Hacker News Reader

kevinmchughon Google ordered to identify who watched certain YouTube videos

Anyone collecting data needs to consider how the data can be misused. Whether that be by a (repressive) government, a hacker, or a future purchaser of the data

kevinmchughon PFAS 'forever chemicals' to officially be removed from food packaging, FDA says

You can pop in butter if you're careful about not over heating it, or in ghee to make it real easy

kevinmchughon Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

Less of the lachrymator gets in your eyes if there's glasses in the way. A sharp knife also produces less lachrymator. If you keep your knives sharpener than your parents did, that'll do it

kevinmchughon Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

I don't think the surface is porous so much as you didn't clean the pan and left capsaicin behind in it. You could try this with other materials - can you eliminate all the spice from stainless or glass without using soap as a surfactant?

It's fine to wash cast iron with soap, and when you're working with spicy things and others use the pan, you really ought to consider it. Even if you don't usually wash your pan.

kevinmchughon Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

I don't buy it either. I've had tons of chile beers and they are typically spicy. I once made a habanero stout and that thing was undrinkably spicy for years.

kevinmchughon Why jalapeño peppers are less spicy (2023)

Dave Arnold has also done it with a rotovap, specifically with habanero. Because he wanted all the bright flavors of habanero, without the heat.

kevinmchughon Marilyn vos Savant and the Monty Hall Problem (2015)

The "smartest person in the world" tag is a marketing push. It works with her name. It wouldn't work as well if she was named Marilyn Smith.

kevinmchughon Populist backlash against globalization: A meta-analysis of the causal evidence

Yeah, I think 2016 with Bernie employing one populism and Trump another one tells this story well. They're more different than similar, to be clear but their pitches had similar shapes. There's an elite, they cause all the policies you dislike, and if we could just engage all the disaffected voters we'd easily get the things we want. For Bernie it was the economic elite preventing expanded welfare programs, especially Medicare For All. For Trump it was a globalist elite preventing nativist policies.

It was more obvious in 2020 (with a less complicated, more policy-driven primary) that tons of Democratic primary voters don't want Medicare For All, and that the story as Bernie had told it didn't match the reality on the ground of differing policy goals even within the party's constituents.

kevinmchughon Certain dogs are capable of learning the names for more than 100 different toys

Yeah, and humans can identify different hops or chocolate or coffee beans by smell. We can't track very well but still have pretty sophisticated noses

kevinmchughon AstraZeneca unveils successes in treatment of lung cancer

Watching my grandfather die with emphysema at age 12 was the only anti-smoking message I ever needed

kevinmchughon US Employers Brace for 16M Super Bowl Sick Days

Society should have celebrations. It's good for social cohesion that people do things together and have shared interests and activities. One of the consequences of celebrations is hangovers. We should make it easy for people to have celebrations, and that includes them having some hangovers, or just being tired from being up later the night before.

I don't drink or care about football, I just think new year's day and black Friday are good holidays.

kevinmchughon The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

If the trucks are otherwise identical the thing you should be most worried about is insiders. The cash being more fungible means you maybe should pay the cash drivers more, so they're never tempted to skim off the top or sell details to the heisters.

kevinmchughon The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

Equity? If you have the choice of a million dollars in salary and 100,000 shares or 1.1 million in salary and 50,000 shares, probably you should take the lower salary

kevinmchughon US Employers Brace for 16M Super Bowl Sick Days

My big stupid idea for American politics is for a president to promise that each budget they sign will add a new holiday. Make Congress come up with one, agree on it. I think super bowl Monday, election day, and a doubled memorial day are the most obvious, best candidates

kevinmchughon US Employers Brace for 16M Super Bowl Sick Days

I tend to think the addition of Juneteenth as a federal holiday a few years ago improved American life just a little bit, and adding more would do the same. The day after the Super Bowl is a natural one to add.

kevinmchughon The Empire Strikes Back First Draft by Leigh Brackett (1978) [pdf]

And also so that the secret wouldn't get out

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

https://g.co/gemini/share/c4e5634a2e2d

Not terrible. It gets the answer wrong, but reminded of the crucial twist it gets it correct, durably. If you're too condescending it will give up and ask what the hell you're looking for

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

I saw it posted on Twitter some time last year. If LLMs are to be useful they should be capable of answering novel questions. This is only a trick question for an LLM. 2 of the 7 sentences plainly state the answer.

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

That's what I like about this problem (and similar Dumb variants of classic brain teasers). It exposes that there's not understanding, there's just a statistically weighted answer space. A question that looks a lot like a know popular topic ends up trapped in the probability distribution of the popular question.

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

Regular

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

My understanding is that gpt4 is better at this than 3.5 and it seems to get it pretty reliably. One thing that's interesting to do is to imply the answer is incorrect and see if you can get it to change its answer. If you let it stop answering when it's correct, you get the Clever Hans effect.

kevinmchughon Bard is now Gemini, and we’re rolling out a mobile app and Gemini Advanced

On logic it cannot handle the Dumb Monty Hall problem at all:

https://g.co/gemini/share/33c5fb45738f

kevinmchughon Disney to take $1.5B stake in Epic Games

This is basically just fortnite. When they wanted to make a racing game, they did it in fortnite. When they wanted a rhythm game, they did it in fortnite. Fortnite is a game browser and engine, not a set of mechanics.

Also if the intention is to limit the use of the property to epic games, why not use a plain old database? Nft seems like overkill

kevinmchughon Jackie Coogan and the fall of Hollywood's child stars

I find that children rarely have much range, but they can be cast inline with their natural inclinations or personality. There's a number of tv shows where the kid actors get worse over time, as they're asked to do more kinds of storytelling (stranger things is a good example).

kevinmchughon Bluesky signups are now open to the public

I really think "tweeting" worked to make it seem more normal and less serious than "posting", which is the brandless term X and Bluesky (the companies, not the communities) both prefer. Posting is for forums and forums are for nerds.

I harbor some hope that Elon will firesale off the trademark on "tweet" and someone can put it to good use

kevinmchughon Bluesky signups are now open to the public

I think a lot of that is on mastodon fwiw, and some hasn't left Twitter

kevinmchughon Bluesky signups are now open to the public

I mute annoying posters (the frequent users who already have >5k posts tend to be uninteresting to me and obviously show up more often in feeds), that makes sense to me.

How goes my experience improve if I block a bot that follows me? Follower bots is a platform problem

kevinmchughon Bluesky signups are now open to the public

More, smaller networks seems like a big improvement over a handful of too-big, everyone's-there networks.

kevinmchughon Bluesky signups are now open to the public

I've been on for a few months now. It feels like 2014 Twitter in that it doesn't have gifs or video, so you will see some very good jokes.

A number of people I used to follow on Twitter are over there but seem to have broken out of the posting habit and are quieter now.

When I look at the "discover" tab I don't usually see much stuff that's interesting to me. It's a lot of men posting thirst-traps, furries, bog standard too online politics, and discussion about what's going on on Twitter

Edit to add: people really like to advise blocking. It's to the point that new users are often advised to add a profile photo and an intro post before following people, because you might get blocked just for not having those. I don't know what this is about - possibly because there's no private/locked accounts? It seems really strange to me.

kevinmchughon Dean of Engineering at University of Nevada wrote a paper that’s bad

It reads like someone took a longer paper, cut out individual sentences or fragments, and then put a fraction of them back together without bothering to see if it made sense.

It lists 9 references but never cites them directly. So there's no way to tell what came from where.

It's also just not copy-edited at all. There's _three _ spaces before the third sentence, which begins with a fragment of a different sentence