Hacker News: tdb7893

New comment by tdb7893 in "Amazon Announces Multibillion-Dollar Data Center in Missouri"

tdb7893 — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 02:29:06 +0000

It's already being used for the greatest good of all, creating value for the shareholders!

New comment by tdb7893 in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

tdb7893 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 17:54:18 +0000

I haven't bothered to keep up with all the frontier drama, are the latest Anthropic models more dangerous or easier to get around safeguards than other models?

New comment by tdb7893 in "Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case"

tdb7893 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:12:44 +0000

He was a top Democrat donor (the article says he was their number 2 individual donor in 2022) so I doubt he could buy one. Not that he seemed particularly left leaning himself and he also donated to Republicans but 5.2 million publicly to Biden seems like a dealbreaker.

https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donatio...

New comment by tdb7893 in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

tdb7893 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:22:01 +0000

I don't think it's odd for a middleman to have some functions in a market (as long as they aren't actually producing anything) but also the definition of a middleman is unimportant to me. I am just highlighting how he glides over a lot in this article (some of which are actually common progressive critiques of the insurance system) and I don't come away from it sympathetic to medical insurance companies at all.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Providers, not insurers, are responsible for excess U.S. health care cost (2024)"

tdb7893 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 18:32:36 +0000

When arguing that health insurance isn't that inneficient he talks about "But when we look at United Health Group’s operating costs in the diagram above, they’re only 22.6% of the actual cost of medical care.". 22.6% for a middleman is not insignificant! Also providers have to spend a lot dealing with insurance so it's certainly an undercount of their total cost. This makes the burden of insurance seem like a huge % of the total medical costs in the US, which seems like the opposite of what he's trying to argue.

Overall, there are lots of nitpicks with this article but my personal takeaway is: if this is the best defense people can make for the US medical insurance system then that shows how bad it really is.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Dopamine Fracking"

tdb7893 — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 18:46:16 +0000

At that age I could watch TV or play video games without strict parental supervision (I had older brothers and would often play with them while my mom cooked or whatever). I was lucky because while I did watch some age inappropriate media (I watched Gundam Wing on Toonami when I was 7) I was really lucky that none of these things were trying to addict me to them in the same way media often does now.

I don't think the level of autonomy I had in the mid-late 90s would be a good idea now, even though it helped me be an independent and resilient adult, and I don't think that's parents' fault. I would've really struggled with the purposefully addictive nature of modern media and trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids (and I've met a lot of parents who had some issues with it).

New comment by tdb7893 in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

tdb7893 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 18:07:39 +0000

My statistics isn't great but reading the study more it looks like they control the rate of false positives via the q values so my initial concern may be unwarranted. I'm surprised that it keeps so many barely significant results with so many hypotheses. I'll have to look it up when I get time.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

tdb7893 — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:06:52 +0000

For point 2: I don't think there's really good or bad places to study it, it might not generalize to sunnier places but the reverse is also true. Presumably the scientists working on this can understand these things (I know in my field I'm aware that studies in the tropics will find different things than studies in Canada).

For my own point: in this study they have like 22 test values but still use the 95% confidence interval. Even on random data there will be a significant result like a third of the time so I think it's easy to interpret these result as more definitive than they are. Not that it's a bad study though (no study will be everything, baby steps like this are important in science).

New comment by tdb7893 in "New method turns ocean water into drinking water, without waste"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 18:28:07 +0000

Through the magic of Googling "Persian Gulf salinity" it seems like it's more that it's a shallow Gulf in a dry area so it has significant evaporation. Desalination does effect it but it's only a few percent of the total evaporation (which is still surprisingly big) and doesn't sound like the main driving factor or an imminent ecological concern.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/marine-science/articles...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14635...

New comment by tdb7893 in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 15:30:16 +0000

So firstly there's been a lot of progress. I know people that grew up vegetarian in the 80s and there are so many more animal and environmentally friendly alternatives and people care more now than ever before.

Secondly, these things will change. If you look at the history of activism often there are people advocating against things hundreds of years before we see large changes (there is activism against forced labor in the Americas in the early 1500s even). So I've found it useful to accept the idea that we'll pass down this fight to the next generation and they'll probably pass it down to the one after that. It could be three decades or it could be three centuries but eventually things will change.

New comment by tdb7893 in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

tdb7893 — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 14:03:25 +0000

My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).

My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Mornings and nights no longer exist at 47C: A day in the hottest place in India"

tdb7893 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 22:36:22 +0000

Human land use is incredibly inefficient. As a simple example, in the US the vast majority of corn production is ethanol or animal feed (which is incredibly inneficient on a calorie basis). Then when you take into account low density residential and their endless lawns (turf grass has by far the most acres of any crop in the US) and a million other poor uses of land and there's a lot we can do, even at 8 billion people, without destroying every forest.

The issue isn't that the problem isn't solvable, there are tons of things that have huge environmental benefits. The problem is that these generally require some sacrifice (e.g. denser housing with much smaller lawns, eating more resource efficient foods like lentils, moving away from fossil fuels) but there's not sufficient collective will for actually doing these things.

New comment by tdb7893 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

tdb7893 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 04:49:32 +0000

Basic science is often cheap, I don't know where you're getting it's generally expensive. I've yet to meet someone whose equipment costs as much as any of the stuff my friends design for defense contractors. Even the head of the lab I'm in is making less than my friends are making as engineers and the lab equipment is pretty cheap compared to the stuff my friends are designing (we have a radar that cost maybe a couple hundred thousand but that's the majority of the equipment cost for the past decade).

Idk what your idea of budgets are for these sorts of labs but I think most engineers would be shocked at the shoestring budgets they run on (at least the ones I know are a fraction of the cost of a single engineering team).

New comment by tdb7893 in "U.S. to dismantle system tracking Atlantic currents that are at risk of collapse"

tdb7893 — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 03:21:09 +0000

What really puts all of this into perspective for me is I work in academia and one of my friends works for a defense contractor. He told me the maintenance cost per flight hour of F-35 was a bit more than $40k, which is significantly more than I make in a year as a grad student. It's crazy basic science is what's been the focus of so many cuts while it's so cheap.

New comment by tdb7893 in "U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box"

tdb7893 — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:56:40 +0000

For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.

Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.

New comment by tdb7893 in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

tdb7893 — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:50:25 +0000

I know scientists who want to move back home but can't because where they are from doesn't have funding for the research they do. Even with the uncertain federal funding it's still more viable than many places around the world.

New comment by tdb7893 in "Hengefinder: Finding When the Sun Aligns with Your Street"

tdb7893 — Sat, 23 May 2026 19:04:59 +0000

Apparently the word "henge" comes from the name Stonehenge but Stonehenge has the ditch on the wrong side of the bank to technically be a henge.

For any other curious people: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/inspire-me/what-is...

New comment by tdb7893 in "Iran starts Bitcoin-backed ship insurance for Hormuz strait"

tdb7893 — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:15:38 +0000

"Iran could easily have garnered a lot of international sympathy and support"

What? I understand sympathy but I am not understanding what the path could've been to meaningful support against US aggression here.

New comment by tdb7893 in "We don't know why Malawi is poor"

tdb7893 — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:45:55 +0000

Is Finland doing that badly? It seems like a good place to live

New comment by tdb7893 in "Swift bricks to be installed on all new buildings in Scotland"

tdb7893 — Thu, 14 May 2026 21:01:18 +0000

Yeah, in some way losing 3 billion birds in the US is painting a rosy picture. Raptors are one of the groups that has had an overall increase but that's partially because DDT was only banned in 1972. Passenger pigeons were also possibly the most numerous bird in the world (with population estimates around 4 billion) and were long extinct by 1970.

It sounds very doom and gloom but I should say that there's also tons and tons of people working very hard to make things better (like the woman in this article). I've met a lot of people working very hard at conservation, generally for little personal benefit since the pay is abysmal, and it's always very heartening.