Hacker News: akk0

New comment by akk0 in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

akk0 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:32:02 +0000

Going from an 80% to a 90% failure rate means the success rate halved; that's a pretty big change in my book.

New comment by akk0 in "Clinical failure rates over the decades: yikes"

akk0 — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:27:47 +0000

Doctors are people

New comment by akk0 in "Long presumed dead, a thriving coral reef is discovered in West Africa"

akk0 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 17:51:00 +0000

Not having heard of this plant before, I was rather confused why people would leave so much footwear on this trail.

New comment by akk0 in "Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public"

akk0 — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 08:03:35 +0000

That sounds great! Maybe not so great for the occasional person sentenced to death for selling weed, but that's just the price of freedom.

New comment by akk0 in "AliExpress hit with record $629M fine for counterfeit and illegal goods"

akk0 — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:47:29 +0000

I could not give less of a shit about counterfeit goods, but of course for safety there understandably are rules and those rules should be enforced.

In general, though, Aliexpress has a lot of goodwill with me; I buy stuff from there with some regularity and personally have seldom made a bad buy. I'm still rocking my decade old €10 polarized sunglasses, my 2018 €25 soldering iron, screwdriver and so forth.

New comment by akk0 in "A Beautiful Theory Falls to Ugly Data"

akk0 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:27:02 +0000

Confused readers may note that EGS refers, I think, to the Epic Games Store, and not to EroGameScape (which does not run a marketplace)

New comment by akk0 in "Japan now has human refrigerators inspired by Japanese vending machines"

akk0 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 08:00:24 +0000

Human refrigerator as in a machine that refrigerates humans, not a human that refrigerates things, as I had erroneously assumed.

New comment by akk0 in "Pseudpocalypse"

akk0 — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:17:59 +0000

If you help fund the research team, I'll contribute the $5 wrench, and we can split the the profits

New comment by akk0 in "Why Am I Left-Handed?"

akk0 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:59:39 +0000

Another example: my partner is left-handed, I am right-handed. We dabble in instruments together; we have a right-handed bass guitar, and an electronic drum kit we set up in a traditionally left-handed way. Both very doable, but there's definitely a debuff when learning from someone else. We're very monkey see monkey do.

I think the "sharp weapon" hypothesis is interesting and favors "why right and not left?" but I think it's too specific and unnecessary to explain the more important "why 90-10?".

New comment by akk0 in "Why Am I Left-Handed?"

akk0 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 22:51:31 +0000

The article searches hard for an evolutionary explanation for why right-handedness specifically would be favored, but I think it suffices to find a reason for most people to have the same handedness, and then right-or-left can just be a coinflip. Most people having the same handedness does seem "better". Author stays by retelling a learning challenge they had as a child because of opposite handedness, I think that general idea for instance would generalize to the ancestral environment.

New comment by akk0 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2025)"

akk0 — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 08:52:08 +0000

Location: Paris, France

Remote: Yes please

Willing to relocate: Nope

Technologies: Bit of everything, full-stack web dev (Vue, React) is what I have most experience with as well as Python. Web scraping, data analysis, recommender systems. Some ML/Pytorch as well albeit not LLMs. Lately I've been focusing a lot on Clojure(Script) and programming language design.

Résumé/CV: https://webbieweb.org/work/looking_for_work.html (haven't gotten around yet to going in detail on portfolio, inquire by email for my actual CV)

Email: akk0@webbieweb.org

Primarily looking for part-time or contract-based stuff, but totally open to full-time for things that are genuinely interesting or truly aleviate suffering in this world. I'm very available for short-term gigs and odd jobs, so if you just need someone to run chores for you for a couple hours at a reasonable rate, I'm your guy.

Professional experience going back technically to 2012 if I'm allowed to be a little cheeky (used to write Minecraft Bukkit server plugins for some extra money as a teen) and provable professional-quality work going back to 2017.

New comment by akk0 in "The Tag"

akk0 — Sat, 11 Oct 2025 10:15:01 +0000

I think "act like it's ridiculous" is pretty hyperbolic here. I didn't know what ARIA stood for until now (though I knew what it was).

You'd be surprised how many people barely know it exists... I was a TA for my uni's Web Engineering and Ethics in CS courses and accessibility never even came up in either course.

New comment by akk0 in "The government ate my name"

akk0 — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 09:45:57 +0000

My partner has a first name like XXXdr, which an airline at some point turned into "Dr. XXX".

New comment by akk0 in "Legal experts condemn Apple bowing to White House's request to remove ICEBlock"

akk0 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 17:29:52 +0000

It's illegal to have navigation in your vehicle tell you there's a camera coming up in France, enforced and punished by high fines (I moved here from NL which has no such law).

New comment by akk0 in "Where it's at://"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 13:54:59 +0000

I can check again when I get home but I'm fairly sure I didn't enable that when it prompted me for interests when signing up.

New comment by akk0 in "Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:48:17 +0000

"just like the bad-thing-doers of old, today's bad-thing-doers believe what they're doing is actually good" is a keen insight in itself when broadly applied, but useless for distinguishing bad things from good things.

New comment by akk0 in "Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:43:36 +0000

And how does that experience shape your views on the uncritical adoption of AI technologies?

New comment by akk0 in "Earth was born dry until a cosmic collision made it a blue planet"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:01:44 +0000

How does this square with the fact that we have solid evidence of water on Mars as well?

New comment by akk0 in "Where it's at://"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 10:12:22 +0000

I imagine myself switching over to that pretty quickly if I do stick with the platform (I also use YouTube that way) but that doesn't address the discovery problem.

It's just really sad that you give people a platform to say whatever they want to the world and most people seem to have little to say beyond "here's what made me unhappy today"...

New comment by akk0 in "Jeff Bezos says AI is in a bubble but society will get 'gigantic' benefits"

akk0 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 10:02:30 +0000

I'd actually love to eat insects but to my dismay I found out they're actually really expensive...