Hacker News: frankest

New comment by frankest in "Didgeridoo playing as alternative treatment for obstructive sleep apnoea (2006)"

frankest — Mon, 25 May 2026 13:19:40 +0000

CPAP machines are essentially a hose that has you breathe into water.

New comment by frankest in "AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale"

frankest — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:31:55 +0000

You are going to see the same thing that happened with newspapers. Those who want to train the AI with their content (advertisers, PR) will push out more content for AI in the open. Those who have quality content that gives you an advantage will try to lock out AI or get pricy subscription APIs for humans and even pricier for AI.

New comment by frankest in "Earth is now heating up twice as fast as in previous decades"

frankest — Thu, 21 May 2026 13:29:01 +0000

Imagine an alien with extreme tech capabilities is pointing a heater at the earth. Now react appropriately:

- model and build temperature resistant crops.

- harvest energy from the heat

- create resilience in social governance to enable safer movement of people with education to enable quick adaptation.

- build energy resilience everywhere - including in and especially in desert areas.

- more constructive ideas.

Don’t:

- guilt your children into not having children to “protect the planet” from themselves.

- use your megaphones to racketeer the people making your food into paying you “indulgences” for producing useful stuff for you and other humans (thus making stuff needed by humans more expensive)

- use the problem to gather around with rich friends on fuel-hogging private jets while making others eat less to reduce emissions.

New comment by frankest in "Subscription bombing and how to mitigate it"

frankest — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:34:45 +0000

I has gone down recently (or they switched to other sites), but it was coming from EU VPN addresses at first before they got lazy and used mostly Russian IPs.

Anti-Corruption Strategy to Counter Russia

frankest — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:52:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.bushcenter.org/publications/europe-must-establish-a-new-anti-corruption-strategy-to-counter-russia

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46232892

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by frankest in "Very Important People"

frankest — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:48:16 +0000

Weddings are also a social commitment exercise to the couple. Imagine if you had break a promise you made in front of everyone both of you know, after spending a whole lot of money. It’s loss aversion and social shame that possibly made a lot of couples stick together. Even so, posing with your best clothes, food, locations, entertainment and donning all of your jewelry (all of your wealth in gold in some country) does likely play the Envy string too.

New comment by frankest in "Very Important People"

frankest — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 07:32:12 +0000

Envy is worth talking about. It seems to pull a lot of people, like one of the strings in string theory. They want to be envied so they live an exhibitionist life, or they were surpassed by someone they thought was their equal and now they hate the gap. Is it possible people who feel envy then decide to be more exhibitionist, so they can be envied in the future?

I wonder what value envy provided to evolution? Did it motivate primates to do more than they are already doing? Is it a by-product of social status behaviors?

New comment by frankest in "Italy's longest-serving barista reflects on six decades behind the counter"

frankest — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 05:00:29 +0000

Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.

New comment by frankest in "NYC congestion pricing cuts air pollution by a fifth in six months"

frankest — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:50:28 +0000

EV self-driving shuttles you can take on demand so nobody needs to keep a car

New comment by frankest in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

frankest — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:45:39 +0000

That’s awesome! I’m sold. Now can it fit a size 3 finger?

New comment by frankest in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

frankest — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:02:22 +0000

Yes, but they mention there will be a subscription plan for their cloud-based transcription. If you want an open platform of devices - ensure users can use a range of transcription providers for quality and security.

New comment by frankest in "Pebble Index 01 – External memory for your brain"

frankest — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 16:05:15 +0000

The only thing that matters here is how good the transcription is. You absolutely have to save the recording. You also have to enable the user to connect to their own transcription service and preserve the recording for that if yours sucks or is not trusted. People have accents. Third party transcription vendors can sell data. Do not mess this up. Enable users to add their own trusted transcription.

If we want to give this to grandparents to save their stories, we can want to have the stories too. If we want it for ourselves, we have to trust it.

New comment by frankest in "Socialist ends by market means: A history"

frankest — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 05:25:34 +0000

The metaphor makes you break away from existing labels and think of newer approaches, enabled by the faster methods of communication we have available. In the past, the head of was many days or weeks ride away for most citizens. It made sense for people to relocate for 4 years and represent interests. Now that agency is proving very corruptible, especially because the enforcement of the rules is corrupted. What would be a faster, more reliable, less corruptible approach? You still need people to implement the will of the people, but can we come up with better ways to communicate that will to those in power?

New comment by frankest in "Socialist ends by market means: A history"

frankest — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 04:13:13 +0000

I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.

Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.

Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.

Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.

New comment by frankest in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

frankest — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 10:52:04 +0000

After becoming a founder and having to deal with my own code for a decade, I’ve learned a balance. Prototype fast with AI crap to get the insight than write slow with structure for stuff that goes to production. AI does not touch production code - ask when needed to fix a tiny bit, but keep the beast at arms distance.

New comment by frankest in "Using LLMs at Oxide"

frankest — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 04:38:33 +0000

DreamWeaver absolutely destroyed the code with all kinds of tags and unnecessary stuff. Especially if you used the visual editor. It was fun for brainstorming but plain notepad with clean understandable code was far far better (and with the browser compatibility issues the only option if you were going to production).

New comment by frankest in "Perpetual futures, explained"

frankest — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 00:06:55 +0000

Crypto at this point is neither decentralized nor anonymous. It’s a Ponzi scheme wrapped in increasing level of complexity and involving an increasing number of banks, and controlled by a decreasing number of very large players. This crypto octopus is putting tentacles in Fidelity, and major US banks, and pension funds, and 401k accounts, and any other money holder. They are putting debt on banks at leverage levels beyond any reason. So when the music stops playing the octopus can slurp the real money liquidity out of as many US banks and savings institutions as possible, to eventually collapse the savings even of people who have nothing to do with Crypto.

New comment by frankest in "'A full-blown crisis': Americans brace for a surge in healthcare costs"

frankest — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 05:37:23 +0000

In case you are wandering where the money goes. If you need a gall bladder removed or an appendix removed the bill to you might be $10,000-30,000 but the surgeon, for all of their care and time with you, is compensated less than $100.

New comment by frankest in "Solar's growth in US almost enough to offset rising energy use"

frankest — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 02:46:32 +0000

Solar only works during the day. Datacenters need energy 24/7. Consumers who didn’t install solar with batteries will end up with higher prices.

New comment by frankest in "From blood sugar to brain relief: GLP-1 therapy slashes migraine frequency"

frankest — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 23:16:06 +0000

These medicines reduce the cravings for sugar. Is it possible that all of these beneficial side effects are just benefits from not abusing sugar.