Hacker News Reader

raincomon Nvidia partners with LG robotics to build humanoid robots in South Korea

Nvidia needs to keep the hype train going, by throwing darts in every possible direction.

raincomon Google to pay SpaceX $920M a month for compute capacity at xAI data centers

As long as they can cash out from these investments by dumping on others, they are safe.

raincomon The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

US workers are left with almost no systemic power to fight corporate exploitation, which creates a brutal race to the bottom. That's the structural context I was pointing out. But let’s be clear: turning that frustration into killing Chinese workers is never acceptable. The issue isn't the foreign workforce; it's a broken system that exploits everyone.

So, when foreigners want to come to the US to work, these foreigners find the working conditions (say, 996 of today) is better than working for the corporate and the government exploiters in their home countries.

raincomon Ask HN: Why do we snore? And what to do about it?

There are many ways to fix snoring:

(a) if one is overweight, losing weight helps

(b) Adjustable bed bases help

(d) new drugs [1]

(e) see whether breathing exercises [2] help

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242278

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48242278#48243574

raincomon Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

Indian bureaucracy exists to enrich themselves for their next ten generations. The bureaucracy itself promotes, recruits incompetents. There is no way to reform such a bureaucracy.

The whole system needs to be dismantled while an alternative system gets built; given the nature of Indian politics (freebies/jobs/reservations to certain groups; monthly stipends to certain groups by borrowing money while at the same time looting public funds), it is impossible.

raincomon The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race [pdf]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240507013554/https://web.cs.uc...

raincomon The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

Why not both? It is a feedback loop. When the US allowed railroad/mine workers from China, it is true that Chinese labor wanted a better future and that capitalists want to use Chinese labor to suppress American wages. For instance, look at the animosity towards Chinese workers in Wyoming by European workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Springs_massacre

raincomon Memory has grown to nearly two-thirds of AI chip component costs

Thanks to Indian constitution and other laws, incompetence is heavily praised and promoted. Go to any public high/elementary schools, go to any private colleges, it is rampant. It has taken three generations to produce these bad results. Of course, I am not saying that students are dumb. It is just that many smart kids in villages if given an opportunity, will leave India in a heart beat because they don't see a bright future for their future kids.

raincomon Qian Xuesen: The missile genius America lost and China gained (2025)

Any source for your claims?

raincomon It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

Stipulative definition is all about fixing the reference. Or if we want to use the talk of meaning, it is abou the extension/denotation. If 100 people fix the reference of the word 'consciousness' to 100 different things, it just means that these people are engaging in philosophical discussions without having any object level theories (theories from neuroscience, etc).

If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.

raincomon It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

One can build scientific theories without rigorously defining terms: a stipulative definition is enough.

Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'

Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.

Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.

raincomon It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

Eliminativism fails to 'save the phenomena.' It is one thing for a new theory to discard the theoretical entities of an old framework--in other words, to eliminate the explanans. It is quite another thing entirely to eliminate the explanandum, the very phenomenon we set out to explain.

raincomon Illusions of understanding in the sciences

The authors of this paper have not studied what historians and philosophers of science have written. They just use 'induction', 'validity', etc. They reinvent the wheel. They write "Of course the validity of that induction depends on a host of other assumptions.". Duhem-Quine thesis is better than this way of formulation, as the latter doesn't use 'validity'.

If authors ever come to this forum, please read Duhem-Quine thesis, over/under determination, inference to the best explanation, Goodman's paradox, also how various theories in philosophy of sciences: from Popper to Kuhn, Lakatos, Laudan, etc.

raincomon Illusions of understanding in the sciences

That's instrumentalism in philosophy of sciences. As long as a theory is useful and results in good predictions, without worrying about whether a theory is true or not.

raincomon US is starting to see heavy job losses in roles exposed to AI

I am happy to see them replace humans with AI machines. However, housing, healthcare, and other insurances have become super expensive. Who is going to buy all the stuff these companies produce? Maybe, it will become a two tier economy: wealthy selling stuff to fellow wealthy people; under ground economy with bartering their trades for food, building shacks for living, flea market dentists, old Wild West style flea market medical doctors selling potions, elixirs, dry lizard oil, etc.

raincomon Princeton mandates proctoring for in-person exams, upending 133 year precedent

I know a guy who TA'ed at Stanford in the 1970's. He said his professor told him to give students “gentleman’s B’s” even when their work was not fully up to par, because many of them would eventually become part of the country’s future elite and power structure.

raincomon Men who stare at walls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trāṭaka

raincomon Is Germany's gold safe in New York ?

What prevents African countries that use CFA from starting their own currencies?

raincomon Brain scans reveal how to enters a psychedelic-like trance without drugs

Original paper "The neurophenomenology of a self-induced transcendental visionary state: A case study" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105381192...

raincomon In math, rigor is vital, but are digitized proofs taking it too far?

That’s similar to Neurath’s boat:” We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.”

raincomon What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

Still better than the third world. For instance, UK is seen as a vassal state of US, and it lost its old glory. Still people want to migrate to UK. Many French speaking folks from Africa want to migrate to France and others.

Politicians and folks in the third world are not keen on developing their own countries. Clean water, clean energy, better education, less corruption are not something they are striving for. Politicians there want to make money for generations, while sending their kids to US/UK/EU for studies, while at the same time selling bad policies for public (freebies, this or that scheme just to garner power to make more money off looting via contracts, natural resources).

raincomon The time I didn't meet Jeffrey Epstein

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-...

Alternative link: https://archive.is/Q8Idm

raincomon FDA intends to take action against non-FDA-approved GLP-1 drugs

Everyone can make their own compounding drug in their basements, thanks to Telegram and other hidden platforms: source sema/tirz, get bac water, mix them.

raincomon Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

I think, this experiment was earlier described in Ramachandran's 1998 book Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind

raincomon Scientists identify brain waves that define the limits of 'you'

Original Paper: Parietal alpha frequency shapes own-body perception by modulating the temporal integration of bodily signals, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w

https://news.ki.se/how-brain-waves-shape-our-sense-of-self

raincomon Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

The West has started to destroy itself from the inside: Politicians and activists always focus on increasing incomes (increase wages) and increasing employment (full employment for everyone), while the cost of living (rent/mortgage, health insurance, auto insurance, etc) goes up. Reduce the cost of living as it helps all kinds of people.

raincomon Why the Tech World Thinks the American Dream Is Dying

https://archive.is/1jgGr

raincomon Pennsylvania High Court Rules Police Can Access Google Searches Without Warrant

Third party doctrine is a loophole for the 4A: "The justices pointed to Google’s own privacy policy as a kind of consent form. “In the case before us, Google went beyond subtle indicators,” they wrote. “Google expressly informed its users that one should not expect any privacy when using its services.”

The court took that disclosure, buried in the fine print of a sprawling legal document, as proof that users had signed away their Fourth Amendment rights."

raincomon If AI replaces workers, should it also pay taxes?

Should AI also pay rent, mortgage, healthcare insurance, auto insurance, etc? Whatever workers make goes to rent/mortgage/insurance. A tiny percentage of workers save for retirement. Now everyone becomes a 'retiree' without monthly allowance.

raincomon The past was not that cute

For the price point, IKEA mattresses (both hybrid and foam) are worth it. Same goes for mattresses sold by Costco/Sams Club.

A lot of this enthusiasm about mattresses comes from being young. When your back is still indestructible, nearly any mattress(all kinds of foam, coils, hybrid, innerspring) feels fantastic. 20% of mattresses are returned for comfort reasons; that's how online marketing companies disguised as mattress companies have won over the traditional brick and mortar companies.

Lots of people complain about the invisible sagging after a few years of usage. For warranty purposes, 1.5" visible sagging is needed. Even latex foam sags too, but it sags slower than PU foams. Even Tempurpedic has cheapened their foam, thereby cashing on its brand name.

High density foam lasts longer. However, 99% of mattress makers don't list ILD and densities of their PU and viscoelastic PU foams. That's why the market is flooded with cheap mattresses that have invisible sag after a couple of years.

Same goes with coils: thin wire, reducing the wire in each pocket, stretching the wire, carbon content, how wires are cleaned, etc--all these factors matter.

Yes, there is advancement in the knowledge of materials and foams. However, industry has started cutting corners for a short term profit. If you make a mattress that lasts 10 years at least, who can you sell mattresses to then? That's why cheap low density foams, cheap coils dominate the industry.