Hacker News: xdavidliu

New comment by xdavidliu in "Residential proxies detected on White House network"

xdavidliu — Thu, 05 Nov 2026 14:24:43 +0000

the politeness appears to be mutual?

New comment by xdavidliu in "Air Purifiers as White Noise Machines"

xdavidliu — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 17:44:39 +0000

i thought i was the only one who did this!

New comment by xdavidliu in "Remove pgrust: the entry is cheating (per-query kernels and result caching)"

xdavidliu — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 14:25:07 +0000

first time I found out about it was on reddit

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/s/QJ5uNP5XMT

New comment by xdavidliu in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

xdavidliu — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:05:43 +0000

additionally, the "get scared" is only if the theranos test incorrectly gives a "something is wrong" diagnosis. What if the theranos test incorrectly gives an "everything is ok" diagnosis? Then the patient does not get scared when they should be, and potentially get significantly harmed

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

xdavidliu — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:54:40 +0000

prosecuted and indicted for both, convicted by jury for only latter

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

xdavidliu — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:53:31 +0000

your parent comment just wanted to get a shot of serotonin by chiming and showing off that they've read (or are merely aware of) the book

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

xdavidliu — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:51:19 +0000

in her position, given her history, it is 100% rational to continue lacking principles

New comment by xdavidliu in "How the Elizabeth Holmes documentary “You Can See Everything” is deceiving"

xdavidliu — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 14:03:42 +0000

> People who get inaccurate diagnostics get scared.

That's only true if those people always follow up with a second test using traditional means. If they don't follow-up and instead immediately go past diagnostics into some sort of action, then it could be catastrophic in a manner exceeding being scared.

Now you can argue that if the patient is working with any medical practitioner worth their salt, that med will surely ask for a second test. But is it obvious that that will always be the case?

New comment by xdavidliu in "MIT class project turns into an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors"

xdavidliu — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 23:51:28 +0000

i think what's going on here is similar to why celebrities are often curt with people that come up to them. Some celebrities are actual douchebags, but others are not necessarily so but just get so many people coming up to them and saying the same thing to them.

It comes down to two mismatches: first being the famous person's own patience, which is just a normal amount, but instead of usual number of others going up to them now it's 100 or 1000x the number of others.

The second mismatch is the information asymmetry: the famous person him/herself knows that they have gotten 100x people going up to them and saying / asking the same thing, and they know that they will continue getting this for the rest of their life, so they respond with annoyance, which is completely understandable. However, the average person going up to them isn't gonna think that many logical steps and realize this; they're just saying "oh cool, it's a celeb, I never see celebs. Let me try to talk to them!"

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:28:17 +0000

"I am 100% sure Microsoft stock will go up 20% tomorrow!"

"i call bs. Why don't you bet your money on it then?"

"well you shouldn't be talking either, you haven't bet money on the stock going down!"

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:27:17 +0000

"I am 100% sure Microsoft stock will go up 20% tomorrow!"

"i call bs. Why don't you bet your money on it then?"

"well you shouldn't be talking either, you haven't bet money on the stock going down!"

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 02:41:16 +0000

I think you misunderstood. His mouth was not at "the proof is correct". His mouth was at "you are not really certain that the proof is incorrect". Those two are not the same thing, so flipping the accusation back at him and saying "you should've bet on the proof being correct then" does not actually make any sense.

edit: in other words, if there is anything that he should bet on, it's "the other guy wasn't really certain that the proof is wrong, he is just bloviating". That's a different bet than "the proof is correct".

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:17:52 +0000

> By standard semantics, if you state that believing with certainty that the proof is incorrect is stupid, then you surely believe with certainty that it's correct.

you might want to think a little bit harder on this

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:15:29 +0000

this argument clearly does not make sense

New comment by xdavidliu in "Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days"

xdavidliu — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:00:08 +0000

ah sorry i should clarify what I mean. I meant to say that it's probably true that very few consumers care about or want this feature, but this feature was desired by the company manufacturing this to sweeten the picture for their own investors

New comment by xdavidliu in "The Mathocalypse"

xdavidliu — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:58:16 +0000

i think what they are saying is that if you really so certain that the proof is incorrect, you would put on that claim and rest assured that you would win. Especially since the position you are claiming is currently at less than 10%, you stand to win a large amount of money.

The person you are arguing with made no such claim of certainty either one way or the other, so they have no reason to bet anything.

New comment by xdavidliu in "Man discovers his parents' coffee machine used 1TB of data in 10 days"

xdavidliu — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 06:42:03 +0000

my guess is so that the company can say on the earnings call that they are going digital / going ai or whatever, "and here's 10 products we have that are taking active steps in that direction".

New comment by xdavidliu in " prevents me from logging into Vanguard"

xdavidliu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:52:00 +0000

recently i noticed logging into vanguard that if I use firefox autofill password, vanguard always says my password is incorrect, but typing it manually it works. I could clear my password from firefox, type it correctly and login, select "remember my password", log back out and back in, and then have it rejected.

so I figured that the way to make it work is to have it autofill, then select my username and press space then backspace, which is a no-op. That way, the javascript knows i've entered something, and then it works.

New comment by xdavidliu in "Zig v0.17.0"

xdavidliu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 23:07:54 +0000

> It's in a similar vein to people who reply to questions with "well Claude says: "

or substantially worse: ""

New comment by xdavidliu in "GPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft for the first time with agent-wow"

xdavidliu — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 16:57:04 +0000

i recall reading somewhere that Steve Bannon, yes that Steve Bannon, once ran a mmo bot farm in asia in the early 2010s