<rss version="2.0" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"><channel><title>Hacker News: Calavar</title><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Calavar</link><description>Hacker News RSS</description><docs>https://hnrss.org/</docs><generator>hnrss v2.1.1</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Oct 2026 10:25:43 +0000</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="https://hnrss.org/user?id=Calavar" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"></atom:link><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Jared Kushner Hacked Phone Reveals Secret Negotiations, Millions in Transactions"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>So Kushner's phone was hacked around the same time as Hunter Biden's laptop? Why has the latter captured the media so much more then the former?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 22:32:16 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202002</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202002</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202002</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Triplet of 'ghostly' galaxies hints at what dark matter is and isn't"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The ordinary matter that gets tangled up is interstellar dust clouds, not stars and planets.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2026 15:59:10 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168359</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168359</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168359</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Wine ported to OpenBSD"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>What are some GNU coreutil extensions that you find you can't live without?</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:36:46 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154511</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154511</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50154511</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information""]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>The use of LLMs to make automatic or semi-automatic decisions on firing weapons. This is already happening [1, 2, 3] and has already led to weapons being delpoyed erroneously against civilian targets [1, 3]. It's easy to imagine it happening again on a larger scale, maybe involving nuclear weapons at some point in the future.<p>[1] <a href="https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-investigators-say-overreliance-on-palantir-ai-tech-contributed-to-u-s-strike-that-killed-123-iranian-children-2000814477" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-investigators-say-overreliance-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-musk-grok-ai-iran-missiles-pentagon-b2997321.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-polit...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drones-autonomous-ai-kill-ukraine-war.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/world/europe/russia-drone...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:41:00 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024069</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024069</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50024069</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Things that apparently cause cancer"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Establishing a correlation is only a starting point. After that there is an entire field of statistics called causal inference that is devoted to establishing causality using a variety of tools.<p>The strength of correlation is NOT the only useful metric and should not be mistaken for more rigorous statistical analysis regarding causality.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:33:53 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49941589</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49941589</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49941589</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Show HN: Yantra – an LALR(1) parser generator for C++"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> A hand-rolled recursive descent parser can say something like "missing semicolon after return statement" because the code knows exactly what construct it's in.<p>> A generated parser's error is usually derived mechanically from the state machine, "expected one of: X, Y, Z, got W", which is correct but generic.<p>You are not describing the difference between hand-written and generated but rather top down vs. bottom up.<p>There may be some confusion here because hand-written parsers are almost always recursive decent (a form of top down), while the most popular parser generators (yacc, bison) are bottom up. However hand-written bottom up parsers do exist (Pratt parsing, recursive ascent), as do top down parser generators (ANTLR, Coco/R, Chumksy). Chumsky in particular gives pretty decent error messages out of the box.<p>Bottom up parsers can parse a larger set of languages than top down parsers, but the tradeoff is you don't know what you are parsing until you successfully reduce the rule (unlike top down parsers). This is why errors in bottom up parsers often lack comments on structure/context like "after return statement" and can only give a list of which alternative symbols would have been valid.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Thu, 01 Oct 2026 06:09:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918246</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918246</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49918246</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "The darker side of being a doctor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> What am I missing?<p>Several things.<p>First, private practice docs see patients with very good employer provided insurance, but residents are largely seeing patients that private practices wont see - patients who are far too medically complex to fit into a 10 minute slot and who also have particularly stingy insurance.<p>So as opposed to a private practice doc who is seeing 30 patients per day and billing an a average of $250 to $300 per patient (certainly not $1000 - that is unrealistic in my experience), a resident is seeing more like 10 to 15 patients per day (30 minute slots) and billing less than $100 per patient.<p>Second, residents have to be supervised. You have not included the salary of the physicians supervising them in your calculation.<p>Third, and I have mentioned this many times before on HN,  training is limited by chiefly by the number of training sites that can offer quality training. For example, most hospitals will not see a single case of Guillan-Barre in a single year. Would you want to be treated by a nuerologist who trained at such a hospital? This is why neurology training is generally limited to places with a high volume of neurologic cases that would be considered rare at the average hospital, and these hospitals can only accommodate so many residents. Even for general medicine, you probably do not want to be treated by a doctor who trained at a hospital where any case that passed a certain complexity was transferred out to a bigger center.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 13:04:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815464</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "The darker side of being a doctor"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>General practitioners make more like 250k on average. 150k for general practitioners working in academics, but not overall.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Wed, 23 Sep 2026 12:45:41 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815264</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815264</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815264</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "What happened to the Snowden archive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I don't think Zelenskyy is a saint - far from it.<p>However this is one of the weakest possible grievances you could raise because Putin <i>also</i> released rapists and murderers from prison to raise manpower, most famously during the spring 2023 Bakhmut offensive. There is no moral highground on that point.<p>Actually, this is actually a near universal issue with Russian grievances against Ukraine. Virtually any grievance that Russia can claim against Ukraine, Ukraine can claim that exact grievance back at equal or greater measure.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 02:33:18 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796171</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796171</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49796171</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "What happened to the Snowden archive"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This is a classic Russian perspective on the war - that Ukraine is a gang of neo-Nazis that are dead set on eliminating Russian speakers from Ukraine by force. Russians will further claim that this gang of Russophobic neo-Nazis is led by Zelenskyy, a Jewish man who speaks Russian as his mother tongue and Ukrainian as a second language.<p>The absurdity of this claim should be self evident.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 03:36:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782771</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782771</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49782771</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in ".name Termination"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> Early termination of a domain registration does not impact the life cycle of the domain, as the domain can still go through the various stages of a standard life cycle.<p>According to ICANN cutting the life cycle short doesn't have any effect on the life cycle?<p>ICANN corruption is at the level of FIFA corruption.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:03:25 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49558790</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49558790</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49558790</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "We are rebuilding Monica"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>An absolute doddle assuming you have an absolutely excellent test suite. Otherwise  on any nontrivial codebase you will still have regressions that make it to production and you will waste your time squashing bugs rather than writing new features.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 16:41:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524436</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524436</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49524436</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "SQLite as a Document Database (2020)"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>It's a MongoDBism. The MongoDB community used document to mean the nonrelational equivalent of a row in a relational database. But over time there was definitional shift, and now it means a JSON blob, even if that blob is in a relational database.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 29 Aug 2026 19:10:15 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492440</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492440</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49492440</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "AI boosted homework scores, then exam scores dropped: study"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:56:38 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390860</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390860</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49390860</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>SoftRam. Raymond Chen wrote a great technical analysis on what it actually did: <a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=105897" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20211111-00/?p=10...</a></p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:21:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078887</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078887</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078887</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "How we measured AI writing across arXiv, and where the measurement breaks"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> There are a finite number of words and a finite way of combining them within an academic setting/field which means that we can't build a perfect classifier with just text.<p>Maybe for very short phrases, but otherwise I disagree. Phrasing very quickly runs into a combinatorial explosion. In the words of Noam Chomsky, "Virtually every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe."<p>In my opinion, the difficulty in LLM/human text discrimination isn't that a person might coincidentally write exactly the same text as an LLM would, but rather that 1) LLMs aren't hard locked to a single phrasing (so this is a tougher problem than matching to a single static document, e.g. plagiarism detection) and 2) text has relatively low information density, so you need quite a bit of it to gather enough data to run a statistical test with a reasonably narrow confidence interval.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:53:59 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984747</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984747</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48984747</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "NYC may require landlords and realtors to disclose the use of AI in listings"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>> They'll almost certainly spend more time and money on the process than is ever collected if this ever happens.<p>The point of regulation isn't for the state to turn a profit. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that regulations that drive a monetary profit for the state are generally bad because they create a perverse incentive. For example, municipal governments adversely affect traffic flow by lowering speed limits because those lower speed limits generate more ticket revenue.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 19 Jul 2026 02:02:17 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964359</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964359</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48964359</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Do Babies Dream of Baby Sheep?"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>Similar situation. I have no doubt that a large fraction of my childhood memories are fabricated, but there were a few that I kept to myself until I was over the age of 30 and were later confirmed by a parent or aunt or uncle.<p>There's also the phenomenon of having a memory of a memory. At age 10, I had a very solid recollection of my life at ages 5 to 6 (not so much of age 4). Now all I remember is that I used to remember a lot more than I do know.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:37:04 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48708318</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "Epidurals are a miracle technology"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>This gets said a lot and it kind of irks me. (I am a physician.)<p>US software devs also make 2x what their European colleagues do, but that never gets called out as bloat. Plus US software devs make that 2x pay without taking our additional loans for medical school at the rate of $75k per year or doing years of low pay residency where their salary doesn’t give them the means to pay off those loans.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 14:25:43 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48645464</guid></item><item><title><![CDATA[New comment by Calavar in "The Coming Loop"]]></title><description><![CDATA[
<p>I would be more willing to believe you only used Claude for minor editing tasks if you disclosed your usage of Claude upfront.</p>
]]></description><pubDate>Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:18:06 +0000</pubDate><link>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</link><dc:creator>Calavar</dc:creator><comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</comments><guid isPermaLink="false">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48644551</guid></item></channel></rss>