Hacker News: blast

New comment by blast in "Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto? My Quest to Unmask Bitcoin's Creator"

blast — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:06:43 +0000

Humans are social animals. Any mystery about another person is interesting, and wealth and fame multiply this.

New comment by blast in "Delve removed from Y Combinator"

blast — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 04:28:23 +0000

friday news dump tho

New comment by blast in "The open web isn't dying, we're killing it"

blast — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:31:37 +0000

Fuck boosting engagement.

New comment by blast in "The open web isn't dying, we're killing it"

blast — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:30:49 +0000

"The lesson is not just to resist. It is to grow up."

Barf.

New comment by blast in "The open web isn't dying, we're killing it"

blast — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:28:34 +0000

Well said and I agree completely...but did Robert Plant play guitar?

New comment by blast in "We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How"

blast — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:30:29 +0000

Gptzero and Pangram both say this article was AI-generated. Seems we've forgotten how to do other things as well.

New comment by blast in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

blast — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:24:03 +0000

> the cheapest bridge that just barely won't fail

That can't be right? What about safety factors

New comment by blast in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

blast — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:11:35 +0000

The joke has been old for a while already.

New comment by blast in "Why the global elite gave up on spelling and grammar"

blast — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:10:10 +0000

This trend predates LLMs though.

New comment by blast in "Tony Hoare has died"

blast — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:46:04 +0000

That's a great point which never occurred to me about Dijkstra, even though I knew where he came from. My father in law used to like this joke: "He was Dutch and behaved as such."

New comment by blast in "Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?"

blast — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 15:57:19 +0000

When did Woz post here? I'd love to see that.

New comment by blast in "Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)"

blast — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:25:56 +0000

This doggerel is every bit as propagandistic as what it opposes, and has nothing in common with Owen's poem of unbearably real experience.

New comment by blast in "Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)"

blast — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:22:11 +0000

The gas victim scene is harrowing. But what haunts me even more is the men without boots, marching with bloody feet.

New comment by blast in "On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]"

blast — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:01:33 +0000

Sorry for replying so late, I only just checked the thread.

"I was mislabeled but not locked up" is misleading because hospitalization was phased out decades ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation). The reason she didn't get "locked up" is because treatments changed, not because she was assessed correctly (she was not). Psychotic patients don't get "locked up" by default anymore—they get medicated, which is what happened in her case as well.

It's a red herring to emphasize an obsolete practice that was phased out long ago. "I was mislabeled but not locked up" says no more than "I was mislabeled but not put in an insulin coma". A more accurate statement would be "I was misdiagnosed and treated for mental illness". Written that way, it's clearer that this is not a refutation of Rosenhan at all, and looks more like a replication.

I don't know if the book is actually this misleading because I haven't read it. I'm just making an out-of-context response to the out-of-context bits of information I've gleaned here.

New comment by blast in "Ask HN: What would you recommend a vibe coder learn about how all this works?"

blast — Fri, 13 Feb 2026 04:45:40 +0000

I feel like we might have more to learn from you than the other way round. Where by "we" I mean the traditional programmers who frequent this place.

New comment by blast in "What won't change"

blast — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:46:46 +0000

All three of these (birth, live music, and cooking) involve the body in ways that can't be virtualized.

One long-term effect of AI adoption might be to cheapen and commodify the virtual, and reorient us to embodied experience. I hope so.

New comment by blast in "On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]"

blast — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 21:23:20 +0000

> She was given some anti-psychotics and sent away

But that confirms the main point of the experiment, which was that people who didn't need psychiatric treatment were given it anyway.

It's only of secondary importance that the prescribed treatment changed from hospitalization in 1973 to drugs by 2004. The primary point is that there was no objective way to determine who genuinely needed treatment. She didn't, but was diagnosed anyway.

This objection is so obvious that she must have addressed it in the book. Do you remember if she did?

New comment by blast in "A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived"

blast — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 20:19:33 +0000

Publications could use watermarking to encode the name of the account an article is being served to, but they don't seem to. I wonder why.

New comment by blast in "We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)"

blast — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 18:33:10 +0000

It helps to have a statistician and a geostatistician as your clients!

New comment by blast in "Ask HN: How did Gemini go from being awful to incredible back to awful?"

blast — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 04:55:48 +0000

I haven't noticed it being awful again. Can you give examples?