Hacker News: sien

New comment by sien in "AI slop is killing online communities"

sien — Fri, 08 May 2026 05:34:44 +0000

Metafilter and Something Awful both do this.

Both sites have survived and continue to work well for their users.

A small cost does definitely work for some sites.

How Long Do We Wait for New Inventions?

sien — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:01:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-long-do-we-wait-for-new-inventions

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056728

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by sien in "Why has there been so little progress on Alzheimer's disease?"

sien — Fri, 01 May 2026 08:56:38 +0000

Thanks for recommending this book.

I'm now about half way through. It's really good.

New comment by sien in "Fuck the cloud (2009)"

sien — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 02:10:53 +0000

A copy for people who want to read the article :

https://archive.md/Q0DYu

New comment by sien in "Hollywood Enters Oscars Weekend in Existential Crisis"

sien — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 22:26:49 +0000

Yep.

Creating a good story, getting good actors and getting it all to come together is hard and still costs millions. At the end you may also not get your money back

Take 'I Swear', a very good recent film. It's well worth a watch.

It's made 8.3M. Has it made the money back?

It's not going to compete with 'The Mandalorian and Sidekick'.

That's likely to make several hundred million and still be fairly poor.

New comment by sien in "Does that use a lot of energy?"

sien — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:46:46 +0000

Yep. It's a very good book and well worth a read.

It's interesting to see how upset people are on Goodreads about that book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145624737-not-the-end-of...

The top reviews are mostly people angry with Ritchie for not being a catastrophist.

New comment by sien in "Little Free Library"

sien — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:39:22 +0000

In Australia it's 'Street Library'

https://streetlibrary.org.au/

Do they have other names in different countries?

New comment by sien in "America vs. Singapore: You can't save your way out of economic shocks"

sien — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:27:50 +0000

Fascinating.

It appears to be the world's second busiest checkpoint now though if you count the Macau to China checkpoint.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_checkpoint#Busiest_chec...

Probably worry about your next job

sien — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 02:43:34 +0000

Article URL: https://dannolan.substack.com/p/you-should-probably-worry-about-your

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083004

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by sien in "Sizing chaos"

sien — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 22:42:51 +0000

Yeah. It's a remarkable problem. There is a clear solution that is happily used for men. You tell people what to measure then have the clothes sized for the various dimensions.

Charles Tyrwhitt have this guide where they tell you what to measure for shirts :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/size-guides/szg-formal-sh...

and for trousers :

https://www.charlestyrwhitt.com/au/szg-trousers-4-2021.html

Presumably some online shops for women have something similar?

You are no longer the smartest type of thing on Earth

sien — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 10:58:30 +0000

Article URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/you-are-no-longer-the-smartest-type

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47001350

Points: 3

# Comments: 4

New comment by sien in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

sien — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 06:00:42 +0000

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

Under construction :

Argentina, Brazil, Canada, France, Hungary, Japan, South Korea and more.

Poland is going to start building soon too.

New comment by sien in "AWS Adds support for nested virtualization"

sien — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 03:24:25 +0000

I always enjoy the color you add to these conversations in your newsletter.

It's provided many a chuckle.

Thanks!

New comment by sien in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

sien — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 22:09:28 +0000

France, Sweden and Ontario exist.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/12mo/monthly

It literally has been done.

New comment by sien in "Why is Singapore no longer "cool"?"

sien — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 05:43:52 +0000

That's very true.

Singapore has done extremely well economically.

But it's not cool. That's something else.

Tokyo, for example, is cool, fashion, music, films and computer games come out of Tokyo.

But that's very hard to say of Singapore.

Perhaps it's like Luxembourg and Lisbon.

Admittedly the link at the top is from Marginal Revolution where 'cool' may mean economically successful and interesting for policy makers.

New comment by sien in "In the Australian outback, we're listening for nuclear tests"

sien — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 11:15:26 +0000

SeiscomP could perhaps be used :

https://www.seiscomp.de/

It's mentioned here by the CTBTO

https://www.ctbto.org/node/9348

New comment by sien in "We Used To Build Things. What Happened?"

sien — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:36:43 +0000

Federal Receipts as Percent of Gross Domestic Product has been roughly stable for more than half a century.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

The top quintile of income earners in the US pay 34% of all taxes. The next quintile 26% .

https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/who-pays-taxe...

US Federal spending was 7 Trn in 2025. This is surely enough to fund things.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

That is more than the total GDP of any country except China and the US itself.

New comment by sien in "We Used To Build Things. What Happened?"

sien — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 03:06:48 +0000

One of the biggest things though is housing.

The US, Australia and probably most developed countries have declining productivity in construction.

(1985) https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w1555/w1555...

(2025) https://www.nber.org/digest/202502/stagnation-us-constructio...

That shouldn't be tied to China. Indeed arguably China might help with cheaper materials potentially.

New comment by sien in "On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]"

sien — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 03:01:37 +0000

To explain this for anyone else like me who hadn't heard the term.

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

Full Text On the Net = FUTON.

New comment by sien in "A lot of population numbers are fake"

sien — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:07:20 +0000

Not according to wikipedia :

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

In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]

Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]

The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.