Hacker News: cryzinger

New comment by cryzinger in "Smudging the game disc to make speedrunning 'SpongeBob' faster"

cryzinger — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:05:47 +0000

There are usually separate categories based on various factors, like which console a game is played on (if it was released on multiple), what the win condition is (do you need to 100% the game, or just see the credits roll?), and whether certain glitches are allowed. Those are nearly always software glitches, but hardware glitches aren't unheard of :)

New comment by cryzinger in "Three of our worst VC stories"

cryzinger — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:39:34 +0000

I think a lot of people fail to recognize that they're the next target, or convince themselves they're special in some way that makes them immune. It's like when someone knowingly participates in an affair and tells themselves "Sure, they're cheating on their current partner to be with me, but after they break things off I know we'll be together forever!"

New comment by cryzinger in "The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography"

cryzinger — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 20:32:21 +0000

For new and under-reported (or otherwise downplayed) stories, I think it's understandable and maybe even good. But when every single story has a breathless, scandalized headline, it gets exhausting fast, and it's hard for me to know what to pay attention to.

I remember last year 404 put out a clickbait-y story about the shitty "covert" websites that the CIA used to communicate with spies they'd recruited in Iran, even though it was old news at that point. If you only read the headline (as many people do...) you'd think it was a startling new development.

New comment by cryzinger in "Sagrada Família Lego set"

cryzinger — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 18:15:44 +0000

Lego also has "3-in-1" sets that come with dedicated instructions to build different possible configurations out of the exact same pieces, which seem like a cool way to encourage kids (or anyone :P) to then veer off into their own building experiments.

New comment by cryzinger in "It's Not Just X. It's Y"

cryzinger — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 02:07:11 +0000

Counterpoint: I think it can also useful to avoid LLM-isms because it's a quick test to check whether you're saying something derivative or actually saying something novel/interesting/significant. Which is to say, if someone could credibly accuse me of being an LLM, then that means my writing is no better (for whatever definition of "better" you want to use) than what happens when you melt down all of human language into a paste and then reconstitute it into featureless little cubes.

Obviously there are exceptions; you can use certain constructions in a way that's still unmistakably human, or use them within a larger context of unmistakably human writing. But in general it makes me think about Orwell's argument against cliches:

> A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’ (e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

If LLM-isms give readers the impression that I'm too lazy to phrase things in my own words, even if I did in fact phrase things in my own words, then I take that as a sign that I should pick better words!

Granted, I've had a strong desire to write as distinctly and un-cliche-ish-ly as possible since long before ChatGPT's public launch, so I might not be as grumbly as other commenters who feel like this would force them to change how they write.

New comment by cryzinger in "Various LLM Smells"

cryzinger — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:32:15 +0000

I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')

New comment by cryzinger in "Citing 'severe' math deficits, UC faculty demand a return to SAT tests for STEM"

cryzinger — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:09:29 +0000

The SAT/ACT prep school industry is a thing. I grew up with many, many kids whose (wealthy) parents sent them to SAT prep summer school every year from age 12 to 17.

New comment by cryzinger in "That Methyl Methacrylate Tank"

cryzinger — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:43:13 +0000

Ooh, like when a bottle of Krazy Glue dries out? I kinda hope so...

New comment by cryzinger in "My two-part desk setup (2025)"

cryzinger — Sat, 23 May 2026 22:18:28 +0000

My wife and I both have Fully desks, which are now part of the Herman Miller family (but weren't at the time we bought them). Not the cutest designs ever, but they've both held up well, and I think the bamboo/wood-ish desktop finish is nicer looking than similar models from other brands.

I've also seen a few places (including IKEA?) sell bring-your-own-top adjustable desks, where they provide the legs and motor and skeleton and then you add some kind of slab of your choosing as the desktop. Haven't tried one myself, though.

New comment by cryzinger in "Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame"

cryzinger — Wed, 20 May 2026 17:28:42 +0000

IgE antibodies, which play a huge role in allergic responses, are "supposed" to target parasites and other non-germ invaders. There are treatments that directly deactivate these antibodies... or you can give yourself a parasite on purpose to give those IgE antibodies something constructive to do: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91951-an-update-on-hookworms

New comment by cryzinger in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

cryzinger — Tue, 19 May 2026 23:52:49 +0000

Do you hold a baseball bat lefty too?

I skate/surf goofy (or used to... haven't done much of either lately :P) and prefer to hold a baseball bat or a golf club lefty, despite being right-handed. And I have an immediate family member who's left-handed but bats righty!

New comment by cryzinger in "Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions"

cryzinger — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:46:34 +0000

Totally fair, I understand :)

New comment by cryzinger in "Shutterstock to pay $35M over hard-to-cancel subscriptions"

cryzinger — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:33:20 +0000

If you only need PS in short bursts, may I recommend https://www.photopea.com/?

It's not at 100% feature parity with PS but it's pretty darn close.

New comment by cryzinger in "Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races Before the Age of Linotype"

cryzinger — Sun, 17 May 2026 17:06:13 +0000

If you mean machine-composed as in AI, I did a reverse image search and found the same image in a blog post from 2013:

https://kenjeffery.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/on-linotype-the-...

And to prove that the image wasn't tampered with recently, here's a Wayback Machine snapshot from 2019:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190823231938/https://kenjeffer...

I think it passes muster!

New comment by cryzinger in "The main thing about P2P meth is that there's so much of it (2021)"

cryzinger — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:50:11 +0000

I think another under-discussed factor in the opioid crisis is that opioids are cheap, but (American) healthcare to treat underlying pain is not. You might not be able to afford six weeks of physical therapy, surgery, etc., but you can probably afford $11.23 a month for a generic prescription.

New comment by cryzinger in "Kickstarter is forced to ban adult content by payment processors"

cryzinger — Wed, 13 May 2026 18:02:46 +0000

Patio11 has a fantastic writeup on exactly this: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/regulation-e/

New comment by cryzinger in "GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values"

cryzinger — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:51:15 +0000

I'm no big-city product strategist, but this is what kills me about so many of these "we're pivoting to AI" announcements. Everyone else is doing the same thing (or already had a long time ago--like you said, GitLab is late to the game here), so squeezing yourself into an AI-shaped mold does exactly nothing to differentiate yourself from the competition. And if/when the AI hype machine sputters to a halt, the few companies that didn't do this will suddenly find themselves at an advantage, because they'll have real, actual differentiators to brag about.

Like, I know there are actual reasons and incentives here for the ever-present AI pivot. But I think they're stupid and short-sighted incentives.

New comment by cryzinger in "Rotten Dot Com"

cryzinger — Sun, 10 May 2026 18:37:18 +0000

I assume because Dell = computer manufacturer?

New comment by cryzinger in "Man finds $1M worth of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster"

cryzinger — Fri, 08 May 2026 23:00:32 +0000

It was this, right? https://www.elitefourum.com/t/many-of-the-pokemon-playtest-c...

New comment by cryzinger in "Xbox CEO ends Copilot AI development and overhauls leadership"

cryzinger — Wed, 06 May 2026 02:18:27 +0000

I've used those occasionally and they seem to be a mix of official guides and user-submitted video clips, but it's not clear where the user-submitted clips come from.