Hacker News: shakil

New comment by shakil in "How will the miracle happen today?"

shakil — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 21:13:28 +0000

Lots of interesting things in this miraculous story, but I can assure you none of these miracles would happen without the two words completely left out of the article: white privilege

New comment by shakil in "ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire"

shakil — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 03:10:52 +0000

All the US has to do is: nothing. Stop sending over tank shells [1], Fighter jets and attack helicopters [2], deploying aircraft carriers [3] and stop vetoing UN Security Council resolutions trying to impose a ceasefire [4]

1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/09/biden-admini... 2. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-25/ty-article/.p... 3. https://www.voanews.com/a/us-aircraft-carrier-to-remain-in-m... 4. https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-un-resolution...

New comment by shakil in "ICJ orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza, stops short of ordering ceasefire"

shakil — Sat, 27 Jan 2024 02:44:01 +0000

Why is this flagged/down voted? Its just a plain statement of fact, supported by credible sources and references. Here's some more references if people think this didn't happen. The IDF attacked and fired on the Nova festival goers with Apache helicopters [1], an Israeli tank fired shells at Kibbutz Be'eri killing hostages and children, and stories of eight babies killed at the kibbutz have been proven to be false, among other things [3], [4]

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/idf-mistakenly-hit-festival-...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be%27eri_massacre#Survivors'_t...

3. https://archive.is/Zn3Bt

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L91kG_bYsn0

New comment by shakil in "The curse of the goitre in Switzerland"

shakil — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 19:32:55 +0000

Iodized salt is almost always the industrially produced variety, pure NaCL and much more salty than the natural varieties - either sea or mountain salts that typically include other minerals and are milder in flavor.

New comment by shakil in "Why doctors in America earn so much"

shakil — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 20:46:24 +0000

The single biggest factor is the cost of medical education. Once a person spends a fortune getting their degree, it creates a gated community that works to preserve its privileges, deny entry to other cheaper alternatives, and keep prices high across the eco-system.

You will see this in any field that transacts with high value goods: real-estate, enterprise software, weapons of war, investment bankers handling M&A ... the higher the cost of the product, the more the people dealing in it feel entitled to charge for their services.

New comment by shakil in "Improving deep sleep may prevent dementia, study finds"

shakil — Wed, 01 Nov 2023 20:39:31 +0000

Here we go again confusing correlation with causation. The medical field is mired with these: eat less to lose weight, reduce cholesterol to prevent heart attacks, reduce stress to prevent stomach ulcers ...

Have they considered people prone to dementia just aren't able to get quality sleep, and both of these are due to some other underlying cause where fixing one doesn't really fix the other?

New comment by shakil in "Hedge Fund Made a Killing Betting Against Lina Khan"

shakil — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 16:29:42 +0000

She's referring to case law. The WSJ and the US Chamber of Commerce have been gunning for Lina Khan for a while now but I wouldn't bet against her. Even when losing, she's expanding how antitrust should be enforced, eg in the FTC v Meta case, the court seemed to accept [1] the FTC's argument about "actual potential competition", setting a precedent that the FTC will likely use in future cases.

1. https://www.wlf.org/2023/02/24/publishing/actual-potential-c...

India Keeps Pulling the Plug on Its Digital Economy

shakil — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 18:31:18 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wsj.com/world/india/india-keeps-pulling-the-plug-on-its-digital-economy-c320a6b6

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512856

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by shakil in "Do high interest rates fix high inflation?"

shakil — Wed, 14 Jun 2023 00:01:08 +0000

Here's a contrarian opinion: Inflation isn't all that bad, if you have a fixed rate loan (i.e. mortgage) that is larger than all your savings put together, and as long as you don't need to sell or refinance, you will come out ahead. Keep in mind inflation requires a wage/price spiral, which means your salaries are also increasing to keep pace with the rising prices, while the loan amount stays the same, so repaying it becomes easier.

New comment by shakil in "Do high interest rates fix high inflation?"

shakil — Tue, 13 Jun 2023 23:45:39 +0000

The article goes into quite a lot of depth about all the sources of inflation and how to fix it without actually mentioning the predominant cause of the latest inflation: Corporate Profits [1]

In Capitalism, we scorn at "price controls", and then go through a tortuous and roundabout mechanism by raising interest rates, so that the increased cost of borrowing causes corporations to cut expenditure which then pushes higher unemployment, reducing purchasing power and consequently reduces demand, all in the hopes that reduced demand would then cause prices to drop. But if the price increase wasn't triggered by higher purchasing power, then this whole rigmarole is meaningless, inflation remains "sticky"

1. https://archive.is/tzeHy

New comment by shakil in "All Those Naked Greeks"

shakil — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 06:29:07 +0000

I'm no admirer of Jordan Peterson, but we don't have to speculate what the religious reaction to this nudity would have been. The Jews were there among the Greeks when all this was happening, and they didn't like it at all [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nudity

New comment by shakil in "The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973"

shakil — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 05:56:10 +0000

Exactly this. There's people responsible for not paying their parking tickets on time, and then there's folks such as Kissinger and Madeleine Albright that have the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on their hands. Lets not sweep it all under the same rug.

New comment by shakil in "Google employees alarmed that the company suddenly expects them to do work"

shakil — Thu, 15 Sep 2022 01:33:32 +0000

IBM is still #1 in patent grants [1] so there's still other groups there going strong I guess

1. https://www.ificlaims.com/rankings-top-50-2021.htm

New comment by shakil in "Former Twitter employee convicted of charges related to spying for Saudis"

shakil — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 23:17:22 +0000

Depends on who is doing the complaining, but yes there is precedent to arresting an employee for "theft of trade secrets" [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov

New comment by shakil in "Ask HN: Why is everything changing too fast?"

shakil — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 21:15:25 +0000

To quote a spiritual/philosophic answer from an Islamic perspective, there's a hadith where the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said: “The Hour will not begin until time passes quickly, so a year will be like a month, and a month will be like a week, and a week will be like a day, and a day will be like an hour, and an hour will be like the burning of a braid of palm leaves"

New comment by shakil in "The Complex Truth About ‘Junk DNA’"

shakil — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 20:50:43 +0000

Any time I read about how some part of the body has no function, I try to remember that our understanding of the body is superficial at best, it was only a 100 years ago when getting your blood sucked by leeches was the standard of care for many conditions. Mother's milk was supposed to contain useless and indigestble substances till it turns out they were important for developing the baby's gut microbiota. Entire organs such as the thymus were considered useless and then we began to understand the critical role they play in our immune systems. Once we consider that even critical muscles waste and atrophy unless used, we have to understand that whatever we retain in our bodies must be absolutely critical to its long-term survival, and there is no such thing as a "junk" component.

New comment by shakil in "Sriracha hit revenue of $150M a year with no sales team or ad spend"

shakil — Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:50:01 +0000

In India, and stretching into the Indian diaspora worldwide, Maggi Hot and Sweet sauce became extremely popular, and for some things such as samosas you can almost never use the regular Heinz ketchup - it has to be paired with Maggi Hot and Sweet.

New comment by shakil in "Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?"

shakil — Fri, 29 May 2020 21:36:52 +0000

If you are bought in to GCP and plan to stay there, then maybe not much. OTOH, Anthos would allow you to do easier migrations from on-prem, support hybrid workloads, or consolidate multi-cloud clusters including those running on say, AWS [1] if you like.

1. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/anthos/multi-cloud-feat...

New comment by shakil in "Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?"

shakil — Fri, 29 May 2020 21:17:06 +0000

Call me biased [1] but K8s will take over the world! Yes you get containers and micro-services and all that good stuff, but now with Anthos [2] its also the best way to achieve multi-cloud and hybrid architectures. What's not to like!

1. I work for GCP 2. https://cloud.google.com/anthos/gke

New comment by shakil in "Association of insulin resistance marker with severity and mortality of Covid-19"

shakil — Fri, 29 May 2020 20:37:14 +0000

> I understand and I'm opposed to things like fat shaming

and then we jump right into it

> witnessing myself how people gorge on junk food and massively sugary starbucks drinks around me, that no, a good portion of those fat people have no hormonal problems

Interesting you brought up genetics earlier in your comment but then ignored it when discussing the "lifestyle choices" of fat people.

It is now established that genetic variations can be responsible for a 1.67 fold higher rate of obesity [1] Just having the wrong genes means more of the calories you consume end up as stored fat, with a subsequent reduction in mitochondrial thermogenesis by a factor of 5 in those cells.

Lets stop blaming "lifestyle choices" and fat people's lack of willpower for this public health crisis and find ways to control it through meaningful interventions that address the real issues underlying the phenomenon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTO_gene#Obesity