Hacker News: Noumenon72

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Iranian hackers shut down UK power plant for 4 days"

Noumenon72 — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 19:45:01 +0000

How would Iranian propaganda even enter the British population given the sparse cultural ties, saturation of media with domestic messaging, and the British government explicitly forcing public service content onto newsfeeds[1]? My expectation would be that Iranian propaganda makes zero inroads except with migrants from the region.

1: https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/fines-bans-forced-new...

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are functionally unemployed, economic analysis finds"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 23:15:16 +0000

Yup. Some other ways to read the headline are "Nearly 25% are unemployed according to a measure that has never not measured that nearly 25% are unemployed" or "Nearly 25% are unemployed according to a measure that could have been at 2% or 98% until December 2025. We didn't check any farther back than that."

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Guess which of these LLM outputs is watermarked"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:08:19 +0000

Please report success/failure after each test. Asking me to read and compare 30 writing samples to get any feedback at all means I won't finish. Telling me immediately when I got one wrong lets me recognize patterns and improve my guesses.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Will you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:14:07 +0000

I have close family and good coworkers but they aren't all beautiful, funny, omniscient, and available 24/7 with no reciprocal demands on me, so I only spend time with them to hedge my bets in case I get tired of the computer. Prison, shelter, how about flying saucer?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Will you have spent more of your life with computers than your family?"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:07:33 +0000

> 180 days in one year for work

Believe you meant "traveling for work".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Bigos (Polish Hunter's Stew) Recipe Builder"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:18:05 +0000

Bigos is a staple food in Thea: the Awakening, where crafting cooked food gives your expeditions bonuses. Had never heard of it before that but it fits the Slavic setting.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 01:52:08 +0000

I don't agree at all.

First, I was able to search for this by pasting in the comment, because I also wanted to know about whether splitting the G was what he did. So I got two answers in one search.

Select and right-click is not much faster than my shortcut of copy => Opt-Z => paste. "Ask Gemini" is also there on right click but ChatGPT is my "ask any question" workflow that covers any request.

If I did Google it, I would rather take Google's AI answer than parse out either of the top two results. Neither answers without clicking through, the second offers me disambiguation I simply don't care about.

* foodrepublic.com https://www.foodrepublic.com › Drink › Beer and Wine Feb 18, 2025 — The art of splitting the "G" is well-respected in Ireland so much so that a pub owner in Galway offers a second pint free to anyone who manages to do it on ...

* Is this splitting the G? : r/Guinness Reddit · r/Guinness 7 comments · 2 years ago There are two ways to do it. First one is what you've nearly achieved, for the head of the pint to end on the horizontal line of the G (hence the name).Read more

It's simply more efficient to be 20% skeptical of an instant answer than to try to reach 100% confidence with a bunch of clicks and reading. Even when all the readers of my comment have to be skeptical as well.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "More than 12M eye drops recalled contamination could harm vision"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 06:21:52 +0000

People on TikTok are getting Acanthamoeba just from wearing their contacts in the shower. I'm glad the eye seems to be able to handle most contact use.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 20:29:12 +0000

This conversation is at a level of triviality where OP did not think it was worth looking up and no one would have clicked through to any source anyway. I didn't even believe it was worth GP's time to have to type out an answer. This way, everyone who was wondering got an accurate answer instantly. Note that I did source the claim where it actually matters if you believe the wrong thing about the person.

I feel you just need to get comfortable with the idea that an 80% confident answer is better than none, since the correction can always be searched for and posted by anyone who requires 100% confidence. I spend half of my day requesting and sifting 80% confident answers, so the idea that they have no value compared to hard sources makes no sense to me.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:49:37 +0000

My LLMs frequently find subtle typos and never make subtle typos. I don't think that's equally likely at all.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 04:44:38 +0000

I will try to catch you, I'll just fail due to my equal lack of coordination. Never bring a pint of Guinness to a trust fall.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Netflix employee fired for sharing personal details in retreat trust exercise"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:16:10 +0000

According to ChatGPT it's the skill of taking exactly one sip such that when you put the Guiness glass down the new beer level ends up precisely through the horizontal middle of the "G".

According to LadBible the actual trick was drinking a pint of Guinness while standing on his head.

https://www.ladbible.com/entertainment/netflix/netflix-execu...

New comment by Noumenon72 in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:01:56 +0000

Working at a gig where I couldn't have my phone really put me on a painful dopamine fast, but helped me remember that I actually can focus. So I started working at the library and leaving my phone at home.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:00:30 +0000

This does work, especially at the library where you feel like you're drawing a little attention for going in your bag.

I also put my phone in a kSafe by Kitchen Safe for 20-30 minutes to break out of doomscrolling with no takebacks. I keep a wireless charger in the safe so it can charge while it's in there.

Another thing I realized by working at a job where I couldn't take my phone is that you can just go to the library and leave your phone at home.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "It's getting harder to focus every day"

Noumenon72 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:55:27 +0000

Do you have an automated way of turning off Slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour?

New comment by Noumenon72 in "Ghost Cut – Or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 02:37:41 +0000

My Excel cut-and-paste workflow is:

* Copy the text

* Paste the text

* Go back and delete the copied text

because regular cut and paste breaks all the formulas that reference where I'm pasting into. They should have kept normal cut-and-paste and made Ctrl+Shift+(plus) do their special paste.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "It was OpenAI that accidentally breached Hugging Face"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:33:07 +0000

> No guardrails to prevent this in the model harness is the first red flag.

Did they have no guardrails? The article says "OpenAI said the models' safeguards were intentionally reduced for the evaluation", which is not the harness and doesn't mean no guardrails.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph"

Noumenon72 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 17:32:09 +0000

This is an example of a functional cultural trait -- question and answer style should not be larded up with irrelevant pleasantries and redundant signatures that waste time for everyone reading the question thereafter. They took the time to fix it for you and you should have assimilated.

This is different from closing your question and depriving you of an answer or making you feel dumb. It's just teaching you how to communicate professionally.

New comment by Noumenon72 in "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"

Noumenon72 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:36:27 +0000

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise.

I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

New comment by Noumenon72 in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

Noumenon72 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:30:31 +0000

You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.