Hacker News: yafinder

New comment by yafinder in "X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok"

yafinder — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:51:36 +0000

This comment is a part of the chain that starts with a very judgemental comment and is an answer to a response challenging that starting one. You don't need legal knowledge of the French law to want to distinguish real child abuse from imaginary. One can give arguments why the latter is also bad, but this is not an automatic judgment, should not depend on the laws of a particular country and I, for one, am deeply shocked that some could think it's the same crime of the same severity.

New comment by yafinder in "Google Safe Browsing incident"

yafinder — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 16:15:05 +0000

For something that you think is a de-facto standard, public suffix list seems kinda raw to me for now.

I checked it for two popular public suffixes that came to mind: 'livejournal.com' and 'substack.com'. Both weren't there.

Maybe I'm mistaken, it's not a bug and these suffixes shouldn't be included, but I can't think of the reason why.

New comment by yafinder in "A candidate giant planet imaged in the habitable zone of α Cen A"

yafinder — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 09:53:57 +0000

Let's call it Polyphemus and its interesting moon Pandora.

New comment by yafinder in "Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal"

yafinder — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 11:41:32 +0000

Reading this thread from Russia feels surreal.

New comment by yafinder in "Five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer"

yafinder — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 16:30:34 +0000

I think this is just an "r>g" rule made famous by Piketty. When r (return on investment) is bigger than g (overall economy's growth), the rich get richer. It's unsustainable in a pure mathematical sense, the rich cannot own more than 100% of economy, so at some moment this system breaks, and one can only hope that it doesn't break violently.

Piketty somehow wrote a 1000 page book about that, and a slightly controversial one, but an idea is very simple and, I think, hard to argue against.

New comment by yafinder in "Signs that it's time to leave a company"

yafinder — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 12:34:13 +0000

What happens when everything stops growing, though?

For decades our industry growed faster than almost any other industry and definitely faster than the economy as a whole. It's mathematically unsustainable. It must come to an end at some point, and that point is near.

Is it simply time to retire?

New comment by yafinder in "Ozone hole goes large again"

yafinder — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 11:00:33 +0000

I was born in the USSR, so, with all due respect, I think I know more about the internal mechanics of undemocratic states than a person who watched YouTube.

New comment by yafinder in "Ozone hole goes large again"

yafinder — Fri, 20 Oct 2023 08:39:58 +0000

Any sufficiently big country is very anarchic in that sense. US and India are made of literal states. Russia resembles a medieval feudal structure. UK is England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it all would be about 5% population of China. An idea that someone or something could govern such a huge amount of people directly and controlling all aspects of life and economy looks absurd to me.

New comment by yafinder in "Reconstructing images a person sees via non-invasive brain scans"

yafinder — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 12:27:43 +0000

It seems that aphantasia is much more common among programmers. It must have something to do with the fact that autism and mathematical ability is correlated, or the third fact that autism and exotically expressed drawing abilities are correlated, too. But this is too complicated a tangle to draw simple conclusions.

New comment by yafinder in "The positive effect of walking on creative thinking (2014) [pdf]"

yafinder — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 07:40:35 +0000

Is there a second paper about showering?

New comment by yafinder in "A crash dummy aimed at protecting women drivers"

yafinder — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 15:59:53 +0000

Now I wonder what about children? Do they have different dummies for different ages and different car seat sizes? If not, what's the equivalent of

> women are 17 percent more likely to die in a car crash

> and 73 percent more likely to sustain serious injuries

for children?

New comment by yafinder in "Kamby – A programming language based on Lisp that doesn't seem like Lisp"

yafinder — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 11:34:33 +0000

Ummmm

planet = [ name := 'World' nick := 'Earth' ]

'Hello, ' + (planet :: {WAT})

Output: 10585168

New comment by yafinder in "The coming tsunami of fakery"

yafinder — Thu, 25 Aug 2022 15:45:15 +0000

> The word robot derives from the Slavonic word robota,

> roughly translating to servitude, forced labor, or drudgery.

Robota simply means "work". These two words are as similar in meaning and connotations as words from two different languages can be. FWIK the emotional coloring is completely invented by the author. The fact that they do such thing in the very first paragraph makes them a very unreliable narrator.

New comment by yafinder in "Absurd Trolley Problems"

yafinder — Wed, 06 Jul 2022 08:23:00 +0000

Ok, this is clearly crowdsourcing a dataset for AI alignment right right?

New comment by yafinder in "They're made out of meat (1991)"

yafinder — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 09:01:29 +0000

The problem is, faster than light travel violates causality in some reference frames [1]. This is a big problem. Forget grandpa-killing travellers; even several bits of time travelling information allows one to easily solve NP-complete problems (it's an even more powerful mode of computation, actually) [2]

Any new physics that allows for FTL must be very weird, even in a logical sense.

[1]: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/52249/how-does-f... [2]: https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec19.html

New comment by yafinder in "Average home prices in New Zealand reaches 8.8 times average household income"

yafinder — Fri, 06 May 2022 09:57:04 +0000

What does an average home in Prague look like? Is it an apartment or a detached house, how many bedrooms?

In Eastern European countries, the quality of housing varies greatly, from cramped apartments in gray concrete buildings to elegant mansions. I wonder, which of this is worth 16 times annual income.

New comment by yafinder in "Why is every consumer startup selling me what I already own for 10x the price?"

yafinder — Wed, 04 May 2022 14:41:23 +0000

Mercedes, Porsche and Lambo aren't startups though. They aren't even normally described as "innovative" (which is kinda weird).

New comment by yafinder in "YDB – An open-source Distributed SQL Database"

yafinder — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:24:01 +0000

> Yandex is a huge beneficiary from the war

This is not true. On the contrary, Yandex's business has suffered greatly. You can see it for yourself here https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/yndx

The company's employees are almost universally opposed to the war, but opinions about exactly how it should be stopped are, indeed, conflicted.