Hacker News: stevenwoo

New comment by stevenwoo in "Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?"

stevenwoo — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:15:10 +0000

I had trouble finishing Zen and the Art because my recollection is he drones on and on about the philosophy after the initial set up. The story disappeared. I felt kind of being had because I remember being intrigued by the title in a used bookshop as a teenager and buying it (this was before the internet) so my viewpoint is biased by that. My college philosophy textbooks managed to be more interesting and deeper than Zen, even a book about Aurelius was more interesting to me.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Peopleless economy? Not technically impossible"

stevenwoo — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:42:49 +0000

Using Marxist as a denunciation feels like a shibboleth considering how often it comes out of the mouths of conservative politicians in the USA when talking about stuff that is not remotely related to it.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Stanford grads walk out on Google CEO Sundar Pichai speech"

stevenwoo — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 00:08:26 +0000

I went to the Electrical Engineering ceremony, the only speakers were from the faculty and one newly minted B.S.E.E. I biked there and saw there were a lot of smaller ceremonies across the campus outside of the stadium the photo captures.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Shall we play a game? – LLMs use tactical nukes in 95% of simulations"

stevenwoo — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:33:19 +0000

Tactical means battlefield, attacking cities and infrastructure means strategic. Tactical nuclear weapons took a while to develop after 1945 - they have never been used.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Albania Is Not for Sale: Kushner's $4B Resort Triggers'Flamingo Revolution'"

stevenwoo — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:01:15 +0000

There’s one bright spot, the Los Angeles mayoral race eliminated the MAGA candidate so it’s a corporate Dem versus more left Dem.

New comment by stevenwoo in "First U.S. screwworm case confirmed in South Texas"

stevenwoo — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:04:24 +0000

Up to five cases diagnosed so far through today, https://www.chron.com/texas/article/usda-texas-dog-calf-scre... All livestock and pets are vulnerable ICYMI as the latest two cases are someone's pet dog and a goat.

New comment by stevenwoo in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

stevenwoo — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:35:03 +0000

I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).

New comment by stevenwoo in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

stevenwoo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:48:55 +0000

Maybe? https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/sustainablebuildings/...

New comment by stevenwoo in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

stevenwoo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:26:36 +0000

That’s true, your comment reminded me of The Electric State which maybe 50 pages of drawings with descriptions and the trailer for the movie was unintentionally funny to me like it was a parody and World War Z where I loved the short action packed book which seemed like an easy translation but I was so wrong.

New comment by stevenwoo in "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Bay Model"

stevenwoo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 19:21:21 +0000

In addition to sibling comments for intent, the book Cadillac Desert documents how this government agency can be used to further moneyed interests, ie subsidize developments that would otherwise not be economically viable from local funding but become viable when federal taxpayer foots the bill. (The big examples in the book is building cities and farmland in deserts.)

New comment by stevenwoo in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

stevenwoo — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 01:56:58 +0000

He says he mainly summarizes plot and that the qualities of the writing are not important. It seems like that would miss opportunities - for instance he didn’t think Vineland was adaptable and didn’t even recognize One Battle After Another as the adaptation when he saw it until the credits rolled. Another example, IMHO Arrival is a beautiful adaptation that improves upon the original short story mostly by addition, or maybe it’s cause Amy Adams is more charismatic than the character in my imagination.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Nabokov's pale fire: the lost 'father of all hypertext demos'? (2011)"

stevenwoo — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:54:42 +0000

I went into it blind and the first thought ( which is probably very common ) is that this experience would greatly benefit from a hypertext implementation. There's a neutral interpretation here. https://www.tundrasquid.com/palefireindex.htm

New comment by stevenwoo in "The Pirate Bay Remains Resilient, 20 Years After the Raid"

stevenwoo — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:40:11 +0000

thepiratebay is fine they just don’t run indexes often so searches often fail for stuff just uploaded within last hour or two. Limetorrents updates indices frequently but uses ad providers that try to hijack your clicks and presses so it takes three or four clicks to get one click that isn’t hijacked. There is a bit of non overlap between those two sites.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Lifelike biochemistry continued to unfold in sterilized soil"

stevenwoo — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 17:31:18 +0000

Tangentially related, this is a bit trying to sell upcoming book, but the discussion of origins of life was interesting to me. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2526959-how-a-radical-n... YMMV but It’s free via my local library and Libby if you are stopped by the subscription nag.

New comment by stevenwoo in "US healthcare still stupidly expensive, with pathetic outcomes, study finds"

stevenwoo — Sun, 31 May 2026 23:06:44 +0000

There’s a fascinating case study on how this happens - Mexico had population much less overweight than USA until NAFTA was agreed to and cheap USA processed foods began inroads so that now Mexico has close to the same obesity issue that the USA has.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Childhood Computing"

stevenwoo — Sat, 30 May 2026 05:06:35 +0000

Right my bad the floppy Disk drive that was almost as big as the C64. I was confusing it with the Atari ST I got next with the hard drive eventually.

New comment by stevenwoo in "The dead economy theory"

stevenwoo — Fri, 29 May 2026 21:26:30 +0000

the USA already went through this when we opened up trade to China and displaced manufacturing workers in USA, the mfg centers in USA that could not adapt withered away. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/29/nx-s1-5660865/why-economists-... We also did this to a lot of Mexican farmers when the first NAFTA deal went through and small farmers in Mexico were displaced by cheap US farm imports. We keep repeating this, it’s not quite crisis theory of capitalism but workers and small businesses bear the brunt of losses every time.

New comment by stevenwoo in "1k-year-old dingo bones show that it was injured, cared for, and ritually buried"

stevenwoo — Mon, 25 May 2026 06:38:17 +0000

We really can’t know why, maybe it was continuous or maybe it was to have the dingos spirit guide their mussel harvest or maybe they wanted their dingo to never be hungry in the afterlife and that particular dingo was forgotten after a generation under accumulated shells, it’s deliberate but that’s all we can conclude.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Childhood Computing"

stevenwoo — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:52:44 +0000

I remember only having enough money to buy the C64 initially and being so relieved to have the checksum on the typed in programs match up, it was ephemeral but it was either that or cartridge programs. The tape drive was the next purchase for me and finally the hard drive. It was still a bargain for the features IMHO compared to the Apple II and other competing devices like Sinclair and Ti99.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs"

stevenwoo — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:43:49 +0000

This covers it pretty well https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48229319, TLDR -memory for AI uses more wafers from same production line as other memory and is more profitable, building new fab very risky historically for companies. The companies have cut production of other memory to favor memory for AI and the market for memory for AI is still unfulfilled so prices still go up for customers of every type.