Hacker News: alpinisme

New comment by alpinisme in "Top amputation surgeon had own legs removed due to fetish. Were patients safe?"

alpinisme — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:52:21 +0000

Yeah if the comment just meant a review is warranted, great. But it’s not like separating personal desire and professional responsibility isn’t a routine part of just about every career. (Not saying this is equivalent to saying “that shirt looks great on you” when as a retail worker you think a customer looks ridiculous; but the analogy isn’t so far off that we should be shocked anyone would manage to have the fetish and still be a caring professional).

New comment by alpinisme in "Top amputation surgeon had own legs removed due to fetish. Were patients safe?"

alpinisme — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:44:34 +0000

What do we gain by pathologizing it in newspaper headlines? Fetish is relatively value neutral, just a blank way of conveying the fact of his desiring it (against the current of normalcy).

If, as you imply, most people would stop a friend who did this, then it sounds like society already has the right attitude against it, and underscoring our concern by turning it into explicit disapproval at every mention is just lathering on a layer of censoriousness or shame.

New comment by alpinisme in "Top amputation surgeon had own legs removed due to fetish. Were patients safe?"

alpinisme — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:15:53 +0000

How is it tainted by that alone? It’s almost certain that at least some of the patients he amputated actually needed amputation.

New comment by alpinisme in "Top amputation surgeon had own legs removed due to fetish. Were patients safe?"

alpinisme — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 20:14:35 +0000

There’s also a known correlation between firefighters and arsonists

New comment by alpinisme in "Canceling "Hey""

alpinisme — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 18:32:48 +0000

He does say to shoot the wolves. And the wolves are the “gypsies” in the analogy he is explicitly drawing. The commenter you’re responding to was highlighting the parallelism not literally saying “he said to shoot people”

New comment by alpinisme in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

alpinisme — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 21:15:00 +0000

The claim isn’t knowing 99% of the field but that 99% of topics are ones you could do a quick-and-dirty crash course and come out with some understanding.

New comment by alpinisme in "A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample"

alpinisme — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 22:28:00 +0000

He’s a hacker news celebrity but not a global celebrity

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

alpinisme — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:17:52 +0000

Not if you’re on page 2

New comment by alpinisme in "Modern Decor May Be Straining People's Brains"

alpinisme — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 17:44:00 +0000

I don’t think it needs to be “flipped”…that’s the plain reading, isn’t it?

New comment by alpinisme in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures (1986)"

alpinisme — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:22:25 +0000

> And this is apparently super common even in ivy league universities as Youtube lessons have shown me over and over.

I think you have the “even” backwards. Elite research first universities have this problem more than teaching-first, low research output programs.

New comment by alpinisme in "Completing a computer science degree on Coursera"

alpinisme — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:00:20 +0000

Yeah but writing detailed blog posts about the experience is usually a signal pointing toward the former group

New comment by alpinisme in "U.S. allows Anthropic to release Mythos AI to ‘trusted’ US organizations"

alpinisme — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 00:03:50 +0000

Prohibition was the 18th amendment

New comment by alpinisme in "A deadly fungus that can infect cats and people is spreading"

alpinisme — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 12:35:27 +0000

The article doesn’t. It quotes a CDC advisor who does.

New comment by alpinisme in "Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil"

alpinisme — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:27:34 +0000

If you say so. In the meantime I’ll continue to appreciate the occasional tornado warning.

New comment by alpinisme in "Is AI ruining our skills? Early results are in – and they're not good"

alpinisme — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 18:54:20 +0000

One of the challenges here is that the skillset we are in danger of letting atrophy is essentially unbounded. It’s not a specialized tool like a calculator, where you have a well scoped domain of problems you are offloading. granted, in practice many people are using ai for specialized domains (like coding or producing visual designs). But whatever level of abstraction they are currently working at is not, in principle, something that they couldn’t also offload to ai.

New comment by alpinisme in "RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method"

alpinisme — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:51:05 +0000

At least support - or lack thereof - for a new verb is unambiguous (compared to changing the semantics of GET)

New comment by alpinisme in "Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models"

alpinisme — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 21:27:06 +0000

Arguably it’s a worse (or different) war crime to knowingly target people incompetently and thus kill more innocent civilians. In this respect, they showed themselves against one war crime. Not “war crimes” in general but a specific misuse of ai in war.

New comment by alpinisme in "US Consumer Price Index up 4.2%"

alpinisme — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:40:48 +0000

That shows that it’s been since 1991 since we saw similar five year increases in prices. Which is a long time. You also have to be careful not to zoom out so far you get into the “we all die anyway” scale where you’re not really tracking things that are meaningful to on-the-ground, as-lived reality

New comment by alpinisme in "Confidential submission of draft S-1 to the SEC"

alpinisme — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 22:35:49 +0000

“Controls”

That will be especially untrue after IPO when shareholders can claim there are fiduciary responsibilities that conflict with the non profit goals.

New comment by alpinisme in "An Ohio Valley 100k-watt FM signal is severed in broad daylight"

alpinisme — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 11:38:49 +0000

Yes but those are very different time scales of consequence. Definite immediate reward or possible long term consequence. People with active drug addictions are known to vastly overprioritize the former to the detriment of the latter. I mean, they also know the risks of overdose but they’re not all getting testing kits for their drugs.