Hacker News: devindotcom

New comment by devindotcom in "The oldest bar in every state"

devindotcom — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 21:19:31 +0000

I don't think Gene Hackman was suggesting it was a Calvinist joint

New comment by devindotcom in "Amazon, which started off selling books, is destroying rare texts to train AI"

devindotcom — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:38:20 +0000

no one uses ai for writing at tc. you're gonna end up chicken-littling yourself

New comment by devindotcom in "How to disable or avoid intrusive AI"

devindotcom — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:32:44 +0000

funny to see you here rather than mefi jessamyn. thanks for everything!

New comment by devindotcom in "Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1T and 114k Lives a Year, Yale Study"

devindotcom — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:36:35 +0000

"known" by whom, and documented where? if you're going to just parachute in and say this paper by domain experts is dead wrong, at least link to what you believe shows this to be the case.

New comment by devindotcom in "ICE Shot a Journalist and Threw Him in Detention. He's Approaching 300 Days"

devindotcom — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 21:21:57 +0000

accounts from ICE are not trustworthy or factual.

New comment by devindotcom in "The mathematical physics of rainbows and glories (2001) [pdf]"

devindotcom — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:16:58 +0000

If you're at all interested in this stuff, Atmospheric Optics is a fantastic resource that illustrates and explains these phenomena with both depth and accessibility. Note that the menu on the left hides lots of layers.

https://www.atoptics.org.uk/halo/common.htm

https://www.atoptics.org.uk/halo/dogfm.htm

Super old school, love that it's still online.

(edit: incidentally, rainbows and glories fall under the water droplets category)

New comment by devindotcom in "'The Cheese and the Worms' by Carlo Ginzburg Review"

devindotcom — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 23:16:11 +0000

Oh, how wonderful. I've been meaning to pick this up but was worried about the accuracy and completeness of the old edition (not that I'd be able to tell, really). So this is great to hear:

> This new edition – the publication of which shortly and sadly pre-dated Ginzburg’s death on 17 June this year – is therefore invaluable, both as an engaging history in its own right and as a ‘classic’ of microhistory. The new translation by Stephen Twilley is excellent, correcting numerous small mistakes and infelicities in the 1980 English edition. It also includes the author’s previously untranslated afterword and a new postscript, which together provide insightful and moving reflections on how Ginzburg’s experiences as a Jew in the 1940s shaped his commitment to studying individuals in all their complexity rather than as merely part of the anonymous masses.

Ordering one right now. If you're curious about this, look also into Ginzburg's "The Night Battles," which is another rabbit hole entirely (and one I hope gets a new edition too).

and here's the JHUP link: https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53948/cheese-and-worms

New comment by devindotcom in "What sort of maths are LLMs good at?"

devindotcom — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:59:14 +0000

look up the actual origin and purpose of the turing test, you may be surprised

New comment by devindotcom in "High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons"

devindotcom — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:53:40 +0000

yeah, this is good advice unless you really want to get deep into it. the people doing the colors on these know what they're doing. that said it can be fascinating to look at the process and try it yourself so go for it. I bet it's well documented.

New comment by devindotcom in "The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment"

devindotcom — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 03:39:31 +0000

oh perhaps you're right. i thought they were clones, not alternative domains. i had that captcha issue as well, it disappeared through no action of my own. hope the same for you.

New comment by devindotcom in "The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment"

devindotcom — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 20:51:54 +0000

there are variations but some are shady... archive.ph, archive.today, etc. there's probably a central list somewhere.

New comment by devindotcom in "Web Security is Too Hard"

devindotcom — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:40:03 +0000

heh yeah I ran into this with one of the few times I used claude desktop. it had no idea what features it had and didn't have, where buttons were in the app, etc. isn't that kind of a core category of knowledge you'd want the chatbot to know?

New comment by devindotcom in "What's Behind the Sharp Drop in Labor Force Participation?"

devindotcom — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:33:21 +0000

no one understands what you are saying

New comment by devindotcom in "What's Behind the Sharp Drop in Labor Force Participation?"

devindotcom — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 20:31:13 +0000

your suggestion to cash strapped people who can barely afford rent is "just buy a house in new york"?

New comment by devindotcom in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

devindotcom — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 06:36:51 +0000

abominable

New comment by devindotcom in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

devindotcom — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:59:55 +0000

Lol. Imagining someone sneaking across the border from Mexico so they can work under the table to afford a $4k/mo 1BR in Hollywood

New comment by devindotcom in "How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood"

devindotcom — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:10:07 +0000

yeah this is what I heard from pretty much everyone in the business down there. since production has gone international LA can't compete with, say, Romania. You can ship out your must-haves and rely on locals for the rest, the savings are enormous.

There's some stuff you can still do in LA but a huge amount of actual shoot days are in countries with lower costs and fewer labor restrictions.

New comment by devindotcom in "Read the novels and forget everything else"

devindotcom — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:55:49 +0000

Excellent books, full of understated spectacle and really excellent wordplay. If you get into them you may want to pick up "A Sea of Words" as a guide to some of the more esoteric terminology. Pretty much guaranteed you'll be stumped quite a few times in every book.

New comment by devindotcom in "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots"

devindotcom — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 18:53:14 +0000

this is a tangent but you should revisit your assumptions about giraffe anatomy. their necks actually weigh a tremendous amount and are kept upright by an interesting system whereby they actually stretch this giant tendon to bend down and the tendon's tension lifts it back up. super cool to learn about - they dissect one in a documentary series I can't think of just now.

New comment by devindotcom in "The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) [pdf]"

devindotcom — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 05:38:32 +0000

"Institutions of learning should be devoted to the cultivation of curiosity and the less they are deflected by considerations of immediacy of application, the more likely they are to contribute not only to human welfare but to the equally important satisfaction of intellectual interest which may indeed be said to have become the ruling passion of intellectual life in modern times."

Very smart guy. I bought the print copy of this essay here: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174761/th...