick the smallest positive element (the element in (0,1]).

There is nothing special about noncomputable set elements.

New comment by schemester in "Casio-F-91W die-shot"

schemester — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 20:34:58 +0000

If the layout had copyright protection, this would still be fair use.

New comment by schemester in "A Sign That Tuition Is Too High: Some Colleges Are Slashing It in Half"

schemester — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 08:57:45 +0000

The school is not remotely elite, that is a fact, and the list of majors it offers is a tell. You think I’m saying the majors list _causes_ it to be elite or not. Or you don’t really think that.

New comment by schemester in "A Sign That Tuition Is Too High: Some Colleges Are Slashing It in Half"

schemester — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 05:07:03 +0000

Explain how this isn’t non-elite.

https://colby-sawyer.edu/academics/majors

New comment by schemester in "Billionaire Winklevoss Twins’ $900M Disaster Is No Shock"

schemester — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 13:01:12 +0000

I don’t know who regulates what, but short-term loans are not securities.

New comment by schemester in "Mutual funds that consistently beat the market. Not one of 2,132"

schemester — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 23:45:03 +0000

Of course a mutual fund isn’t going to beat the market in each year. It would have to time the market perfectly through what we’ve gone through. That involves placing bets on other people’s opinions of companies instead the company itself.