Hacker News: stevenwoo

New comment by stevenwoo in "In Japan, the robot isn't coming for your job; it's filling the one nobody wants"

stevenwoo — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:18:45 +0000

For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Electrical transformer manufacturing is throttling the electrified future"

stevenwoo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:48:09 +0000

I live near Palo Alto and a transformer blew at the closest PG&E substation and it took six days to ship in a replacement and they cut electricity to the whole area for that time, I want to say last year or the year prior. So it’s not like they had to wait years as described in the article for new builds but I wonder where they got it from and how many do they have.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Common drug tests lead to tens of thousands wrongful arrests a year"

stevenwoo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:46:10 +0000

The prosecution and the judges and the law enforcement and probation officers and law enforcement who protect the judge and the prison system and the jail system are in quite a cozy and self perpetuating cycle. Prosecutors in USA get such high conviction rates cause they ladder charges to encourage defendants to take plea deals, everyone in system profits. It’s so profitable most large local law enforcement agencies in USA have marketing departments.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Japanese, French and Omani vessels cross Strait of Hormuz"

stevenwoo — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 16:36:26 +0000

Germany got a new type of government. The 2/3 required in USA for significant change will be insurmountable short of a disaster on order of second Great Depression since plurality of American voters can’t see past next paycheck, no Democrat that can win Presidential primary has any kind of revolutionary vision, it’s all muted, even Bernie got squashed by centrist voters eventually and he was not even that far to the left IMHO - he even stayed away from race or gender issues.

New comment by stevenwoo in "F-15E jet shot down over Iran"

stevenwoo — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:15:05 +0000

All reporting I’ve seen on Israel mention destruction of Iran as long time dream of Bibi and it distracts from his legal and political troubles and unites country behind him - war has 90 plus percent approval among Jews and about 25 percent among Arabs who don’t vote for his coalition anyways, so political win for him. For modern GOP, “the cruelty is the point” can be used to explain most of his policy decisions, the book and original essay make the argument that making “others” suffer is uniting factor for GOP since Trump took the reins (in spite of many conflicting reasons Rubio, Trump and Hegseth have given to justify this war including setting stage for apocalypse foretold in Revelations to please fundamentalist Christian voter bloc) Many GOP voters have backed Trump in interviews even after being hurt by his tariff regime, immigration crackdowns, DOGE cutbacks, threats to annex territory, the only thing that appears to move the needle a little in GOP approval has been the recent run up in gasoline prices. One case in point - Farmers got hurt in first term by Trump tariffs, overwhelming supported Trump three elections in a row, and after second term tariffs hurt them, still support Trump, one would think if one farmer said I’m off the Trump train that reporters would be all over it. There is no rational thought process going on here beyond first order effects.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Dutch armed forces recruiting 1,200 drone specialists"

stevenwoo — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:50:13 +0000

The article says they are distributing drone operators among most infantry units like Ukraine is doing - it seems like not doing so now is a big mistake among modern military - though the movie Warfare fictionalizes a little bit, it had Navy SEAL units deploying at least observation drones with each unit in 2006, offensive and defensive drones would require a bit more specialized loadout and training plus spread out through entire army and marines is a big change - the long development times of US military equipment also muddies the waters. edit: this article from two years ago illustrates what Ukraine was telling the public at least. https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpke...

New comment by stevenwoo in "R3 Bio pitched “brainless clones” to serve the role of backup human bodies"

stevenwoo — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:17:46 +0000

The initial murder case Kovacs investigates in both the book/show involves a wealthy man who is killed but has his backup mind inserted into his backup clone so he is “recovered” so the victim has no memory of his killing since the backup was prior to killing instead of optimally just prior to death. There is also a big subplot that is show only with Kovacs’ sister and clones.

New comment by stevenwoo in "My astrophotography in the movie Project Hail Mary"

stevenwoo — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 02:03:30 +0000

Audiobook is outstanding with sound fx, if one is into that.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Bets on US-Iran ceasefire show signs of insider knowledge, say experts"

stevenwoo — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:22:34 +0000

Lots of lucky trades timed just prior to and in aftermath of latest Trump social media announcement. It could be coincidence or not.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/23/volume-in-stock-and-oil-futu...

New comment by stevenwoo in "Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?"

stevenwoo — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 16:08:44 +0000

The Apple gold and glass plaque of kowtowing and subservience was first.

New comment by stevenwoo in "The Soul of a Pedicab Driver"

stevenwoo — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:22:43 +0000

If it's anything like the sport of bicycling in the USA, for a long time it's been a sport of caucasians, this is changing a bit but it trickles all the way up just from a sampling of who represents the USA at the Olympics and World Championships. Possibly a combination of the high cost of entry with the clique-ishness and the sport requiring quite a bit of free time and the support or money to have that much free time. Not talking about kids riding around the neighborhood but people who continue or start riding as adults, so not a social shift at all but existing demographics.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Afroman found not liable in defamation case"

stevenwoo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:27:25 +0000

Not only that but if they claim they were afraid for their life, that excuse is used to justify any action, which works short of admitting wrongdoing on video and in post incident interviews.

New comment by stevenwoo in "The math that explains why bell curves are everywhere"

stevenwoo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 14:24:56 +0000

I remember my professor talking about eigenvectors in Linear Algebra and it's been 50 years - though I barely remember anything else from that class. It was taught very early on in the course and eventually we used them all the time to solve problems.

New comment by stevenwoo in "What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable"

stevenwoo — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 20:26:35 +0000

The books Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor (by two of the winners of past years Nobel Economics award, both books are a simple thesis and lots of historical examples IMHO) will have to be updated to include this and other current events in the USA. This is one of many aspects mentioned in both books.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

stevenwoo — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:35:44 +0000

People commit suicide with it because it's supposedly painless and quick.

New comment by stevenwoo in "Qatar helium shutdown puts chip supply chain on a two-week clock"

stevenwoo — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 19:33:28 +0000

All natural gas deposits contain helium at various concentrations, it's only commercially worth harvesting above a certain percentage but speculate the problem is the US can't just fill the Qatar loss in supply immediately since we have plentiful natural gas.

Colon cancer now leading cause of cancer deaths under 50 in US

stevenwoo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 15:33:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/12/colon-cancer-leading-deaths

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352277

Points: 144

# Comments: 213

New comment by stevenwoo in "Swiss e-voting pilot can't count 2,048 ballots after decryption failure"

stevenwoo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:21:45 +0000

The poster is also trusting the database provider, database admin, the voting machine provider, the voting machine maintenance person, etc in an electronic voting machine since they implied this by saying database. Manual paper counts with multiple counters and multiple counts that resolve differences are hard to top when each set of counters is adversarial. In spite of that one thing I thought might be useful and point of failure if electronic voting were allowed is from Venezuela of all places. Each precinct printed an initial tally, the opposition collected most of them and claimed they were cheated. They might have had a fair election up until the voting machines were summed up at a central location -it appears the ruling party cheated when adding up the precincts. https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-election-maduro-machado...

New comment by stevenwoo in "Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years"

stevenwoo — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:01:42 +0000

I think the monarchy could have used its power to prevent Brexit, but the monarchy never uses its voice for anything controversial for the most part, that there was a valid referendum and the closeness of the vote and rancor at the time from leavers who held all the reins of power at the time might have made the partial public funding of monarchy untenable, too. Queen Elizabeth seemed particularly neutral even on Brexit, maybe Charles would have done differently?

New comment by stevenwoo in "5,200 holes carved into a Peruvian mountain left by an ancient economy"

stevenwoo — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:20:49 +0000

We can only speculate on evidence we have. The prehistoric chubby dolls (Venus figurines) from archaeological digs that many hypothesized to be fertility totems can be hypothesized to be just idealized symbols of female form as the shape changed depending upon the average temperature - ice age meant fatter dolls, temperate times meant thinner dolls. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mystery-of-the-enigmatic-ve...