Hacker News: coriny

New comment by coriny in "Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations"

coriny — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 14:18:28 +0000

Your maths doesn't seem right. You can estimate mutation rates very easily, and you don't end up at crazy numbers. The sequence space explored by evolution is tiny compared to the possibilities and closely interlinked. A simple example is comparing haemoglobin sequences from different animals.

New comment by coriny in "X blocks EU Commission's advertising account after €120M fine"

coriny — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 06:55:42 +0000

Could be Reagan as well.

New comment by coriny in "X blocks EU Commission's advertising account after €120M fine"

coriny — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 06:23:46 +0000

The EU, like almost every democracy ever, is a "representative democracy":

> Representative democracy is a system where citizens vote for officials (representatives) to make laws and political decisions on their behalf, rather than voting on every issue directly, making governance of large populations more efficient while holding elected leaders accountable through regular elections. It's also called an indirect democracy and is the most common form of democracy, seen in the UK (MPs) or India (Members of Parliament).

Direct democracy has historically been completely impracticable. And even with modern comms, I still don't see a way of doing it in practice, personally. The direct democracy of ancient Greece was notoriously corrupt.

New comment by coriny in "In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended"

coriny — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 08:15:27 +0000

It was possible to obtain them in Edinburgh 25 years ago, but it was rare. It was more of a meme than a popular choice, based around the Scottish love of deep frying absolutely everything.

New comment by coriny in ""Don't want no Samsung": London's phone thieves get picky"

coriny — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:37:21 +0000

I recommend scrolling to the next article about the giant AI-generated Christmas image/Lovecraft Eldritch horror on a shopping centre in Kingston (London). It is glorious.

New comment by coriny in "'Dark oxygen': a deep-sea discovery that has split scientists"

coriny — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 11:10:55 +0000

> This cast doubt on the long-established view that life was made possible when organisms started producing oxygen via photosynthesis, which requires sunlight, about 2.7 billion years ago.

So ... life began because it started producing oxygen via photosynthesis? I think they oopsed the word "multicellular" or "complex". A low-grade article and a long shot of a theory, but maybe not impossible.

New comment by coriny in "Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke"

coriny — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 22:06:17 +0000

Botswana is well in the top half of least-corrupt countries. I suspect you know nothing about Ukraine or Botswana.

New comment by coriny in "Apple stuck the Mac mini power button on the bottom"

coriny — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 06:56:13 +0000

Shutting down and starting up again can draw more power than sleeping/other low power mode. e.g. airplane mode on a phone is probably better than turning the device off for the night. Old dumb phones used to sip power when switched off so the alarm would work.

No idea with desktops, but I wouldn't be surprised if suspend used less power than stop/start for overnight in some cases.

New comment by coriny in "AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of life's molecules"

coriny — Thu, 09 May 2024 07:58:36 +0000

There is a biannual structural prediction contest called CASP [1], in which a set of newly determined structures is used to benchmark the prediction methods. Some of these structures will be "novel", and so can be used to estimate the performance of current methods on predicting "structure that we have no baseline to start with".

CASP-style assessments are something that should done for more research fields, but it's really hard to persuade funders and researchers to put up the money and embargo the data as required.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CASP

New comment by coriny in "How to pick the least wrong colors"

coriny — Sat, 13 Jan 2024 10:37:40 +0000

New comment by coriny in "Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley"

coriny — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 17:05:30 +0000

Not quite sure what you mean by "mind manifestation"? MDMA has significant impacts on your emotional and mental state, and also causes strong audiovisual hallucinations, disorientation and loss of self. What extra experiential effects would you ascribe to a classic psychedelic that aren't found in non-psychedelics?

Generally there's either the experiential (e.g. do you hallucinate?) definition, which regards MDMA, THC etc as psychedelics or the receptor-based definition, which excludes them.

New comment by coriny in "Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley"

coriny — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 15:53:18 +0000

Ketamine is a psychedelic, just not a "classical" one that operates the same receptors as LSD/mushrooms. Or rather, whether or not it is a psychedelic is a semantic argument, and it still makes you hallucinate. MDMA is another "non-classical" psychedelic.

New comment by coriny in "A Lost Hiker’s SOS Signal Sparked a Wildfire. Now He Must Pay $300k"

coriny — Wed, 22 Feb 2023 12:58:03 +0000

I don't know if it's still the same, but from Stansted airport you had a choice of taking either the train to Liverpool St or Liverpool Lime St. Fun times for tired travellers.

New comment by coriny in "Ask HN: DarkSky Alternatives?"

coriny — Sun, 08 Jan 2023 12:48:53 +0000

I find rain alarm good enough for this.

New comment by coriny in "Apple’s ad business set to boom on the back of its own anti-tracking crackdown"

coriny — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 07:38:23 +0000

From over a year ago: https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/10/apple-hires-former-facebook-a...

New comment by coriny in "Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt"

coriny — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 10:26:09 +0000

You might have missed this statement in the article:

> German authorities were of course also customers of the company

Though I don't think that's what the title was implying, I think it means German "nationality" rather than German "state-owned".

New comment by coriny in "Maryland hasn't updated Covid case data for 15 days due to a security incident"

coriny — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 09:16:16 +0000

They seem pretty good. This summer was a bit of a mystery, but otherwise things have tracked pretty well.

Obviously you can't determine anything without taking into account the estimated/guessed factors (extent of people movement, other restrictions) included in the models versus what really happened (new restrictions, lower than expected movement). And why only select this subset of forecasts, given they are produced daily/weekly (depending on urgency)? There was an early prediction that Covid would only cause ~30,000 deaths in the UK, why wasn't that included?

Do you have a link to anything that isn't Fox-news level cherry-picking? The Spectator is notoriously not a reliable source.

New comment by coriny in "“They introduce kernel bugs on purpose”"

coriny — Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:38:32 +0000

Patches with built-in bugs made it to stable: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs/YIAta3cRl8mk%2FRkH@unreal/.

New comment by coriny in "Ask HN: How have you cured your RSI?"

coriny — Thu, 01 Apr 2021 06:49:31 +0000

I don't know if it was clinically RSI, but I had severe cramps in my forearms, shooting pains and tingling sensations from shoulders to hands for about 6 years. Switching from using MacOS laptops back to Gnome 3 (first an XPS 13, currently a Lenovo L14) fixed it in three weeks. I realised in retrospect I had been using Apple laptops for about 6 years. Never going back without a fundamental redesign.

New comment by coriny in "I just lost my wallet on the way home from work"

coriny — Tue, 15 Oct 2019 21:43:08 +0000

Both of those options would take longer and be more effort, but I've only find someone else's cards 3 times in 40 years...