Hacker News: danparsonson

New comment by danparsonson in "Investigating how prompt politeness affects LLM accuracy (2025)"

danparsonson — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:28:24 +0000

Statistical significance is about whether an effect can reliably be said to have been measured at all; it's not about whether or not the effect itself would be significant in the sense of moving some other needle.

The ~5% improvement reported here might just be an artefact of the data collection or random variation, rather than a consistent repeatable change.

New comment by danparsonson in "Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order"

danparsonson — Wed, 20 May 2026 13:01:00 +0000

Nana's Archive would have a nice cozy feel to it

New comment by danparsonson in "The Futility of Lava Lamps: What Random Means"

danparsonson — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:29:45 +0000

They're very calming

New comment by danparsonson in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

danparsonson — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:47:50 +0000

Do we need to keep pointing this out though? LLMs are not going anywhere any time soon and people will keep using them to generate articles.

If the content is also nonsense then that's worth talking about, but otherwise comments about LLM style are about as interesting as remarks about typos.

New comment by danparsonson in "The quiet renovation at Bitwarden"

danparsonson — Mon, 18 May 2026 21:34:39 +0000

Mobile wireguard clients are very good as a solution to the access problem.

New comment by danparsonson in "I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis"

danparsonson — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:21:09 +0000

Yeah... in my experience people who code like that 'successfully' make modifications that fix an immediate problem while kicking another bug or two further down the road in a never-ending sunk-cost-fallacy of job security...

New comment by danparsonson in "Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s"

danparsonson — Wed, 13 May 2026 11:20:51 +0000

Aren't they two different things? Vendor SDKs to get the data in, client SDKs as an option to get the data out?

New comment by danparsonson in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:42:44 +0000

You're right, thanks - that makes more sense.

> In conclusion, Google must be destroyed

Yeah they've had their time XD

New comment by danparsonson in "Google broke reCAPTCHA for de-googled Android users"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 22:40:36 +0000

Ah got it - I guess I was having a slow day that day.

New comment by danparsonson in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:04:19 +0000

Ahhh I apologise - I misparsed your comment. I read it as:

> Why is someone making that much money [from] stealing a MacBook

instead of

> Why is someone [who is] making that much money stealing a MacBook

Sorry about that.

New comment by danparsonson in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 15:00:51 +0000

Edit: my bad, see my other comment

The final paragraph:

"Court overtime

For every DUI arrest made, state police troopers must appear in court, and in evidence motions filed with the court, attorneys have said this has led to a staggering amount of overtime pay for Trooper Bradley.

State records show in 2024, Bradley nearly tripled his salary, earning nearly $250,000 in one year."

New comment by danparsonson in "Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 14:04:43 +0000

Here's a radical idea... you could... read the article :-O

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:32:31 +0000

You can do it by cutting and folding a sheet of clear acetate or similar from a net like this: https://wp.optics.arizona.edu/oscoutreach/wp-content/uploads...

Or you could cut the four sides separately and just sellotape them together.

edit: not much help without measurements sorry - try this: https://www.holeinthewallgang.org/Customer-Content/www/CMS/f...

The required angles appear to be 54 or 126 degrees: https://data.formsbank.com/pdf_docs_html/304/3049/304991/pag...

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:12:43 +0000

Yeah that would work! Or @progbits' suggestion of "goes with" works for me too.

In any case thanks for your consideration and thanks again for a great game!

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:10:42 +0000

> To me a "stop watch" is a type of watch

Right but the answer in this case is not "stop watch" - the answer is just "stop". Name a type of watch: "stop".

> I saw someone on here recently say they like to do the puzzle without looking at the clues

Yeah I do that sometimes too, especially finishing off can be easier that way

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:35:59 +0000

You're right - all of mine instantly stopped working and I'm just gonna switch over to pen and paper.

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:31:41 +0000

You can create the same effect on a smart phone screen with a video like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CIszi2Kv_lk and a some clear plastic sheet put together like this: https://www.twowaymirrors.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/pep...

OP: beautiful work with your surf projector!

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:10:12 +0000

Thank you for Tiled Words which I play regularly! I introduced it to a couple of friends and now they compete every day for the best time to finish :-)

While you're here if I could make a small suggestion - the wording of the 'type of' questions was confusing to me until I got used to it; 'stop' is not really a type of 'watch' for example, so maybe you could find a different way to phrase those? Maybe there isn't a neater way to encapsulate the idea of 'is a prefix or suffix to', I don't know, but I found it difficult. Anyway kudos to you and your wife, it's a great game!

New comment by danparsonson in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

danparsonson — Sun, 10 May 2026 23:03:13 +0000

Very nice! Does the sharing feature allow live location sharing? That seems like it would help a lot, especially when group members are in separate vehicles.

New comment by danparsonson in "Meta Shuts Down End-to-End Encryption for Instagram Messaging"

danparsonson — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:41 +0000

I run WhatsApp concurrently on two phones and receive all messages on both devices. But generally speaking this is where we disagree - requiring all devices to be authorised by me is feature not a bug as far as I'm concerned.