Hacker News: yongjik

New comment by yongjik in "That post never existed. Stop listening to that thing"

yongjik — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:08:30 +0000

I don't say this often... but I feel this post could have been a tweet. Maybe two.

New comment by yongjik in "US Corporate Insiders Are Selling Stocks at a Near Record Pace"

yongjik — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 06:43:05 +0000

KOSPI is "crashing" to ~6800 from the highs of ~9000, but that's still 110% higher than 1 year ago (~3200), so let's not get ahead of ourselves yet. It remains to be seen where it will land.

* Also, from what I heard in Korean news, many blame the current situation on the government allowing single-stock leverage funds for Samsung and SK Hynix, which reportedly made the market ultra volatile. (Well, most Korean stock traders are deranged gamblers, so maybe they are trying to find excuses, I dunno.)

New comment by yongjik in "Three ways people respond to a problem (other than solving it)"

yongjik — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 19:19:38 +0000

The interesting twist is: now what does that tell us about people who say they will cut the waste of government incompetence?

New comment by yongjik in "Late Bronze Age Collapse"

yongjik — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:22:50 +0000

Well, I guess that makes a certain philosophical sense, but if we allow for the existence of an extra-physical god (or gods) that we can't test for, there's no reason to believe that one particular story is more likely than others. Maybe it was alien gods that built Pyramids, and the Hebrews took forty years to reach Jericho because they had to first go through a couple of Stargates.

New comment by yongjik in "Star Just Ate a Planet, and It's Not Done Yet"

yongjik — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:43:35 +0000

Sounds fine to me. Why would you need tires in interstellar space?

New comment by yongjik in "Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline"

yongjik — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:03:21 +0000

That's a really funny way of looking at "Some right wingers end up repelling their children through sheer bigotry or just being terrible parents, and as a result, these poor children will find solace and friendship in an ideology opposite from their parents' one."

New comment by yongjik in "South Korea to spend $1T on more memory chip production and humanoid robots"

yongjik — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:28:08 +0000

To expand a bit, even saying 대약진 _daeyakjin_ "great leap forward" wouldn't have turned many eyes, because _dae_ is just a common prefix ("great") and _yakjin_ is also a common word meaning "leap forward, push forward, improve". The word simply doesn't have the same connotation of the English phrase "Great Leap Forward", which is almost always used for the infamous Chinese movement.

If a Korean speaker wanted to talk about that Chinese movement, they'd use the full name, 대약진운동 (大跃进运动): the great leap forward movement.

New comment by yongjik in "The rise of South Korea’s weapons business"

yongjik — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 23:16:57 +0000

Due to the geopolitical situation, South Korean military has invested a crazy amount of resources on firepower. It has 2,780 self-propelled artillery vehicles, which is number #3 in the world (after Russia and China). The US (#4) has 1,521.

For a random comparison, Poland has 593 and Germany has 134.

(source: https://www.globalfirepower.com/armor-self-propelled-guns-to... )

...that is, (depending on what you want) South Korea has proven experience in building a ton of military equipment on time. Also, due to the dreadful climate of Korean peninsula, if something works in Korea, it will work pretty much everywhere except for desert (and maybe the arctic).

New comment by yongjik in "Notes from tired Egyptian whose job is explaining that humans built the pyramids"

yongjik — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:41:18 +0000

> People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths.

Somehow I feel personally attacked.

New comment by yongjik in "U.S. science is in chaos"

yongjik — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 18:51:50 +0000

Maybe off-topic, but sadly, climate change is an inconvenient topic for everyone. There's one thing that the poor, angry, ready-to-eat-the-rich masses hate more than the world warming up, and that's higher gas prices. Polices to reduce fossil fuel usage by making them expensive are strikingly unpopular across the world, regardless of how much they say they hate fossil fuel CEOs.

New comment by yongjik in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

yongjik — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:52:28 +0000

At some point, people should agree they are responsible for the opinions they hold. Otherwise there's no point even arguing, because the only alternatives are that (1) the modern society fails, or (2) we will have an iron-fisted eco-fascist ruler who will "restore the balance" by stomping on people's will.

New comment by yongjik in "A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown"

yongjik — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 19:19:01 +0000

It's a two-sided sword. When you are the consumer, blame the producer. When you are the producer, blame the consumer. In this way everybody can blame someone else and ensure that nothing is done.

For example, more people buying EVs can meaningfully reduce CO2 consumption, but you can easily find millions of people ideologically opposed to that.

Or just look at how reliably people reject any policy that vaguely looks like a carbon tax scheme. "Fix the earth somehow, now, but I'm not paying a cent, because that wasn't my fault!" is everyone's rallying cry.

New comment by yongjik in "A Farmer Donated Land to Turn into a Park. The City Is Building a Data Center"

yongjik — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 02:07:11 +0000

Is this supposed to be sarcasm? As far as I know, America is the only nominally democratic country where cops routinely shoot people, and their number one excuse is that they thought they could be shot.

Nothing makes cops more trigger-itchy than the thought that a random stranger could "fight back" any moment.

New comment by yongjik in "Tech sell-off widens as South Korea index plunges"

yongjik — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 03:17:17 +0000

Eh looks like it already recovered about half of the plunge? KOSPI fell from 8,048 to 7,477, but now it's back to 7,807.

New comment by yongjik in "India's surprise baby bust"

yongjik — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:18:11 +0000

I think there should be a relatively simple solution. Tax the homeowners proportional to their homes' market value. Either you get enough tax revenue to build more houses, or the tax burden is too high for those NIMBY to remain at their beautiful suburban homes, and their houses will be back on the market.

But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.

Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.

New comment by yongjik in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

yongjik — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 23:53:05 +0000

Meh, it's not like before public schools most children had access to tutors tailored to their individual needs.

Badly misquoting Churchill, public schools are the worst form of education, except for all the other forms.

New comment by yongjik in "Should you normalize RGB values by 255 or 256?"

yongjik — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 23:56:05 +0000

If your input is an arbitrary float, you need to check for denormals (and maybe NaNs). You can do bitmasking trick to avoid conditional jumps but I'm skeptical you can do it faster than SIMD multiply instruction.

New comment by yongjik in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

yongjik — Sun, 24 May 2026 04:14:04 +0000

Sometimes I hate being proven right so easily.

New comment by yongjik in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

yongjik — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:59:51 +0000

[flagged]

New comment by yongjik in "Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says"

yongjik — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:21:59 +0000

You're putting the cart in front of the horse. If the US economy didn't need low-wage immigrant workers, we wouldn't be complaining about them in the first place, because they would've gone somewhere else where the jobs are.

The fact they're coming the US literally means its economy needs them.

Of course we could all wax philosophical and say "Nobody needs a Frappuccino every other day, we just want it," but then nobody needs to live in a prosperous economy anyway.