Hacker News: thelamest

New comment by thelamest in "Staying ahead of censors in 2025"

thelamest — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 09:22:26 +0000

Florida, 2020: 63,217 domestic violence arrests

The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.

New comment by thelamest in "Why, as a responsible adult, SimCity 2000 hits differently"

thelamest — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 20:12:03 +0000

Addressing the hypothetical person you’re describing: car infrastructure may solve some needs, but it is in direct conflict with other needs. Give every adult a guaranteed parking space just at home and at work, and the physical space required for that alone is an unbelievable double-digit percentage of the city area. Cities are so valuable because they pack a lot of amenities and markets (including your family’s schools and workplaces) in a compact area. Place everything significantly further apart, add more concrete and noise, and you’ve lost on all fronts: safety, charm and efficiency.

New comment by thelamest in "How to avoid P hacking"

thelamest — Tue, 13 May 2025 10:29:06 +0000

The general topic and some specific ways to estimate a correction are described under this term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_analysis

New comment by thelamest in "Chongqing, the Largest City – In Pictures"

thelamest — Sun, 27 Apr 2025 12:34:53 +0000

(Maybe I’m reading too much of a narrative into what you wrote, but–) I don’t think it’s causal like that; it doesn’t have to be. In particular, “wealthy, modern urban cores” tend to be self-sustaining economic force multipliers rather than parasitic resource sinks or vanity projects. Each specific megaproject might be one of the latter, of course. In general, however, I’d be careful about mixing up different public choice failures. How easy it is to: (agree on a fair way to) collect public money, identify and agree on some kind of public benefit, allocate resources to further that interest, execute projects without snags – etc.

New comment by thelamest in "Reasoning models don't always say what they think"

thelamest — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 18:23:58 +0000

AI CoT may work the same extremely flawed way that human introspection does, and that’s fine, the reason we may want to hold them to a higher standard is because someone proposed to use CoTs to monitor ethics and alignment.

New comment by thelamest in "Inheriting is becoming nearly as important as working"

thelamest — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 01:14:56 +0000

It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.

New comment by thelamest in "A new proposal for how mind emerges from matter"

thelamest — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:52:41 +0000

>This makes me think that our formal [definitions] of "intelligence" […] and what we intuitively look out for, are really two different things.

Just two? You can name so many more terms in this concept cloud, e.g.: personhood, moral agency, consciousness, self-awareness, processing power, wit, autonomy, feeling-and-experiencing capacity, and so on… We don’t seem to agree on what’s separate from what, and yes, it would be useful.

New comment by thelamest in "It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds"

thelamest — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 19:41:59 +0000

“Transparency” as leaks from abuse is very, very different from transparency as a policy of easy access – and neither makes you necessarily better informed. In short, a biased selection of information can leave you worse off than having no information.

New comment by thelamest in "Pricing Money: A beginner's guide to money, bonds, futures and swaps"

thelamest — Sat, 17 Jun 2023 02:44:04 +0000

For one, finance is a macro force multiplier; it can make or break entire other industries. There’s also a bit of selection (global top) and survivorship (plenty of less visible non-success stories) in the wild money stories you can see out there.

New comment by thelamest in "Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU"

thelamest — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 19:53:45 +0000

To expand just a bit more, the map is very blurry. Nation states tap into some real and old sentiments, but are not just a translation of those to a modern political language. They are their own new political projects, with a shape that is a result of historical happenstance and personal ambitions of specific people. It is surprisingly malleable – depending on what common enemies appear, what leaders and writers become popular, etc.

New comment by thelamest in "Why Not Mars"

thelamest — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 04:06:46 +0000

Mars is on (or above) a wiped out Earth level of difficulty already

New comment by thelamest in "Privacy is ok"

thelamest — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 22:23:09 +0000

Counter: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-... (and it isn’t a left vs right thing, Vox is replying to a whole bunch of coverage from all angles; I’ve mostly seen Gilens&Page posted from the left).

New comment by thelamest in "Twitter archiver: Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive"

thelamest — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 21:50:25 +0000

I hope you’ll get a better answer, but a minimal solution is to use snscrape (https://github.com/JustAnotherArchivist/snscrape) to download a raw JSON dump of a user timeline. Some caveats: 1. This doesn’t work for all users (e.g. some accounts seem to remain deindexed after unsuspensions). 2. While you can get rid of 90% of the file size by removing fluff columns (e.g. related to processing media and emojis), keep a backup. When importing such JSON, I unwittingly did a lossy data type conversion, and it can be irreparable once the tweets are deleted.

$ snscrape --progress --jsonl twitter-user jack > jack.json

[PS With courtesy rate limiting, depending on the account size, you may then script a way to send each tweet URL for archival in the Wayback Machine.]

New comment by thelamest in "The Casino-Chip Society"

thelamest — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 16:01:48 +0000

It’s not a closed system or a zero sum game. The average loan has positive expected value in terms of new, real goods and services being created – so it can be accompanied with an increase in nominal amount of money. The casino analogy falters here, because gambling is associated with, at best, only intangible entertainment value creation, and at worst, value destruction. Banks are somewhat free to create money, because they enable making new real value, and carry much of the risk for bad calls.

New comment by thelamest in "The Casino-Chip Society"

thelamest — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 15:48:08 +0000

Yes. If the (overall) nominal money flows decrease but (overall) real economy size stays the same – to the extent that it’s going to change prices for no “real” reason – people and central banks are likely to notice and may react.

Central banks are tasked with stabilizing price levels. (Why? Predictability helps people make decisions and plans, and get rewarded for them. Caveat: price changes that originate in changes to real economy convey valuable information about real scarcities and surpluses. This one, kinda, doesn’t.) Prices are closely related to the ways money circulates in the economy – so CBs keep a close eye on these stats. (Why? In short, it’s a big factor in the simple monetary formula, MV=PQ, that is: overall amount of money * money velocity = price level * quantity of real consumption.) The fact you froze or burned a lot may influence how that looks, in turn possibly influencing CB decisions to put the finger on this or that scale.

Of course, the CB doesn’t know what you did exactly, it’s playing an aggregate game. Right now it would appreciate that you counteracted inflation – made everything a bit cheaper by not spending or loaning your billions for others to spend.

New comment by thelamest in "Rebuilding after the replication crisis"

thelamest — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 16:50:23 +0000

Finding new particles and studying astronomical events has a larger nugget of similarity with the psychology modus operandi than you may think. They’re studying rare or unique objects with extremely finicky measurement tools; enormous amounts of noise are statistically treated to extract a signal. Victor Ninov claimed to have discovered new elements, causing years of disappointing failures to replicate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Ninov). Even if the actual scientists learn their lesson, with some regularity popular science media announce that “the Standard Model just got overturned” or that this or that new quark was discovered.

New comment by thelamest in "Rebuilding after the replication crisis"

thelamest — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 16:39:20 +0000

Yeah, yet this bonduary traces a fuzzy and surprising route. Lives are on the line in microbiology, yet Bik uncovered thousands of suspect image errors there (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_Bik). Semiconductor physics is relatively tangible and close to production, yet Hsu&Loo and others found that Schön faked his award and attention grabbing recipes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6n_scandal).

New comment by thelamest in "America Has Lost Its Oil Buffer"

thelamest — Sat, 24 Sep 2022 13:09:03 +0000

This is just not true. In the act that established SPR (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-845/uslm/COMPS-845...) there’s much about supply, little about national security, and next to nothing about military:

Sec 151(b) [The purpose of creating the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is] to reduce the impact of disruptions in supplies of petroleum products, to carry out obligations of the United States under the international energy program, and for other purposes as provided for in this Act.

Sec 161(d)(2) [Secretary of Energy may authorize a drawdown when] (A) an emergency situation exists and there is a significant reduction in supply which is of significant scope and duration; (B) a severe increase in the price of petroleum products has resulted from such emergency situation; and (C) such price increase is likely to cause a major adverse impact on the national economy.

Sec 161(h)(1) [POTUS can authorize drawdowns if] (D) the Secretary of Defense has found that action taken under this subsection will not impair national security,

New comment by thelamest in "U.S. annual inflation rate drops to 8.5%"

thelamest — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 16:57:26 +0000

Trimmed inflation measures exist, but this one is not it. They’re not used in a sneaky way, they’re clearly named “trimmed CPI”, “trimmed PCE” etc.

New comment by thelamest in "Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes"

thelamest — Wed, 10 Aug 2022 16:51:23 +0000

Coordination games and public goods games (which arguably model insurance) work best when people don’t adversely self-select, but coordinate around the social optimum (for insurance, when the risk pool is as large as possible). Whatever can orchestrate such coordination adds value. If people do it on their own, great, but some problems have characteristics like time horizons such that the coordination doesn’t happen without an authority. Yes, this brings in other public choice problems, but the trade-off is not necessarily bad.