forbiddenvoid

The park across from our apartment in Cupertino was the morning gathering point for every crow in the Bay Area. They showed up at about 3:30-4:00a every day. It was as loud and obnoxious as you might otherwise imagine.

Now, in Seattle, we just have a nice family of three crows that hang out on our balcony on a daily basis. I much prefer this arrangement.

If there was a second of the same letter, but in the wrong place, it would be yellow. If it's gray, that means there is no repetition of that letter. So once you've seen that the second one is gray, you have the information you need to know that letter is not repeated.

This is great. The speed aspect reminds me of the old AOL chatroom word scramble games. I personally love the timer, but I also do the newspaper anagrams without a pen, so I'm certain to be out of the majority on this.

A shuffle button would be nice (especially if it's keyboard friendly). I've found it useful for me with the NYT Spelling Bee. Sometimes my brain just gets stuck on a letter combination because two letters are close together, and the rearrangement helps.

It would be kind of fun to have an endless mode too, that just pulls words from the dictionary. Maybe not quite in line with the "daily word game" premise, but something I would personally find enjoyable.

I mean, no one except the 30 million or so people who are paying for it. I'm quite happy with the GamePass selection, and I consider it an excellent value for me.

I don't really buy this argument. When you buy a physical product, you are paying the entire product lifecycle, not just the marginal aspect of retail distribution. This is the same thing. The marginal inference has to come FROM somewhere. It doesn't just appear out of nowhere.

The meat is alive, actually. Sentient meat, if you can believe it.

This seems really cool for people whose friend networks are physically located in the same place they are.

That's not me, and hasn't been for probably 20 years.

But it's a neat idea regardless.

I don't really need a social network for the people I'm already in close proximity with. But, I'm glad they're making an attempt here, at least.

I was just in Aomori this past week (to see the sakura blossoms in Hirosaki). We literally left Sunday night, and while it seems like there really wasn't any concern in the city, I'm not sure I would have been prepared as a visitor to the country.

I know that it's just a super common distinction between pilers and filers, but I really struggle to comprehend the usefulness of just "dumping everything" in one place and hoping that search will sort it out.

At a certain threshold, doesn't it just become impossible to remember what you do or don't have in that pile?

When search fails, is it because it isn't there? Or is it because the search just didn't find it?

We still have "both" and it's quite commonly used. It's even used _in_ the article, and in several comments here in this very discussion.

The medium is the message. I feel like this should be more obvious in 2026 than at any other time in history.

If the author does not care to take the time to craft their message, why should I care to take the time to read it?

If you used AI, and I cannot tell, I don't care that you used AI. But when it's clear and present almost immediately, I feel as though the author does not respect their audience (of which I am a member).

As every composition teacher would say: "use your own words."

I immediately suspected AI writing. Then I quickly checked a couple of their older posts, and sure enough: completely different tone, language, grammar.

There may come a day when we can no longer reliably tell the difference, but for now, I'd just prefer not to see this kind of writing popping up on HN.

More than one solution can exist for the same problem.

> "Today it's gambling advertising, tomorrow it's alcohol, then it's sugary drinks, fast food, critical minerals and who knows what else comes next," chief executive Kai Cantwell said.

Good? I really hope that we are approaching a day when we realize that advertising itself is harmful, and leads to contra-social behavior in general.

I would say that it is less that DoorDash makes it worse than it is that DoorDash's model removes any incentive for making it better.

This has been common parlance in much of the US for a long time. I would hesitate to even call it slang at this point. It's a pretty commonly used term.

Not the person you asked but:

ADHD is a debilitating neurological disorder, not a mild inconvenience.

Believe me, I wish that just drinking coffee and "trying harder" was a solution. I started medication because I spent two decades actively trying every other possible solution.

> what would you recommend if one is against the idea of medication in general for neurological issues that aren't deterental to ones life?

If your neurological issues aren't impacting your life negatively, they aren't neurological issues. I don't know what else to say to this. Of course you shouldn't treat non-disorders with medication.

> do you feel the difference between being medicated and (strong?) coffee?

These do not exist in the same universe. It's not remotely comparable.

> have you felt the effects weaken over time?

Only initially, after the first few days. It stabilizes pretty well after that.

> if you did drink coffee, have you noticed a difference between the medication effects weakening on the same scale as caffeine?

Again, not even in the same universe. Also, each medication has different effects in terms of how it wears off at the end of the day. For some it's a pretty sudden crash, for others it tapers, and some are mostly designed to keep you at a long term level above baseline (lower peaks, but higher valleys).

> is making life easier with medication worth the cost over just dealing with it by naturally by adapting to it over time (if even possible in your case)?

If I could have solved the biological issue "naturally" I would have. ADHD comes with really pernicious effects that makes adaptation very challenging.

It's very presence in the list is already a drain on my attention that I didn't ask for and do not want. The fact that it requires any action on my part to remove it from the queue is an issue in and of itself.

I will not hide my disappointment that this headline was not, in fact, referring to the classic adventure game.

The AI turned me into a newt!

In the long run, this makes for very interesting rhetorical analysis of the work.

Your example of Braveheart, for instance, involves two views of the past through the lens of the _present_. So even in that context, both of those views are tinted by the experience and environment of the observer.

I hope so. Random accusations of "this feels like AI" don't add anything to the conversation and are genuinely harmful to those accused when there is no AI involved.

AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.

I would consider it more of a necessary evil than a flaw. Both the writer and the audience need to be able to connect with the story, and you're just going to have a better connection if it feels more familiar to you.

It's a construct that long predates AI. And using it with such intensity and frequency is more likely a sign that this _wasn't_ AI generated, since AI writing tends to _not_ repeat things quite so often.

Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.

You _can_ literally do this in your head, and also, it doesn't matter what the numbers are, what the product is or what the sum is.

Companies pay out severance mostly for compliance with the WARN act. If they could get away with not doing this, they absolutely would.

Every time one of these pops up on HN, it's always an abandoned, unfinished project. Why do these OS projects never get completed?

My first instinct was to think this was satire and I exuded a chuckle.

My second instinct was a brief moment of panic where I worried that it might NOT be satire, and a whole world of horror flashed before my eyes.

It's okay, though. I'm better now. We're not in that other world yet.

But, for a nanosecond or two, I found myself deeply resonating with the dysphoria that I imagine plagued Winston Smith. I think I may just need to sit with that for a while.