Hacker News Reader

complaintdepton Boxed – Things I learned after lying in an MRI machine for 30 hours

Yeah this is interesting. It makes sense...you're filtering out low level background noise so all you really get is the higher volume stuff like speech. Just like adjusting squelch on a radio.

complaintdepton Orphaning bcachefs-tools in Debian

> Hey at least it's not the worst behavior we've seen from a Linux file system creator...

I think that dubious distinction would go to Hans Reiser.

complaintdepton The Thin Purple Line

Econ or Bloomberg had an article about a month or two ago about stores locking up their merch and the motivations for it, and why it's such a stupid idea (sales plummet when you need an employee to unlock deoderant). One of the reasons for locking everything up is that they don't have good inventory management systems and when a manager or higher level person sees empty shelves they assume theft...but often times it either hasn't been ordered or simply hasn't been put on the shelves. Most real theft happens from the trucks delivering the goods.

edit: found it

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-08-01/why-cvs-a...

complaintdepton Unlocking the Pixel 9 bootloader breaks some Pixel AI apps

Yeah I'm not seeing a downside to this.

complaintdepton Big Pharma claims lower prices means giving up miracle medications. Ignore them

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of...

I'm sure there's plenty more out there.

complaintdepton Big Pharma claims lower prices means giving up miracle medications. Ignore them

Pharma spends more on marketing drugs than developing them. If marketing drugs is prohibited, especially through dubious kickback schemes with doctors and hospitals, there'd be a lot more room for lowering prices.

The profit motive really doesn't deliver great outcomes in medicine, between the enormous information asymmetry between patient and doctor (and even other doctors), doctors with perverse financial incentives, and believing (whether it's true or not) that your life or wellbeing are on the line if you're wrong, it's ideal for all sorts of chicanery. (/rant)

complaintdepton Apple explores robotics in search of life beyond the iPhone

Hyundai is Korean

complaintdepton How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

Teachers unions also negotiate for things that make it nearly impossible to fire an underperforming teacher.

complaintdepton How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)

Relevant:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-rise-...

complaintdepton Papersway – a scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm

> This is an implementation of PaperWM-like scrollable window management for Sway/i3wm. If you like Sway/i3wm’s commitments to stability, avoiding scope creep etc. but dislike the window management model, papersway might be of interest.

Seems relevant.

complaintdepton Zettlr: Note-Taking and Publishing with Markdown

This. Use it with vim and spend a day mapping any repetitive tasks to streamline things. It's magic. You could also use a bash script for creating backlinks, and it probably wouldn't be difficult to make a graph of all the connections using `dot` (graphviz).

complaintdepton Aerc: A well-crafted TUI for email

Personal preference. Perks include consistency and hackability. Mutt for instance hasn't changed a whole lot in decades. The relative simplicity and stability also means I'm not running into a whole lot of bugs. GUI email clients on the other hand...

Resource usage is also about as low as you can get.

complaintdepton The bizarre siege behind Stockholm Syndrome

Funny bit of trivia, Patty Hearst went on to be in several of John Waters' movies.

complaintdepton Markov chains are funnier than LLMs

My favorite markov experiment was feeding it the works of Nietzsche from Project Gutenberg. Really brought out the late stage syphilis, but was still very distinctly Nietzsche.

complaintdepton ChatGPT unexpectedly began speaking in a user's cloned voice during testing

> LLMs demonstrate complex reasoning, multi-modal understanding, and emergent behaviors that go well beyond simple pattern continuation.

Can they win Wordle yet?

complaintdepton The Third Atomic Bomb

I wish I had read your entire comment before ordering "The Making of" because now I'm paying double shipping to get "Dark Sun" as well.

complaintdepton East Germany invented 'unbreakable' drinking glasses

Corning used to make these bowls (called "Grab and Go", I think) that were very difficult to break. You could cook in them, eat out of them with utensils that damage normal ceramic (like a Ti spork), and probably throw them out of your kitchen window onto cement and they'd be fine. They sold off the patent to some other company that couldn't afford the production and quality went way down -- I think prod required intense heat and/or pressure. Sad times.

complaintdepton Gangs in the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

WaPo claimed in 2015 that civil asset forfeitures exceeded losses to bulglars:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...

Here's a blog from 2019 with some more info -- 2014/2015 CAF included Bernie Madoff money, but the amount they seize every year is still shocking:

https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/cops-still-take-more-stuff...

complaintdepton Moments in Chromecast's history

The whole thread is about Google discontinuing a physical product, not a feature baked into TV's. I've never seen the product they're discontinuing IRL.

complaintdepton Moments in Chromecast's history

I screencasted once to play with video feedback, but never seen a Chromecast device that plugs into a TV.

complaintdepton Moments in Chromecast's history

I travel quite a bit and I've never encountered one. Never even seen one at all. I've heard of Chromecast because I go on tech sites, but they're suspiciously absent in my bubble of reality. I'm an Android and Linux user too.

complaintdepton CVE-2024-40798 – an app may be able to read Safari's browsing history

I'd like to see this run back to back with those recent Apple commercials.

complaintdepton Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'

Re: lost classics, I hope we can recover an intact work by Heraclitus from those burnt scrolls in Herculaneum, that would make me lose my shit.

complaintdepton Make your electronics tamper-evident

I encountered the hair trick on Ren and Stimpy...Ren's first chest hair was taped across a door or lid to show if it had been opened. Not sure why, but that left an impression on me.

complaintdepton Manjaro Immutable out now for community testing

Don't forget the swaywm variant.

https://fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/sway/

complaintdepton If temps do not stabilize by 8/2024, world in uncharted territory

Clathrate Gun territory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis

Somewhat related, I saw a Netflix documentary (can't remember the name of it) a few years back about these researchers in the Bahamas studying blue holes. Some of their findings indicate that every worldwide coral bleaching event in history was followed shortly after with a mass extinction.

complaintdepton Shoe prints lead FBI to suspect couple involved in multiple New Mexico wildfires

I mean...something like half of homicides go unsolved.

complaintdepton Smart jerks aren't worth it

I had an oldtimer boss that fired assholes without hesitation. The reason was that once upon time he had a fantastic one-of-a-kind worker, but he was real shithead that brought the whole team down. It got so bad he was left with the one asshole and a bunch of incompetent workers who would only put up with him because they couldn't get a job anywhere else. Everybody else who was worth half a shit walked off (several mid-shift) because of this guy dragging everyone down. Boss realized what he'd let happen one day, fired the asshole, got most of his old workers back, and he ended up getting a lot more work done with them than he ever had.

I've always kept that lesson in mind since and it's never led me astray. Companies that put up with those personalities just aren't worth it.

complaintdepton Chinese-born chemist cleared of last conviction under US’s espionage probe

> (illegal withholding of possibly exculpatory evidence)

I hear about this sort of thing way too often. I say we make a new law that if prosecutors pull shit like this they get sentenced to triple the jail time/financial penalty the defendant would have had, if convicted, and pay triple the legal expenses to defendant as well. This multiplier is often used in the law as deterrent where a 1x multiplier is not deemed sufficient for the total damage and inconvenience caused.

Seriously, how can anyone be expected to trust the legal system when the state pulls shit like that without any consequences?

If course, this will likely mean prosecutors will start destroying exculpatory evidence when possible.

complaintdepton What Is Entropy?

Even mortals such as ourselves can apply some of Von Neumann's ideas in our everyday lives:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_coin#Fair_results_from_...