Hacker News: bennettnate5

New comment by bennettnate5 in "uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook"

bennettnate5 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 22:32:20 +0000

Most people I've talked to actually use the "friends feed" in the menu that shows literally only what your friends have posted and nothing else; that could be my friend bias though

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 16:03:18 +0000

Sounds like a great way to strongly incentivize a new form of fraud--fraud-reporting fraud! Imagine how much fraudsters could gain by reporting thousands or tens of thousands of "fraud" calls that they themselves both originate and report from existing SIM farm infrastructure. Any deployment weakness or hole in blocking malicious traffic in the global telecommunications network all of the sudden becomes akin to a weak smart contract that is ripe for exploitation on the order of millions of dollars of fines until it is patched, all due to this depositing requirement.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan"

bennettnate5 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:23:56 +0000

> The most memorable creative responses to The Odyssey – such as Euripides’ Helen, Virgil’s Aeneid, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Joyce’s Ulysses, Walcott’s Omeros, Atwood’s Penelopiad, Madeline Miller’s Circe or Lisa Peterson’s play set in a modern migrant camp –

Hey, she forgot to include O Brother, Where Art Thou!

New comment by bennettnate5 in ""Please just use plain English, I don't understand what you're saying.""

bennettnate5 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:26:34 +0000

> That's exciting that emergent behavior is coining new idioms that may be applicable to some situation

I dunno, it feels pretty similar to an elementary student blindly swapping words with a thesaurus to increase the sophistication of their writing (which I readily admit I was guilty of doing once). It sounds more intelligent but lacks substance.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby"

bennettnate5 — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:09:43 +0000

Yeah, I definitely think "pallets" would make more sense in this context.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS"

bennettnate5 — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:48:32 +0000

It is. It's far from good, but it's much better than eugenics.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "How Ukraine Built a War Fighting State"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 19:45:19 +0000

This was literally an extended sales pitch to get people to buy/invest in real estate in Kyiv. Of course they're going to portray it as vibrant and rich.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Chinese EVs Can Now Project Movies from Their Headlights"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:16:54 +0000

That'll put a whole new spin on drive in movie theaters...

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Supreme Court to hear arguments in landmark Roundup weedkiller case"

bennettnate5 — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:54:20 +0000

It's a matter of when, not if, and that _when_ was more than a decade ago. Round-up resistant Kochia (a weed) has spread across Western Canada and was first observed in 2011. Pretty difficult stuff to get out of your field once it takes root.

As for solutions, I agree with you that there's no single clean solution to mitigate resistance. But it seems like some weeds' reproduction paths are better suited for resistance than others (Kochia produces tens of thousands of seeds and spread similar to tumbleweeds, so there's a lot of potential for mixing and genetic diversity relative to other weeds).

https://saskpulse.com/resources/kochia-resistance-update-res...

New comment by bennettnate5 in "If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:48:08 +0000

So is your general take on the problem that because the way it's worded (blue => "everyone survives", red => "only those who press red survive"), enough people would choose blue that therefore the empathetic/moral thing to do would be to also choose blue to save them? I can get on board with that line of reasoning

New comment by bennettnate5 in "If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:24:53 +0000

I'm wondering if it's really the framing of the problem that's inflating the number of individuals responding with blue (similar to certain confusingly-worded ballot measures).

Suppose the problem were worded in a more concrete way: "I have a large container ship that I'm draining the ballasts out of tomorrow. If less than 50% of get on the ship, it will capsize and everyone who chose to get on it will die. You can choose either to get on the ship (blue button) or refuse to (red button)."

Would one hold a person guilty for not getting on the ship? Would a perfectly empathetic person even board that ship?

New comment by bennettnate5 in "If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 20:08:19 +0000

Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:

There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.

You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.

I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved

New comment by bennettnate5 in "If more than 50% press blue, everyone survives. Red pressers always survive"

bennettnate5 — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 19:37:59 +0000

This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:06:23 +0000

The usual justification is that if you don't do at least a breadth-first literature review, you can get burned by missing a paper that already does substantially what you do in your work. I've heard of extreme case where it happens a week before someone goes to defend their dissertation!

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:58:23 +0000

For me, it wasn't so much about mitigating this cycle as much as recognizing that the grit of pushing through that last 20-30% is actually a valuable life skill that the PhD could teach me to do, and that projects that I felt like I would never want to touch again actually started to become interesting again after I had left them for a year or so.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:52:11 +0000

> This is definitely not true. There is no biological pathway that can do this

Nevertheless, it continues to give her migraines even in small portions where other foods don't. I don't doubt it could be some byproduct from the process of MSG salt's synthesis or cooking with it rather than the actual glutamic acid, or some allergy as others have suggested.

I wouldn't be so strong as to categorically say that MSG can't cause migraines in any of the human race as you so claim though. There's so much we don't know about human biological mechanisms in niche cases; even water can cause allergic reactions in certain individuals (see Aquagenic Urticaria). What is true generally is not always true specifically when it comes to human health.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 16:26:42 +0000

I definitely wouldn't be surprised if that were the case

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Sabotaging projects by overthinking, scope creep, and structural diffing"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:53:19 +0000

Incidentally, this describes what I believe to be the great difficulty of PhD research. You have to take a topic you find interesting and read all possible related work in it, which tends to result in significant scope creep as you realize just how much there is that already does you want to do. Having exhausted your initial energy and excitement for the project, you have to force yourself the remaining 20-30% of he way to the finish line to get that work to a publishable state.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)"

bennettnate5 — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 14:14:35 +0000

I have a family member who has discovered through gradual process of elimination that she gets migraines from MSG, aspartame and yeast extract. "just sodium headaches" doesn't really apply to her case; simply chewing a piece of gum that has aspartame, or eating a piece of meat cooked with MSG in her salad is enough to trigger them. I agree in the general sense with your comment and the article that there's no widespread danger to public health from these additives, but it doesn't mean there aren't still individuals whose health gets messed up (including legitimate headache or migraine symptoms) by these additives.

New comment by bennettnate5 in "Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price"

bennettnate5 — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:47:47 +0000

Fancy gains in ROI come from smart seeder/sprayer attachments and combine harvesters (a completely different piece of machinery), not from the tractor that's pulling those equipment. At best there's the ROI from less seed overlap, but plenty of GPS systems integrate well into any tractor and the gains are really marginal. I don't think tractor electronics are as important as they're hyped up to be.