Hacker News: sooheon

New comment by sooheon in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

sooheon — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 07:36:06 +0000

Yep pus is what animal bodies excrete in response to some infections -- there's no reason to think standalone viruses would naturally summon pus.

New comment by sooheon in "Dwarf Fortress is getting the mother of all magic updates"

sooheon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 08:24:34 +0000

Same, the ASCII interface is an eternal classic to me, the updated graphics try harder and achieve less (just my opinion).

New comment by sooheon in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

sooheon — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:12:07 +0000

If they're so valuable, maybe you could spare a thought of thanks that the previous owners passed them onto posterity, whatever the condition. If you don't like the condition, feel free to continue your search. Getting heated over their use of their own property isn't very philosophical of you.

New comment by sooheon in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

sooheon — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 05:34:17 +0000

That's just vanilla regulation. Yes it tends to create market inefficiencies, by definition. Capture entails industry corrupting and directing regulatory bodies.

New comment by sooheon in "U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"

sooheon — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 05:33:13 +0000

I think this is plain old regulation, not regulatory capture. For it to be the latter we'd need evidence than it was the incumbents who designed this oversight which they then asked the white house to rubber stamp.

New comment by sooheon in "No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass"

sooheon — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:45:51 +0000

This straw man doesn't merit falsification. Nobody claims wealth alone gives political power. Wealth applies leverage to all endeavors, but political ends still require strategy and operationalization. It's just a lot easier with a couple trillion dollars, vs. a single individual vote once every couple of years.

New comment by sooheon in "No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass"

sooheon — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:39:58 +0000

> you start or fund a think tank that writes policy proposals, or a media organization that advocates your views

Or you run "money primaries", financially filtering the menu of candidates before democratic voting. Or you pay/lobby for (non-democratic) judicial appointments, which is a strategy that's been openly pursued since 1971: https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/blog/powell-memo.pdf

New comment by sooheon in "Polymarket has flooded social media with deceptive videos by paid creators"

sooheon — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 03:48:27 +0000

Nobody is forcing anyone to place bets they can't back, isn't this a personal responsibility issue?

edit: to be clear, if companies are committing fraud in their marketing, that should be prosecuted or if regulations around misleading marketing are weak, that should be legislated of course.

New comment by sooheon in "Siri AI"

sooheon — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:20:43 +0000

A family member lost years of irreplaceable photos and paid apps due to account lock, and doing this across two countries they were legitimately residing in triggered it.

New comment by sooheon in "Make macOS consistently bad unironically"

sooheon — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:03:55 +0000

Also went from one click to two clicks

New comment by sooheon in "Treasure hunter freed from jail after refusing to turn over shipwreck gold"

sooheon — Sun, 15 Mar 2026 03:47:46 +0000

Wonder why he was only charged with contempt, rather than defrauding investors?

New comment by sooheon in "Enhancing gut-brain communication reversed cognitive decline in aging mice"

sooheon — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 13:42:57 +0000

Your nervous system extends over your entire body, the brain doesn't live in a firewalled jar.

New comment by sooheon in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

sooheon — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:12:50 +0000

Yeah not disputing that, just saying it's definitionally wrong to say land "is not the means of production".

New comment by sooheon in "Lena by qntm (2021)"

sooheon — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 07:30:44 +0000

This is a sad take, and a misunderstanding of what art is. Tech and tools go "obsolete". Literature poses questions to humans, and the value of art remains to be experienced by future readers, whatever branch of the tech tree we happen to occupy. I don't begrudge Clarke or Vonnegut or Asimov their dated sci-fi premises, because prediction isn't the point.

The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.

New comment by sooheon in "Fixing retail with land value capture"

sooheon — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:15:49 +0000

Land (or in modern terms, location value) has been seen as a means of production along with labor and capital since Adam Smith.

New comment by sooheon in "A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived"

sooheon — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 00:31:19 +0000

My bad, went down rabbit hole and got my writers/links confused.

New comment by sooheon in "A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived"

sooheon — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 11:25:50 +0000

The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.

New comment by sooheon in "Surely the crash of the US economy has to be soon"

sooheon — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 03:08:29 +0000

The weird cousin of "This time it's different": "That time was different"

New comment by sooheon in "Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy"

sooheon — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:11:34 +0000

Yes, but rent seeking isn't even capitalism in theory.

New comment by sooheon in "Predicting OpenAI's ad strategy"

sooheon — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 07:06:44 +0000

I'm not sure what definition of capitalism you're running with, but as early as Adam Smith, the importance of competition free from monopoly and rent seeking was central to the mainstream definition.