Hacker News: addisonl

New comment by addisonl in "Show HN: I built a 2-min quiz that shows you how bad you are at estimating"

addisonl — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:55:37 +0000

> Question: A fair die rolling a 6 twice in a row is more likely than rolling 1-2-3-4-5-6 in sequence

Two 6s in a row is 1/36 chance (1/6)^2

1-2-3-4-5-6 is a 1/46656 chance (1/6)^6

Website is claiming they are the same probability:

> Same probability: 1/46,656 — Both outcomes have exactly the same probability: (1/6)^6 = 1/46,656. This illustrates the representativeness heuristic — random-looking sequences feel more probable than ordered ones.

Website's "answer" is wrong: was the question supposed to be rolling a 6 six times in a row?

New comment by addisonl in "Eat Real Food"

addisonl — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 22:00:21 +0000

Its actually not "pretty clear"—about 25-30% of people are hyper responders who are impacted by dietary cholesterol.

New comment by addisonl in "AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. court says"

addisonl — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 17:22:54 +0000

I mean these analogies could be applied to AI image gen too. Open up an image gen tool and press generate. Do you get a great image? No, because you didn’t even enter a prompt.

New comment by addisonl in "DMV tells Cruise to reduce its driverless vehicle fleet in SF by 50%"

addisonl — Sat, 19 Aug 2023 16:50:10 +0000

Cruise has been operating in Phoenix for many years now.

New comment by addisonl in "YouTube using antipattern to force people enable history"

addisonl — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 19:00:58 +0000

I love and share this view—whenever a website uses dark patterns like this to try and get me to do something I just close the website and thank them for helping me reduce my screen time!

New comment by addisonl in "Musk: Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs"

addisonl — Fri, 18 Aug 2023 16:42:54 +0000

Best way to block people on Twitter after this: delete Twitter.

New comment by addisonl in "X apparently added 5-second delay for links to sites Musk doesn’t like"

addisonl — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 19:06:58 +0000

A temporary outage that only impacted sites that happened to critique or compete with Musk?

New comment by addisonl in "LK-99 isn’t a superconductor"

addisonl — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 17:17:12 +0000

> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism".

That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.

New comment by addisonl in "Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco"

addisonl — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 05:12:34 +0000

> If that claim breaks down whenever the driving conditions are anything other than perfect, then self driving cars lose their only supposed benefit

False dilemma: value from self driving cars is a sliding scale, not all or nothing.

New comment by addisonl in "Webvan: The dotcom bubble’s biggest bust"

addisonl — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 03:37:13 +0000

> The biggest beneficiary of Webvan’s failure was Amazon.com. Not only did the company learn from the mistakes made by Webvan, but it also hired former Webvan executives to launch its own grocery delivery service: Amazon Fresh. Further, in 2012, Amazon bought KIVA Systems, a company that developed the robotic technology initially used in Webvan distribution facilities, for $775 million. Amazon even owns the domain webvan.com.

Never heard of this company before but found this very interesting. Good read.

New comment by addisonl in "Being a short-term rental host has become much harder"

addisonl — Thu, 10 Aug 2023 18:07:56 +0000

Strawman: no one said loud guests are the norm.

New comment by addisonl in "Why heart attacks are rising in young adults and what to watch out for"

addisonl — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 16:24:18 +0000

You have any studies stating the opposite, that heart attacks are falling for folks under 50?

New comment by addisonl in "Tesla committed fraud by “grossly” exaggerating EV range, class action says"

addisonl — Thu, 03 Aug 2023 21:45:45 +0000

On top of that, my car can remember the MPGs I got for the last tank (and every tank before that) and estimates my range off of that. Apparently that’s “magic” according to the comment you replied to. Tesla apologists always have some excuse.

New comment by addisonl in "Senate votes to let people who’ve used marijuana work at intelligence agencies"

addisonl — Tue, 01 Aug 2023 21:13:59 +0000

Wealthiest religion in the world, they have massive real estate holdings.

New comment by addisonl in "LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor"

addisonl — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 23:02:10 +0000

This has been asked over and over again in this thread.

New comment by addisonl in "Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon"

addisonl — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 22:57:42 +0000

> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead

New comment by addisonl in "Scientists may have found mechanism behind cognitive decline in aging"

addisonl — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 15:50:47 +0000

Well, considering it was trained from content created from how people actually write, yes?

New comment by addisonl in "One in five Texans lives in a floodplain, state’s first-ever analysis shows"

addisonl — Sun, 30 Jul 2023 14:24:57 +0000

Hasn’t TX had multiple years of grid failures? Not really a “black swan event” if it keeps happening.

New comment by addisonl in "Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints"

addisonl — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 23:40:56 +0000

“The organization also found that Tesla, which is often lauded for its sophisticated technology, was not a paragon of reliability, ranking dead-last among brands”

New comment by addisonl in "Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints"

addisonl — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 19:04:48 +0000

Tesla is one of the least reliable brands you can buy: https://www.jdpower.com/business/press-releases/2023-us-vehi...

Only Ford/Lincoln, Audi, and Land Rover are worse—all notoriously unreliable brands.