Hacker News: gmane

New comment by gmane in "Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California"

gmane — Sat, 16 May 2026 02:28:11 +0000

I think you miss how sophisticated some game server code is. Taking fighting games for example: they have entire processes to have both clients predict what the other client will do, and then have the server arbitrate the different client solutions into a "fair" result based on latency, player inputs, etc. There are problems that game servers solve that could have applications in other areas, and have a lot of value.

New comment by gmane in "What twenty years of DevOps has failed to do"

gmane — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 22:26:31 +0000

Spoken like someone who has never had to deal with business critical production environments.

New comment by gmane in "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections"

gmane — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 20:00:40 +0000

I have questions here, a lot of lobbying is done by:

a) trade organizations (we're all the onion farmers in Nebraska and want to make sure the Nebraska legislature doesn't pass laws that negatively impact us and promote laws that help us)

and

b) activist organizations (we're a coalition of organizations that protect water usage in the Mississippi delta and want to pass laws that promote conservation in those states)

Those groups often choose to retain professional lobbyists but will also send groups of interested parties to lobby who are not professional lobbyists.

Do you also ban trade organizations and activist organizations in this case? Do you carve out exceptions for them and just ban the "freelance" lobbyists? Most lobbying is meeting with legislators and talking with them about issues, educating them. How do you ban that without making legislators effectively useless (or if you're cynical, even more useless)?

New comment by gmane in "What makes you senior"

gmane — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 01:04:30 +0000

One of my favorite interview questions for senior positions is "Tell me about a decision you made that you would change in hindsight." Junior level people and people who are otherwise unfit for the role will try to give answers that minimize their responsibility or (worst case) have no examples. Senior level people will have an example where they can walk you through exactly how they messed up and what they would have done differently. Good senior level candidates examine their mistakes and are honest about them.

New comment by gmane in "Doom crash after 2.5 years of real-world runtime confirmed on real hardware"

gmane — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 01:04:41 +0000

Commenting on my Epic from an LG Fridge.

New comment by gmane in "Time travel is self-suppressing"

gmane — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:49:03 +0000

I disagree with this interpretation of what I said. We HAVE evidence that time and gravity interact. It's actually more of a violation of Occam's Razor to suggest that time travel is somehow exempt from that interaction than to claim that yes, time travel should in someway be subject to the influence of gravity.

New comment by gmane in "Time travel is self-suppressing"

gmane — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:16:20 +0000

I'll give a half-baked counter to this: we know gravity impacts the flow of time through relativity. There is currently no evidence that time travel wouldn't be impacted by gravity in some way. Maybe the way time in time travel interacts with gravity protects you from this problem? Probably not, but it has just as much evidence to support it as your claim of time travel will dump you in empty space.

New comment by gmane in "The Big Vitamin D Mistake (2017)"

gmane — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 10:51:34 +0000

I would agree with you if this paper was citing... more papers. Since there are so few and one of the citations is a concurrence with the paper with actual data work, then it harms this paper.

Either the author didn't do a literature review before publishing, isn't well versed in the field, or chose not to cite works which may not agree with their results. Neither of which reflects well on the author.

New comment by gmane in "The Big Vitamin D Mistake"

gmane — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:46:36 +0000

Right, I was criticizing the approach. Edit: specifically the fact that the paper has no discussion of how the meta-analysis data was prepared, processed, or how they made sure it was complete.

New comment by gmane in "The Big Vitamin D Mistake (2017)"

gmane — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:17:44 +0000

Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34079693/

Edit: You can also click on his name in the original post (or the link above) and see all the papers in pubmed authored by him.

Edit 2: These two papers:

Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed Veugelers PJ, Ekwaru JP. A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients. 2014;6(10):4472–4475. - PMC - PubMed

and

Heaney R, Garland C, Baggerly C, French C, Gorham E. Letter to Veugelers, P.J. and Ekwaru, J.P., A statistical error in the estimation of the recommended dietary allowance for vitamin D. Nutrients 2014, 6, 4472-4475; doi:10.3390/nu6104472. Nutrients. 2015;7(3):1688–1690. - PMC - PubMed

New comment by gmane in "The Big Vitamin D Mistake (2017)"

gmane — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:01:57 +0000

This paper cites 10 other papers, two of which are essentially the same paper. The author also has additional papers claiming that Vitamin D helps prevent COVID mortality using a "ecological integrative approach." His papers also all seem to be lacking concrete meta-analysis and discussion of other approaches and clinical data.

Seems... like a quack.

New comment by gmane in "How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?"

gmane — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:36:42 +0000

That’s not even my argument though? I was very clear that specifically immediately post birth is a high risk time and that mandatory paternity tests at birth increase those risks with little to no benefit to anyone. I did not say anything about forcing a man to raise a child. You’re deliberately misreading my point to argue against a straw man.

New comment by gmane in "How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?"

gmane — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:35:29 +0000

New comment by gmane in "How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?"

gmane — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:02:45 +0000

The internet is truly a wild place. You can say something like "We shouldn't do mandatory paternity tests at birth because they bring no benefit to the child" and someone responds with "So you're saying we shouldn't stop wife beaters?"

No bitch, that's a whole different sentence. What the fuck are you talking about.

New comment by gmane in "How often are children genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers?"

gmane — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:24:00 +0000

I disagree here. Blood tests done at birth are done specifically for the benefit of the child (and with minimal risk to the child). A paternity test has no benefit for the child (it doesn't tell you who the father is, simply who the father isn't) and a ~1% risk of harm to the child.

The period immediately after birth is one of the most dangerous times for children, and we (should) specifically take action to protect them in a moment where they are at risk and have no agency. A paternity test would increase the risk of harm to the child (either through violence, deprivation, or neglect). We didn't even get to the subject of possible violence against the mother either, which is likely.

New comment by gmane in "New research suggests that our universe has no dark matter"

gmane — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 21:20:39 +0000

Sorry, the conclusion in the paper really underlies how poorly the results fit the evidence: "The resulting almost doubling in the age of the Universe and increasing the formation times by 1 order of magnitude has been a subject of concern and requires that the new model also explain some critical cosmological and astrophysical observations" [0]

Call me skeptical of the claims made.

[0] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad1bc6#...

New comment by gmane in "How Deep Can Humans Go?"

gmane — Fri, 23 Aug 2024 02:02:21 +0000

It feels like it might have been written by AI. The cadence of the text is really unnatural.

New comment by gmane in "What makes gambling wrong but insurance right? (2017)"

gmane — Sun, 09 Jun 2024 02:42:12 +0000

Hedging risk. This is often a hard concept for people to grasp: there is value to hedging risk. It (generally) cannot be turned into money. There is extrinsic value to reducing risk.

New comment by gmane in "The Effects of Early Relational Trauma (2001) [pdf]"

gmane — Wed, 22 May 2024 03:36:02 +0000

It can also be survivorship bias: "we never used seat belts and we were fine" can only be said by someone alive.

New comment by gmane in "Losing My Hands"

gmane — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:26:32 +0000

Not OP, but I had a boss who specifically bought ambidextrous mice and would switch hands every hour (or so).