Hacker News: usednoise4sale

New comment by usednoise4sale in "Silver plunges 30% in worst day since 1980, gold tumbles"

usednoise4sale — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 01:11:58 +0000

I believe that is a widely misunderstood conception of the origin of money. Gold has generally not been used as currency. The sovereign right to dictate the value of a coin struck in a metal is called "seigniorage", and exists for all of those 3000 years. The value of the currency comes from the demand for it by the government to pay taxes, not the value of the metal in the coin. The metal in the coin makes it expensive to counterfeit said coin, with punishment by death doing the rest of the disincentive.

There is a reason the coins have the emperor's face on them. They are what he will accept as payment for the taxes he requests, and in assessing taxes according to his power, he dictates their value by fiat.

New comment by usednoise4sale in "Scott Adams has died"

usednoise4sale — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 20:05:30 +0000

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I would point out that "happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human" is probably not the best mental model of how to quantify this sort of relationship. Due to combinatorial explosion, these numbers are kind of misleading. It is similar to saying that it is trivial to crack a 1 million bits of entropy password because we already know 99% of the bits. This leaves out that you still have 2^(10000) possible passwords.

Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.

I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.

New comment by usednoise4sale in "The Origins of Wokeness"

usednoise4sale — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 02:59:26 +0000

I agree the hipster comparison is interesting. No one really wanted to be called a hipster either, but you knew who they were. I know I quit identifying as one some time in the late 00s, before the backlash really went mainstream.

New comment by usednoise4sale in "What P vs. NP is about"

usednoise4sale — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:25:00 +0000

Well, it was recent, so I'm currently in the 'feedback and validation' stage. I've reached out to experts for feedback, but these things do take time.

If you have a genuine interest, and especially if you could provide feedback or warm introductions to someone who can, I'm happy to share.

You can email me at atmanthedog at Google's free email service domain. Put something HN related in the subject. *If you do, please share your mathematical background so I can better tailor a response.

New comment by usednoise4sale in "What P vs. NP is about"

usednoise4sale — Sat, 05 Oct 2024 22:05:54 +0000

I know no one will believe this but I'm reasonably sure I proved P!=NP earlier this week.

It was very similar to a previous unsolved problem in a "haha, history repeats itself" sort of way.

This comment might have a lot more comments someday.

New comment by usednoise4sale in "Averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience"

usednoise4sale — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 02:59:07 +0000

Our world in data pushes a clear agenda, and it isn't really to be trusted.

Consider: https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality-in-the-past

From this article: "Researchers also collected data about hunter-gatherer societies. The 17 different societies include paleolithic and modern-day hunter-gatherers and the mortality rate was high in all of them. On average, 49% of all children died.[5]"

This is cited as coming from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

Which categorically states: "Unfortunately there simply is not enough direct paleodemographic archaeological data to make definite claims about the global patterns of infant and child mortality rates of our Paleolithic hunter–gatherer ancestors."

The author of the Our World in Data piece seemingly intentionally conflates the proxy with actual archaeological evidence of the actual child mortality rates. Given the clear warning in the cited article about making definite claims, I cannot read the deception any other way.

After seeing this error, I do not know how you could possibly trust anything they have to say on the matter.