Hacker News: xhevahir

New comment by xhevahir in "Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden"

xhevahir — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:09:17 +0000

Skiing. He arranges his life around Nordic skiing to an incredible degree.

New comment by xhevahir in "Palantir founder purchases large swath of forest in Sweden"

xhevahir — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 21:08:06 +0000

He's probably buying it so that he can ski through miles of virgin forest with his Norwegian bodyguards. I hate this weirdo but he's probably not going to do much to the landscape.

New comment by xhevahir in "The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent"

xhevahir — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:19:12 +0000

I don't think the problem OP has is anything so metaphysical as the fact/value distinction. This is a business, after all. It has goals (e.g., making money) that the model surely can grasp. It sounds to me more like a breakdown of organizational control owing to a lack of transparency in the tools and a general ignorance among the management.

New comment by xhevahir in "Was silent reading unusual during Augustine's time?"

xhevahir — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:15:30 +0000

There's been a lot of debate over the years about what exactly it was that Ambrose was doing differently, and whether silent reading was really so uncommon in antiquity.

New comment by xhevahir in "Ember-1"

xhevahir — Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:36:18 +0000

> what a time to be alive!

It's good to hear you're enjoying yourself, but I suggest retiring that expression. It's really beginning to grate.

New comment by xhevahir in "The forgotten battle of East Lansing"

xhevahir — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 20:44:00 +0000

> “But many Michigan State College students, overhearing the arguments between the unionists and the businessmen, quickly perceived the situation as a challenge to their sovereignty and to their eating places,” they wrote.

I'm skeptical of the idea that this was all the result of a big misunderstanding. Students were often recruited to act as strikebreakers in the early 20th century.

There's a book that deals with this subject, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. Football players were especially valued.

New comment by xhevahir in "AI safety is mostly a sex cult"

xhevahir — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 09:52:23 +0000

If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.

New comment by xhevahir in "Small programming tricks"

xhevahir — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:12:51 +0000

Maybe, but there's all sorts of habits and skills that would make us enormously more productive/healthy/etc. if only the masses would learn them. This is a very old problem.

New comment by xhevahir in "I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea"

xhevahir — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:37:50 +0000

I love reading about that place, too, but I want to point out that

> They practice cannibalism, and Michael Rockefeller was likely eaten there

is kind of misleading. If you read Carl Hoffman's book Savage Heart you see that the tribe that are suspected to have eaten Michael Rockefeller probably gave up cannibalism for good not long afterward (i.e. the early 60s).

New comment by xhevahir in "Dario, Please"

xhevahir — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:40:03 +0000

It's frustrating to see smart people failing to recognize a prisoner's dilemma when they see one.

New comment by xhevahir in "Ex-FTC boss Khan: break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent"

xhevahir — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 06:35:09 +0000

You're suggesting that Lina Khan is trying to give Trump an opportunity to pardon AI company people?

New comment by xhevahir in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

xhevahir — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 21:00:52 +0000

I don't think Mexico is an exception in that respect. There are some pretty significant Incan elements in the Catholicism practiced in the Andes, Vodou and Santería stuff in the Caribbean, El Tío in Bolivia, Tetri Giorgi/Uastyrdzhi in the Caucasus, and lots of others no doubt. Christianity (and Western culture) didn't demolish these beliefs and practices.

New comment by xhevahir in "On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem"

xhevahir — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:47:23 +0000

Maybe he was dreading it.

New comment by xhevahir in "What is Nueralese and Why is it Bad"

xhevahir — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 19:10:07 +0000

Yeah, from looking at the link i wondered if it would have to do with the Nuer people of South Sudan.

New comment by xhevahir in "Terpstra Keyboard"

xhevahir — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 04:01:01 +0000

When i play my Axis-49 keyboard i find that i don't know how to do voice leading. I guess it's kind of like a guitar in that respect too.

New comment by xhevahir in "Go grandmaster Shin defeats AI KataGo with a two-stone handicap"

xhevahir — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:48:35 +0000

> "This series taught me that rather than trying to imitate AI, it is far more important to build the board according to my own style."

It's never made sense to me that so many go players study AI go play in the hope of emulating it in a human game. We're not machines. We can't do thousands of Monte Carlo tree searches per second.

Mapping global methane emissions from space with Deep Learning

xhevahir — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:56:12 +0000

Article URL: https://research.google/blog/mapping-global-methane-emissions-from-space-with-deep-learning/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532676

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by xhevahir in "Two German airport workers die of malaria after 'mosquito arrives on plane'"

xhevahir — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:24:37 +0000

Yes, I remember reading in Charles C. Mann's book 1493 an interesting chapter about how malaria was pretty common in preindustrial SE England, where it was known as "marsh fever" or "ague."

New comment by xhevahir in "Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices"

xhevahir — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 19:28:10 +0000

I don't know whether it's a founder effect of the users that fled there from X, or the mass-blocking features, but no site is as good at enforcing political orthodoxy as Bluesky. A near perfect echo chamber.

New comment by xhevahir in "Where did all the public bathrooms go?"

xhevahir — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:05:30 +0000

They're probably talking about the sociological functions of the facility, not the set of legally permissible uses of it. (There's a pretty famous book on this particular application, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex In Public Places.)