Hacker News: zasz

New comment by zasz in "There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days"

zasz — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 22:12:20 +0000

That and also employees don't have the same power. Employees fundamentally have less autonomy. If you have to work inside someone else's box all the time, you're not going to want to work as hard.

New comment by zasz in "Can we have the day off?"

zasz — Thu, 28 May 2026 02:23:22 +0000

You know the ones bringing most of the violence were the state and private goons hired by capitalists, right?

New comment by zasz in "America's Greatest Strategic Blunder: The Imprisonment of Qian Xuesen"

zasz — Wed, 20 May 2026 14:05:27 +0000

I buy it that this guy is incredibly important in the history of aerospace engineering and the weapons industry, but the article seems like it's making an overly strong claim that the trajectory of American and Chinese tech development was so affected by Qian Xuesen. There are, after all, many other people involved in both trajectories. Would Qian have been so successful in China if the economic and political incentives to listen to him had not been there? Had Qian stayed in America, is there a guarantee that the infrastructure necessary to support his doctrine on technological development would have been available?

New comment by zasz in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

zasz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:00:18 +0000

I visited the office near University Avenue, once, many years ago. I found the freezer full of ice cream, the fragrant gaming room, and the heavily used bunk beds very disturbing. I'm not surprised they encouraged employees to spend one night a week there.

New comment by zasz in "Palantir employees are starting to wonder if they're the bad guys"

zasz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:55:55 +0000

We had a few smart people in national security, but they're getting fired. The Navy Secretary was just forced out. There's nothing that can help when the problem is upper management.

New comment by zasz in "The Bromine Chokepoint"

zasz — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 23:30:31 +0000

I clicked through on the link that the article said showed that bromine was impossible to recycle. The abstract says "Here we propose a catalytic strategy that enables the selective and mild-condition conversion of all organobromides present in wastes into renewed bromides for Br recycling. It employs Ullmann-type reactions enabled by inexpensive Cu(I), simple ligands and hydroxides in DMSO–H2O solvent. This strategy achieved >95% bromide yields at a temperature ≤120 °C for complex real-world Br-laden wastes."

I'm sure it would take a long time to make this process fit for mass bromine recycling, but it's a bit hard to take the rest of the article seriously.

New comment by zasz in "Dad brains: How fatherhood rewires the male mind"

zasz — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:07:32 +0000

I mean, yes, they do. It varies, depending on the specific foraging society, since they're not a monolith.

Hadza men spend enough time with their children that their T levels drop: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2674347/

Aka men are doting fathers to the point of letting their children suck on their nipples: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/jun/15/childrensser...

This is a nice survey of the role of fatherhood in various cultures, with a focus on foragers: https://anthro.vancouver.wsu.edu/media/documents/fa_role_201...

Near the beginning, the paper states that humans are extremely unusual in the rates of paternal investment that fathers do. With most species, the male dips out. Men don't always spend a lot of time on children, but they do have the wiring for it. It seems to be one of the many traits that sets humans apart from other species.

New comment by zasz in "OpenAI is walking away from expanding its Stargate data center with Oracle"

zasz — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:58:09 +0000

It seems like GPUs with a high utilization rate (60%+) degrade after 1-3 years: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

Would be interested to know if others have takes on this.

New comment by zasz in "Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal"

zasz — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 15:07:13 +0000

So they would be better people if they didn't care about anything? Maybe, instead of getting mad that Palestinians are getting support that you think normal Iranians should get also, you could be constructive, and offer Americans some advice on how to pressure the Iranian government to stop the killing?

New comment by zasz in "Larry Ellison – 'citizens will be on their best behavior' amid nonstop recording"

zasz — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:32:10 +0000

You're naive if you think cops won't find a way to hide the footage or simply refuse. They already find plenty of excuses not to release body cam footage: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/31/1222337130/bodycam-footage-wa...

New comment by zasz in "Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say"

zasz — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 15:16:17 +0000

Ahaha, by this logic we should just ban vaccines if that's popular.

New comment by zasz in "MIT Study Finds AI Use Reprograms the Brain, Leading to Cognitive Decline"

zasz — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 15:07:36 +0000

Yeah and the people paying other people to write code won't understand how the code works. AI as currently deployed stands a strong chance of reducing the ranks of the next generation of talented devs.

New comment by zasz in "Amazon denies tariff pricing plan after White House calls it "hostile/political""

zasz — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 14:06:55 +0000

Well, in the literal sense it would be neutral to be transparent, but "political" in the sense that the White House is using means "you're being mean to me."

New comment by zasz in "America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back"

zasz — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:44:48 +0000

That IS what Biden was trying to do though with the CHIPS Incentive Act. He was trying to onshore production of semiconductors in a partnership with TSMC. Didn't do him any favors, and Harris lost the state of Arizona anyway. Americans had the choice between a party that was serious about trying to onshore some manufacturing and a party that wasn't, and it made the wrong choice because vibes, basically.

New comment by zasz in "Trump's Police Are Now Disappearing Students for Their Op-Eds"

zasz — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 00:27:51 +0000

That's a fair question. She has no interesting online activity besides that op-ed, so hard to see what else it could be.

New comment by zasz in "East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago"

zasz — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:32:20 +0000

I too have read Never in Anger, the ethnography mentioned in this blog post, and the way I found it was by reading a survey of egalitarian societies called Hierarchy in the Forest, by Christopher Boehm. Many of the personality traits that the author seems to think are special about people who share the East Asian phenotype are actually common amongst fiercely egalitarian societies. It is normal to highly police socio-emotional expression and to regard angry tribe members with suspicion. The !Kung San live in a hot climate and are like this. The Montenegro Serbs live in the Balkans, a rather different climate, and are also like this. I finished Hierarchy in the Forest with the strong impression that no member of any modern society could tolerate the lack of personal expression required to suppress any would-be chiefs.

This person could've spent a lot less time going down a rabbit hole with a couple introductory anthropology classes and by asking themselves if there were any societies with these same traits in a warm climate. It is poor scientific reasoning not to check for examples of this personality type in hot climates. Not exactly PhD material.

New comment by zasz in "The young, inexperienced engineers aiding DOGE"

zasz — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:06:42 +0000

That's false, the average age was 29.4: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/L...

Here are the ages of the senior scientists: Oppenheimer: 38 Teller: 34 Lawrence: 41 Rabi: 44 Szilard: 44 Ulam: 33 Bethe: 36 Fuchs: 31 von Neumann: 39

So the younger people would have had plenty of supervision.

New comment by zasz in "Venting doesn’t work"

zasz — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 17:24:10 +0000

There's also this implicit conclusion that venting must not work if the levels of aggression don't change, but the article did say that blood pressure dropped. I thought the paragraphs on venting to friends didn't make much sense to me either--honestly, if something terrible happened to a friend, and they didn't vent to me about it, at least a little, I'd be wondering if we were still friends.

New comment by zasz in "Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute"

zasz — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 16:39:28 +0000

I don't know about Jeff, but I know Sahar quit working at Facebook over a year ago to work on this instead.

New comment by zasz in "YouTube is banning anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content"

zasz — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 23:52:29 +0000

My friend's father got pancreatic cancer. His chemotherapy was delayed because the hospital was full of covid patients. Now he's dead. People who get mad about being harangued to take the vaccine are failing to see the whole picture.