Hacker News: bdzr

New comment by bdzr in "How the Lobsters front page works"

bdzr — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:36:38 +0000

This has also been my experience. I like that it's a small community but their toxicity is much more towards AI or anything to the right of RMS.

New comment by bdzr in "Study: MRI contrast agent causes harmful metal buildup in some patients"

bdzr — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 01:57:31 +0000

> As it happens, the daily practice of medicine does not require interpretation of p-values. Indeed, medicine existed before the p-value.

What are you talking about? Doctors refer people based on test results every single day. From what I've seen, hardly any of them understand the precision/recall of the tests that they then use to refer you (or not) to screening procedures (which are not all harmless).

New comment by bdzr in "Study: MRI contrast agent causes harmful metal buildup in some patients"

bdzr — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 23:48:04 +0000

> I agree. Expecting perfection from humans, even experts, is not reasonable and is frankly counterproductive.

There's a big difference between perfection and "Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance"[1]. I don't think their intentions are bad, but they are woefully incompetent at many basic things.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/17/statistical-literacy-a...

New comment by bdzr in "Organize your Slack channels by "How Often", not "What""

bdzr — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:15:08 +0000

Or at least give us the discord feature of "Mute channel for ..." with some fixed set of durations.

New comment by bdzr in "Vibe coding cleanup as a service"

bdzr — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 16:50:08 +0000

I've made heavy use of emdashes my whole life. It feels like I have to eliminate them now :(

New comment by bdzr in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

bdzr — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:22:17 +0000

Are you worried about being sherlocked at all? I know "multiplayer" is on their official roadmap.

New comment by bdzr in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

bdzr — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:12:32 +0000

I think it's a matter of time until we see a notable plugin in the obsidian space get caught exfiltrating data. I imagine then, after significant reputational harm, the team will start introducing safe guards. At a minimum, create some sort of verified publisher system.

New comment by bdzr in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

bdzr — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:08:39 +0000

It's *significantly* worse than vscode. vscode is at least attempting to grapple the problem: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/configure/extensions/exte....

New comment by bdzr in "Signal Secure Backups"

bdzr — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 20:04:07 +0000

Will the secure backups also be incremental? I've gotten to the point where the backup takes quite a while to generate.

New comment by bdzr in "What even is a small language model now?"

bdzr — Sun, 25 May 2025 03:58:23 +0000

> Using an LLM is not just ridiculous here but totally the wrong fit and a waste of resources.

Time and labor are resources too. There's a whole host of problems where "good enough" is tremendously valuable.

New comment by bdzr in "Ty: A fast Python type checker and language server"

bdzr — Thu, 08 May 2025 02:24:45 +0000

> I'm not proposing that we all just try harder to be altruistic, but rather that we craft some institution for rewarding people who have solved problems for many without encumbering those solutions with a monetization scheme.

> I'm sure somebody has a better idea than mine, lets get creative.

Every creative scheme I've seen someone try to come up with fails to do what charging money for a product can. Charge money for stuff, have a free tier, enjoy sustainable software.

New comment by bdzr in "Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests"

bdzr — Sun, 04 May 2025 23:30:01 +0000

> there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.

Is that true? Most trades can work fewer hours, medical workers like nurses can, hairdressers, plenty of writers are freelance, the entire gig economy.

It seems like big companies don't provide the option, for software at least. I always chocked that up to more bureaucratic processes which add some fixed cost for each employed person.

New comment by bdzr in "Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water"

bdzr — Sun, 30 Mar 2025 15:57:25 +0000

Also tariffs on cane sugar.

New comment by bdzr in "DOJ: Google must sell Chrome, Android could be next"

bdzr — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 14:07:52 +0000

90% of the people here wouldn't pay $3/mo for a browser. Who do you think is going to raise the money?

New comment by bdzr in "GLP-1 drugs: An economic disruptor? (2024)"

bdzr — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 23:17:30 +0000

> I don’t know if it’s the nature of the products themselves

Isn't this what you were just arguing it was not 10 minutes earlier?

New comment by bdzr in "In memoriam"

bdzr — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 21:06:24 +0000

I don't see what the big deal is - Governments don't change hands or selectively prosecute.

New comment by bdzr in "In memoriam"

bdzr — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 21:04:45 +0000

> the stated target of the law but the least likely to be affected by it

The least likely to be negatively affected. This will absolutely be good for them in that it just adds another item to the list of things that prevents new entrants from competing with them.

New comment by bdzr in "After layoffs, Meta rewards top executives with a substantial bonus increase"

bdzr — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:25:08 +0000

Why not raise it to $50/hr? While we're printing money without side effects we might as well go big.

New comment by bdzr in "Obsidian is now free for work"

bdzr — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 14:23:39 +0000

Interesting. I usually don't complain about prices because I wish more products charged, but I always found the publish pricing to just be too high altogether. I have a blog that's a few simple markdown files and it's easily worth the pain of setting up GitHub pages instead of paying $8/mo. Maybe I'm not the target market though.

New comment by bdzr in "43K fewer drivers on Manhattan roads after congestion pricing turned on"

bdzr — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:10:19 +0000

Oh god. Didn't they try to do something like this in Mexico City and it resulted in no change? Clever policy is always rife with unintended consequences; prices are good.