HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

rawgabbit

5,480 karma · joined April 12, 2020

submissionscomments
rawgabbit··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
https://claudemariottini.com/2014/06/19/ripping-open-pregnan...

Quote

     One of the most violent and brutal conducts in times of war was the Assyrian practice of ripping open pregnant women in order to expose their fetus. In his article, “‘Ripping Open Pregnant Women’ in Light of an Assyrian Analogue,” Mordechai Cogan quotes an Assyrian poem, probably dated to the reign of Tiglath-Pileser I.
rawgabbit··on Why the Bronze Age Collapsed
It could be the Bronze Age empires were based on violence and coercion. When the small polities had the means to defend themselves, the empires fell apart.
rawgabbit··on Nvidia launches new tool to keep AI agents from going rogue
The related X post: https://x.com/JensenHuang/status/2104499465055023424?s=20
rawgabbit··on Japan moves to tighten rules for foreigners
When East Germany existed, East Germans were shot dead trying to escape to West Germany.
rawgabbit··on The darker side of being a doctor
Thanks for the link. Am I reading the article correctly. There are about 24K medical school students and 50K medical school applicants so that means almost half of the applicants are accepted into medical school? That seems a bit high?
rawgabbit··on What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals
You sir are a literary genius.
rawgabbit··on Beyond Ukraine: Why Europe is preparing for a wider conflict
You assume rationality when history has shown wars are often started with irrational or no apparent reason.
rawgabbit··on I hate you Microsoft
Oddly enough. I found ChatGPT to be good at making slides. I prompt it with the text I want and some "stage direction" about the aesthetics and it makes good slides. It also makes good PDF documents as well; I feed it my markdown and tell it to make a publish quality PDF and it does a good job. In short, I am defaulting to Obsidian/markdown and use ChatGPT when I need to create other formats.
rawgabbit··on Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU
As an American, because of Trump's actions, I identify more with "European" culture and feel I am a stranger in my own land.
rawgabbit··on Most people prefer traditional architecture
https://www.habitat67.com/en/

I find the Habitat67 brutalist apartment complex in Montreal to be tasteful and livable?

rawgabbit··on Show HN: Neobrutalism.dev – Just added Base UI support and added new color theme
I am not a front end dev. But one question I always had is why px and not em? I thought em as a relative distance would be better than hard coding px?
rawgabbit··on Why is Google still serving dodgy ads?
Google’s cash cow is ads. I think the writing on the wall is ChatGPT and other AI search engines will dominate. It is to be seen how Google will respond. But in the end, their monopoly on web search is coming to an end.
rawgabbit··on Flock worker calls police on reporter filming public camera installation
In the United States, clergy never had formal political power. Religious movements did play major roles in the abolition of slavery and Prohibition of alcohol.

The United States had campaign-finance laws to limit the political influence money can buy. The McCain–Feingold Act restricted “dark money”. The Supreme Court struck it down in Citizens United v. FEC.

rawgabbit··on Fuck it, make it anyway
Any advice on how to use or not use AI?
rawgabbit··on iPhone Duo
My first thought is what happens when I drop a $1999 device and break it.
rawgabbit··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
I found this nugget on page 315. It seems to say the OECD acknowledges students are just blowing off this test.

     For most students, PISA is a low-stakes assessment: they can refuse to participate in the test with no negative consequences and do not receive any feedback on their performance. There is a risk, therefore, that students do not do their best on the test; and that they behave differently from what they would do in other circumstances.
    ...In most countries/economies, students reported making less effort on the test in 2025 than in 2022 and in 2018: on average across 35 OECD countries, the difference corresponds to -0.5 points on the 10-point scale (compared to 2018; and -0.3 points compared to 2022) (Table I.A1.1). Meanwhile, the proportion of students who indicated that they invested very little effort in the PISA test increased from 3.5% to 5.4%.

There is also this strange entry here(https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results-volum...).

     In this section, the analysis focuses on two types of incorrect responses that can be identified on most, if not all, items: skipped responses (item responses left blank, in-between non-missing responses); and hasty responses (item responses that were not scored as correct, and on which students spent less time than the fastest, yet accurate respondents). More precisely, a “minimum threshold” of time effort required for each item was defined as the 1st percentile of the (unweighted) distribution of response times among all respondents who solved the item correctly, across all participating countries and economies.2 This means that only 1% of all full-credit respondents were able to respond to the item in less time, and 99% of full-credit respondents spent longer than this threshold. The minimum threshold of time required was increased to 10 seconds in all cases where, mostly because of correct guess answers, more than 1% of full-credit respondents had provided the correct response in less than 10 seconds. Respondents who did not obtain a full-credit score on the item, but who spent less time than this threshold, are considered to have given a hasty, speeded response (as defined, a “skipped” response may also be a “hasty” response).
     Table I.A1.12 shows how the proportion of skipped and speeded responses evolved between 2018 and 2025. A clear trend emerges: on average across OECD countries, the average proportion of hasty (incorrect and fast) responses increased significantly between 2018 and 2025. The average proportion of hasty responses increased by over 4 percentage points over the period, reaching a total of about 9%. The average increase across items of hasty responses exceeded 10 percentage points in three countries/economies (Kosovo, Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, in descending order of that increase). Similar analyses for the mathematics and science test are presented in Tables I.A1.13 and I.A1.11; analyses for math, in particular, also show an increase in the proportion of hasty responses between 2022 and 2025, with the largest increases observed in Serbia, Malta and Israel.
    In the PISA test, sequences of items that are left blank at the end of the test are not considered when scoring students’ answers. Similarly, in these analyses, the corresponding students and (missing) answers are excluded from the percentages of “skipped” or “hasty” respondents. Indeed, in PISA, these items are considered as if they were not administered to students, who, most likely, did not reach them. Such non-reached items are also ignored when estimating item difficulty and student performance. However, because, over time, students became more likely to skip or to provide a fast (if incorrect) response rather than to continue working on a task that they perceived as difficult, it is interesting to note that the proportion of non-reached items declined in reading, by about 2 percentage points (Table I.A1.12), on average across OECD countries.
rawgabbit··on How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?
From what I read Texas will have larger and more intense heat domes. On the plus side, this high pressure shifts tornado alley towards the east away from Texas. On minus side, Texas will be the new Arizona.
rawgabbit··on How Climate Resilient Are the Largest Cities?
I have a hard time believing this site also. When I looked at their methodology at how this list was created, it said "Please fill out our Methodology Request Form, and a member of our team will get back to you, typically within one business day.". As far am I am concerned, I can safely ignore this site.

https://docs.alphageo.ai/climate-resilience-suite/climate-ri...

rawgabbit··on PISA 2025 Students' reading and mathematics performance declined across the OECD
Quote

     PISA 2025 was the largest assessment to date, involving 760 000 students across 91 countries and economies.
What were the sample sizes in previous years and their related demographics?
rawgabbit··on The Dataflow Model Revisited
TLDR. 15 years ago they avoided SQL and created a language for streaming. Today, the industry decided that SQL materialized views with a “freshness” or time lag promise is the correct mental model.
rawgabbit··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
It's the 2026 version of Jerry Springer freak show cum reality TV.
rawgabbit··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
The charitable take is she is an expert in method acting; she has become the fantasy she invented. The less charitable take is that she is a sociopath lacking the ability to realize the danger and harm her fraud is causing.
rawgabbit··on 'You Can See Everything' Review: Nathan Fielder's Doc About Elizabeth Holmes
She would have made a terrific actress playing mafiosi. I can see her giving that death stare while knifing Johnny nine-toes and pulling out his entrails.
rawgabbit··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
Thiel says Zuckerberg is special. He is the chosen one. He will lead an entire generation etc. This is a master class in ass kissing.
rawgabbit··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
That says more about the US software industry than anything else. You “win” by being hostile to consumers while you lawyer up and bribe the powers that be.
rawgabbit··on Bill Gates tries to install MovieMaker (2003)
For all the pontificating, Zuckerberg is disliked more than Musk. According to this 2025 survey: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/02/19/how-ameri...
rawgabbit··on Www.whitehouse.gov/Arcade/
Bread and circuses. Can’t afford the bread but we have games.
rawgabbit··on Protecting Engineers' Skills in the AI Era
Quote:

     A perfectly optimized system that produces incompetent operators is not optimized at all. It has simply moved its failure mode somewhere the spreadsheet can’t see it.
rawgabbit··on 'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This
The ancient societies you mentioned, were not anti-intellectual. If anything, they placed too much power in their intellectual elites e.g., monks becoming bureaucrats in Charlemagne's kingdom, scholars becoming mandarin officials in Chinese dynasties.

The US always had an anti-intellectual streak. A common quote was I'd rather be judged by a jury of averages joes than a panel of intellectuals. In 2026, the anti-intellectual and anti-science folks are in charge of US institutions.

rawgabbit··on 'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This
I write like this. It's probably a Texas thing as my writing is a close approximation to how I talk. That is the writing is meant to be read out-loud.

BTW, I believe the author was painting the visual image of Beavis & Butthead, not a caveman.

Page 1 of 34Next →