Hacker News Reader

inkcapmushroomon When oil prices spike, where does the money go?

Horses go before carts though, not after. Can't pull a cart from behind it.

inkcapmushroomon How to Write with an LLM

The irony comes in the last sentence: "Readers won’t put their fingers on what’s wrong, but they’ll sense that you’ve become artificially-flavored." The joke is that he wrote the preceding sentences in the paragraph in a way that intentionally plays up written-by-LLM-isms so that you feel the sense being described in the quoted sentence.

inkcapmushroomon Claudette: Make Claude stop talking like a BuzzFeed article

Berating an LLM's response as a way to improve output has worked for at least some subset of LLMs and outputs. I have a coworker who told me that "hack" anyways.

inkcapmushroomon We shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever: On weird fiction

Thanks for submitting the article, this gives me lots of new stories and books to check out. This is a genre I've always loved (Edgar Allen Poe was my favorite author from a young age) but haven't explored the width of enough.

inkcapmushroomon We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

They did include a screenshot which looks like at least 6 emails being sent in the 24 hour time window. I would certainly consider that spamming from some diary app on my phone.

inkcapmushroomon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

>Also thoughts of mine recently: why are we not doing subterranean datacenters, why are we not doing tall/skinny skyscraper like datacenters (versus enormous sprawling warehouse-style).

It's cheaper this way.

inkcapmushroomon Single Dose of Frog-Derived Gut Bacterium Eradicates 100% of Tumors in Mice

Those things have also happened under other forms of economic structure, such as feudalism and communism. In fact there's no point in human history when we weren't manipulating the environment for our gain, destroying some species and promoting others in the process, we just got better at it over time. It's sort of an inevitability given we are megafauna who take a lot of resources per human to live, and there are an awful lot of us.

Rather than blaming "capitalism" as a whole, I would more put the blame on our ability to ignore negative externalities when pricing things in. That occurs just as much in any other economic system.

inkcapmushroomon Show HN: Hallucinate – Massively Multiplayer Online Rave

Good news, you can still go to raves. There are still people there being people.

inkcapmushroomon Spotify will start reserving concert tickets for fans

Spotify is another entity dipping into the limited pool of available tickets and further limiting supply. I don't pay for/use Spotify and don't want to, so as far as I'm concerned this is only worsening the problem by further constraining the supply of tickets available to me.

inkcapmushroomon How long-distance couples use digital games to facilitate intimacy (2025)

Thank you for this game. I played it a whole lot as an early teen and have lots of fond memories from it.

inkcapmushroomon Earthquake scientists reveal how overplowing weakens soil at experimental farm

The modern industrial farming complex is designed to treat every field as identical, and to allow as few people as possible to work as big an area as possible. That allows for standardizing methods and optimizing the output per acre. Tilling the soil is mainly for aeration: the farm equipment rolling over the fields (which is needed to massively reduce labor costs) compact them, so you need to loosen the soil again. It's also for weeding; if you till before you plant you uproot any plants already growing there (weeding by hand is extremely labor intensive). It also allows you to mix compost and other beneficial components into your soil to further aerate it and give space for roots to grow. It's all to give your field a "blank canvas" that you apply your crops to, where you can just dump about 2-3x the recommended amount of fertilizer into it and not worry about the particular conditions of the soil itself beforehand.

inkcapmushroomon Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US

Where I live I would half to walk about a half day to get to the nearest place that sells any kind of food and back, which is a 7/11 gas station. To get to a real grocery store and return would require a full day's travel on foot (just checked google maps, 4.5 hours one-way to the closest one). There is no public transportation option at all, the only buses are school buses until you get much closer to a major city. Driving is a necessity in such places.

I live in a well populated East Coast state, so it's not like I'm even really far out in the sticks too, there are many places which are even worse off in these regards.

inkcapmushroomon A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

They were baiting it with carcasses! Everyone knows Bigfoots are vegans and prefer chai soy milk lattes.

inkcapmushroomon Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries

I have definitely used canned goods and household chores in sentences before.

inkcapmushroomon Elvish as She Is Spoke [pdf]

I think we also need kenming and kemning at a minimum.

inkcapmushroomon Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins

Yeah but my 401(k) tax statement paperwork doesn't make me feel like a pirate.

inkcapmushroomon Claude's new constitution

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

inkcapmushroomon Sins of the Children

The Expanse has some environmentalist characters in it, but I think the series as a whole doesn't tend that way. In my reading of the series it portrays the human need to consume and reach further out as just as natural as anything else.

inkcapmushroomon Our approach to advertising

Do you have an example of a text or site written in a way that's been AEO'd? I'd be interested to know what that looks like, especially if it sounds cult-ish.

inkcapmushroomon So, you’ve hit an age gate. What now?

I have a similar problem, I do swing dancing and all the information for dances in my area are exclusively posted on Facebook by a wide variety of people who are putting on the dances. I can try and go to each individual organizing a dance and try and get them off Facebook, but that's making their job harder when we've already had lots of people stop organizing events post-COVID, and the system they have now seems to really work for getting new people into dancing that haven't done it before with lots of new faces each dance. So I just go along with it.

inkcapmushroomon Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

Now I'm picturing someone peeling their Zebra Cakes and cutting it into slices.

inkcapmushroomon CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat

I wish they would just say what's producing the protein. "Our cultures" and talk of fermentation makes me think it's just yeast maybe?

inkcapmushroomon A woman on a mission to photograph every species of hummingbird

This summer I woke up early and stepped outside in some bright tie-dye. I had a hummingbird approach me within about 4 feet and check out my shirt, obviously trying to decide if I was just a really weird flower or something. It was really incredible to interact with such an interesting bird (even though I'm sure he was annoyed that I wasn't in fact a giant flower).

Nice documentary about hummingbirds: https://youtu.be/vGMJZSfVW1M?si=m-LmIO9vgt7l-nV4

inkcapmushroomon The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

What if the stores detain you and force you to work in their perfume department to pay off the million-dollar multi-item fee they just thought up? What if they also do a bunch of allergen testing on you to figure out what you're allergic to and then make you exclusively sell perfumes containing those allergens?

All because of that darn penny-rounding.

inkcapmushroomon I may have found a way to spot U.S. at-sea strikes before they're announced

Well, the murder, for one.

inkcapmushroomon Global Peace Index 2025

The index is not just about "how peaceful is the average citizen's life", which is one part of it, but also includes other things like how many wars the country participates in, how much of their government budget goes to military, etc. You shouldn't get a good "Global Peace Index Score" while exporting violence across the globe.

inkcapmushroomon Doorbell prankster that tormented residents of apartments turns out to be a slug

Those are its eye stalks. I don't imagine pressing with a lot of force on its eyestalks is something a slug likes to do, but then again I haven't asked any yet.

inkcapmushroomon Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/5504/

https://rockinst.org/blog/public-mass-shootings-around-the-w...

The US is an outlier in how many guns we own, with about 1/3 of American adults owning guns, and we are also an extreme outlier in mass shootings unless you compare us to places that lack rule of law. How many more people need guns before that mass shooting number goes down to 0, do you think?

inkcapmushroomon Ultrasound toothbrush promises painless checks for hidden gum problems

That's called an ultrasonic scaler, which is quite different to the device in the article. A scaler is for removing tartar and stain while the device in the article is an ultrasound (like the device for viewing babies during pregnancy) which looks under your gums at your tooth roots and bones to see if you have any bone loss or gum disease.

You might not have the dentist or dental hygienist use the probe very often. When they do it's a rounded straight tip device, and they usually call out numbers to an assistant for how deep under the gumline the probe can reach. That's the procedure this device would replace. If nothing else it's an improvement because you don't need an assistant to record the numbers, and if someone has bad gum disease it might hurt them when you poke in there with a probe.

inkcapmushroomon Show HN: Penny-1.7B Irish Penny Journal style transfer

Most times I just talk to obviously unimportant NPCs so that I can read about the setting and feel more immersed in the fiction. It also stems from old RPGs like the original Pokemon where sometimes you had to talk to a random NPC in town to learn how to progress past an obstacle.