Hacker News: statguy

New comment by statguy in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

statguy — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:24:02 +0000

It is reasonable for Iran to do things that hurt the US (and the world) when the US hurts them.

New comment by statguy in "Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known"

statguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:49:47 +0000

The down votes to this suggest that many in the west are in denial. China doesn’t need to fight a hot war with Taiwan, they can incrementally pressure Taiwan while their western allies issue impotent statements.

New comment by statguy in "Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known"

statguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 20:44:07 +0000

The casualties are low largely because US troops simply abandoned their bases and moved to hotels, treating the citizens of their gulf allies as human shields.

New comment by statguy in "Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known"

statguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 19:12:26 +0000

Exactly, Trump was high on the Venezuala “win” and Netanyahu managed to suck him into this war with disastrous consequences for US and the world.

New comment by statguy in "Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known"

statguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:45:02 +0000

The Taiwanese know they can't take on China directly, they now know that Western support is meaningless - in fact it pushes them more into conflict with China. Given a choice, I think the Taiwanese would prefer a Hong Kong like outcome to a Ukraine/UAE like outcome.

AFAIK Iran never directly attacked several countries (e.g. UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi, Bahrain) before this war.

New comment by statguy in "Iran caused more extensive damage to U.S. military bases than publicly known"

statguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 17:21:28 +0000

This has massive strategic implications for the US. The US couldn't protect its bases in the middle east from a middle power like Iran and in fact its bases were the reason that its "allies" in the gulf were attacked. Iran would have no reason to attack those allies otherwise. The US has also shown that Israel is the only ally that it really cares about.

Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Australia are taking notes. Prediction: there is not going to be a war over Taiwan - Taiwan will gradually come to a Hong Kong like agreement with China.

New comment by statguy in "The Killing Fields of Tehran"

statguy — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 01:19:49 +0000

I don't doubt that the Iranian regime has committed some atrocities during the recent protests. However, I would discount any person/source who - supported the Iraq war, cheered America/Israeli bombing of Iran in 2025 and has nothing to say about Israel's genocide in Gaza, as being a reliable source of information on Iran.

New comment by statguy in "ICC ditches Microsoft 365 for openDesk"

statguy — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:44:54 +0000

does it matter if you are the one on the receiving end?

New comment by statguy in "Amazon Demands Perplexity Stop AI Agent from Making Purchases"

statguy — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 19:12:13 +0000

https://archive.ph/nGmOJ

New comment by statguy in "I don't want AI agents controlling my laptop"

statguy — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 23:54:47 +0000

It doesn't work that way. The dedicated machine for running agents will have very limited utility because it will not have access to anything it needs like your credit card to automatically purchase stuff on your behalf etc.

New comment by statguy in "A.I. researchers are negotiating $250M pay packages"

statguy — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 07:24:29 +0000

Any idea roughly how many $100M offers have been made. I initially thought that there were maybe 1-2 such offers and the remaining were maybe around $10-25M. However, judging by this particular case and another report where a $1.5B offer was made to a someone at Thinking Machines, I think that the actual number of such offers is much higher.

Any idea if the Googles/Apples are offering similar retention grants to prevent key employees from leaving?

New comment by statguy in "AI chipmaker Cerebras files for IPO"

statguy — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 07:16:42 +0000

Nvidia is also going to keep improving, so it will be a moving target.

New comment by statguy in "Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?"

statguy — Mon, 12 Aug 2024 08:28:51 +0000

I was curious so I looked it up, it turns out that the men’s world record for a mile is 3 minutes and 43 seconds, the women’s is 4 minutes and 7 seconds. These are the very best in the world at their prime. I would conjecture that less than 50% of adults in an industrial society would be able to run a 7 min mile, which is less than twice the world record times.

New comment by statguy in "Airbnb is banning indoor security cameras"

statguy — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:14:31 +0000

You knew this when making the booking? Why didn’t you book a hotel instead? Airbnb or the host have no incentive to change if people like you keep going back. They will change only when it starts to hurt their bottom line.

New comment by statguy in "Show HN: XRain – Explore rainfall statistics around the world"

statguy — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 19:14:28 +0000

Cam here to say the same thing, the map appears to be overly smoothed and does not capture the sharp rainfall changes that often occur due to the local topography - e.g. when going from the windward side of a mountain to the leeward side.

For example, according to the map the rainfall at world's wettest place Mawsynram, is about 4300mm, which is about 35% of the the actual. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mawsynram

New comment by statguy in "The sudden demise of Indian vultures killed thousands of people"

statguy — Tue, 29 Aug 2023 06:24:24 +0000

I remember that during the early nineties, when I was kid, I often used to see over a dozen vultures perched on my maternal grandparents’ terrace in New Delhi on summer evenings (I visited them only in summer). A few years later I noticed that I didn’t see them anymore and occasionally wondered why. Then years later I started seeing articles about Diclofenac killing vultures and then it clicked. Just thought I’d share.

New comment by statguy in "Nvidia H100 GPUs: Supply and Demand"

statguy — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 05:43:24 +0000

What is with this webpage, it appears to be blocked by pretty much every browser?

New comment by statguy in "Shingles vaccination may reduce dementia risk"

statguy — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 21:05:55 +0000

Previous discussion on the same study from 2 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36083620

New comment by statguy in "Zoho became a $1B company without external investment"

statguy — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 07:23:44 +0000

RSS is a straight up fascist organization:

"India has the longest-running continuous fascist movement in the world – the RSS was founded in 1925. It’s nearly 100 years old. Their internal language hasn’t changed; they’re still using texts by Savarkar or Golwalkar for indoctrinating their members – and Golwalkar famously thought that the Nazi example of getting rid of Jews from Germany should be followed in India for Muslims." https://thewire.in/politics/benjamin-zachariah-fascism-sangh...

"In the 1930s Hindu nationalism borrowed from European fascism to transform 'different' people into 'enemies'. Leaders of militant Hinduism repeatedly expressed their admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler and for the fascist model of society. This influence continues to the present day. This paper presents archival evidence on the would-be collaborators." https://www.jstor.org/stable/4408848#metadata_info_tab_conte...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/20/hindu-supremac...

Vembu's hobnobbing with such organizations, should make Zoho untouchable for any reasonable person.

New comment by statguy in "Apple becomes first tech giant to explicitly ban caste discrimination"

statguy — Tue, 16 Aug 2022 18:27:58 +0000

I am guessing that you are upper caste, which is why it didn't really come up. If you were lower caste it would have been a different story.