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cafemachiavellion Raw milk sales spike despite CDC's warnings of risk

Don't think I'd want to take that risk regularly, although I did try raw milk a few years back and definitely preferred the taste to my standard supermarket brand milk at the time.

After a bit of experimentation I noticed that I dislike some kind of flavor that is present in the homogenized milks I tasted but not the unhomogenized milk from my local farmers's market. Luckily, pasteurization does not worsen the taste profile for me, so now I get the best of both worlds at a slightly higher cost.

cafemachiavellion Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?

I hope to and I'll probably ask on HN for volunteers once I have a stable-ish alpha ready. Might take a while, though; grad school owns my life for now.

I'm a bit doubtful that it'll handle professional-scale project mgmt from the go - the early vision is to help other ADHD folks like me build tiered todo lists - but it'd certainly be a nice target to aim for.

If you'd like to field a few questions or get an early invite, feel free to ping me at gnfxf@rap0.pbz (rot13).

cafemachiavellion Ask HN: What non-AI products are you working on?

A todo app for recurring personal projects. I found that breaking projects down into simple tasks really helps with my procrastination, but existing apps don't make that process too easy and quickly get cluttered.

My prototype lets me create project templates (that can contain other projects) and I can instantiate an arbitrary amount of them. Triggers can be a time ("every quarter") or some logical threshold (e.g. failing three workouts puts a "review fitness plan" action on my schedule).

It's my first real coding project and almost certainly too big, but it's been very fun to use so far and I already have ~50% of my ADHD social circle interested in the alpha.

cafemachiavellion Bombe: Minesweeper, but you only solve each situation once

The UI feels unpolished (why can't I select multiple patterns in one movement? Why is the bomb/free selection so small?) but the game loop itself is quite satisfying. I remember playing Minesweeper as a child, explaining the deductions I made to imaginary friends, and having to think through why a certain rule works the way it does scratches the same itch.

cafemachiavellion Effective Spaced Repetition

The only thing that worked for me (also ADHD) is to have fixed study sessions, typically in the morning ("Kanji before breakfast") or during my train commute.

Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about backlog too much. I use a custom deck that gives me my maximally doable number of cards per day and completely ignore the rest. It's not like the actual repetition frequency is critical - many people change those settings quite drastically and still manage to memorize their cards fine.

cafemachiavellion Risk Everything (2007)

It's a nice story but imo would be better without the forced lesson at the end. As most here have pointed out, it's just survivorship bias with some poetic phrasing.

As for taking risks: I don't think I'd lose single utilon if I never hear another affluent ex-entrepreneur talk about the importance of taking risks. I've been broke before, I've nearly missed rent on several occasions, and none of those times had me working at my baseline competence, let alone at my peak. If those people do better at those circumstances, they must have some quirk that I'm missing.

In practice I perform at my best when I'm emotionally invested but don't really care about the outcome. My two successful businesses were both side gigs I started for fun that scaled well when I noticed that I had greatly underestimated demand. I didn't risk anything for either of those beyond maybe a hundred hours of initial setting up time.

cafemachiavellion IQ Test Made by Mensa Norway

Rot13d for spoilers:

Vg'f fvtarq nqqvgvba. Lbh gnxr gur yrsg funcrf nf artngvir naq gur evtug funcrf nf cbfvgvir naq nqq gur svefg gjb vzntrf gb neevir ng gur guveq.

cafemachiavellion A short conversation with a bank

https://youtu.be/soDlyercgOo

Fwiw, I don't think economic planning is or was the main problem of socialism, more the information gathering that precedes it or the mechanism design that comes after, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone engaging productively with alternatives to capitalism, even if they aren't particularly fleshed out.

cafemachiavellion The case for induction cooking

I'm German and switched to induction from (old) electric after moving to a nicer apartment.

Despite ostensibly knowing about its responsiveness before I still ended up with slightly underdone food for the first week - if you turn off the stove, it will get cold almost immediately, no/little residual heat to make use of.

It also comes with the vaguely flashy feature of letting you run one stove plate with twice the energy by temporarily disabling its neighbor. Since the dial goes up to 9.5 regularly, I call the power boost setting "19" and relish in the knowledge that I'm 8 steps ahead of Spinal Tap.

cafemachiavellion A short conversation with a bank

I know this is the kind of flattering in-group humor aimed at people like me, but I still found it hilarious.

Also, considering that I'm listening to a talk about the computational complexity of economic planning on the side, the "we should recreate the entire financial system from first principles" part felt like a rude yet completely deserved callout.

cafemachiavellion The Bastard Operator from Hell (1999)

I'm pleasantly surprised to see this kind of sentiment at the top. I also like the posts you linked a lot. I used to like these kinds of bitter sysadmin revenge fantasies, but I no longer really get the appeal; they seem to exemplify a kind of "punching down or sideways because you can't punch up" behavior that I see IRL (outside IT) too often to find it funny.

cafemachiavellion More Casio Watch Mods

The hardware does have its charm, I remember implementing DMG on an FPGA some years ago to learn HDL coding and it was a lot of fun.

cafemachiavellion Legalizing gay marriage in Crusader Kings III with Ghidra

For a second that title made me remember early SEO tactics of stuffing your H1 tags with as many relevant keywords as possible, except here it's optimizing for my queer nerd interests.

I'm a bit surprised by the reaction from Paradox - I assume the standard forum mod has neither the time nor skillset to assess whether any game binary patch is going to be safe, so banning them by default seems like a safe way to go, but removing even the discussion of it feels a bit overkill.

cafemachiavellion The Feminine Physique: On Women's Bodybuilding

They do, albeit in much lower dosages to avoid or at least reduce the androgenic effects (hair/genital growth, voice deepening) of testosterone. Usually steroids with a better anabolic/androgenic profile are taken in addition or instead of testosterone.

Of course, there's also a small subset of female bodybuilders that lean into steroids to an extent to essentially chemically transition and I wonder if many of these might just be trans without noticing or disclosing it. As an additional caveat, in some places it can also be significantly easier to live as a woman on a lot of steroids than a trans man.

cafemachiavellion Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

1. More of a CompSci aha: Hard problems are hard. Sometimes I get frustrated over getting stuck in a bad local optimum that I can't easily get out of. But then if I take a step back, I notice that the problem is NP-hard, that I'm not gonna solve it by throwing random heuristics at it and I need to either change the constraints to make it P, lower the input size, or lower my expectations. Simplest example: Deciding what goes in which shelf in my home is NP-hard. Solution: Get rid of stuff more liberally -> (n' < n) -> f(n') is much easier than f(n)

2. Doing NAND to Tetris the first time. It taught me not only how computers work, but how powerful recursive layers of abstraction can be. I had absolutely no idea how my system looked on RTL, but I was still able to build it.

3. Also Lisp. I wish Nand to Tetris had picked something more lisp like in the second half to show how simple and powerful it is.

4. When I'm just coding something- alternating writing and testing - is much quicker than writing a bunch and then debugging it. For bigger projects, setting up CI/CD early can similarly save headaches.

5. The functional big three (map, filter, reduce), but for me even more so closures. I had gotten stuck trying to hardcode coefficients for a polynomial until I noticed I'd end up with a lot of duplicate code, which was what I was trying to avoid with FP in the first place. Then I realized I could just put the polynomial function itself in a closure and call it with the coefficients I wanted, when I wanted.

cafemachiavellion Boy, 16, was given estrogen at L.A. juvenile hall, suit says

As someone who recently had surgery for gynecomastia that I've had since puberty, I feel sorry for the kid and hope the breast tissue will naturally resolve.

The event is confusing for several reasons - not only are testosterone levels not linked to ODD, even if they were, there are drugs that can gently reduce testosterone production. Estrogen isn't one of them.

cafemachiavellion Boy, 16, was given estrogen at L.A. juvenile hall, suit says

Source on the sterility?

Afaik all that happens is that estrogen inhibits the pituitary, which will temporarily shut down testosterone and sperm production. But with patience or sufficient antiestrogens, those can be restarted. (Testicular atrophy is another factor, but that takes much longer to occur is also reversible)

Which isn't to say that estrogen is harmless. Without proper therapy, the hormonal shutdown can take many months to undo itself, and gynecomastia can usually only be resolved by surgery.

cafemachiavellion Dealing with Insomnia

I haven't tried this, but I could absolutely see this working for me as well. I've noticed that my visual imagination gets much more vivid just as I'm drifting off to sleep, so I have in the past tried to gently nudge that along by jumping between visual thoughts. It did work fairly well, but I also never had enough trouble sleeping to hone the technique or quantify its effectiveness.

cafemachiavellion Ask HN: How are you holding up?

I am not having a great time and I'm not entirely sure why. A broad list of factors:

I'm slowly passing the this-is-mostly-easy threshold in University. I expected that, but it's still somewhat sad. Before, I could put in the time and finish any homework on my own, now I get stuck on exercises or lecture notes fairly frequently. I've noticed that I easily obsess over the meta ("I should have read the notes vs watched the recording, that cost so much time") and I'm making some progress as far as not feeling guilty for not performing perfectly.

I'm also not sure what I actually want to do. I was cautiously eyeing academia because I like the idea of intellectual freedom (in CS, so not as concerned about the culture war) and enjoy teaching, but I haven't really found a field that fully interests me yet. Both theoretical CS and technical CS sound intriguing, but I haven't found a sweet spot that is a) easy enough to be tractable and b) significant enough to be rewarding. I think this is mostly hitting me right now because of a lowered sense of self-efficacy and mild burnout that makes any problem look uninteresting, but I still yearn for some long-term goal that excites me and I can't find one.

I had surgery last week and have been mostly tuning that out. I'm not in any pain, but do have to wear a compression vest that gives my breathing issues if I use my ADD medication. So I'm a bit more foggy and unfocused then usual, which to be fair is still much better than having to gasp for air all day.