Hacker News: helterskelter

New comment by helterskelter in "USAA closed 51% of home insurance claims without making a payment in 2025"

helterskelter — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 15:51:17 +0000

I hate dealing with USAA, and probably should have had a life insurance policy before I even tried. Their phone trees are designed to misdirect you, the agents do not help at all (let me transfer you...[half hour hold time]...Sorry wrong department, let me transfer you), you can't get any real information from anyone. I had to start taking down phone session ID's from the reps and asking for customer advocates to get anywhere at all. Terrible experience.

I still have their awful jingle stuck in my head played over hours of holding on the phone, I'll probably turn into a Manchurian candidate if I ever hear it again.

New comment by helterskelter in "The footgun of right-to-left decorative characters"

helterskelter — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 03:28:27 +0000

> A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.

Yeah but at least we can read ancient boustrophedon-style texts in plaintext, the way they were meant to be read, free of 21st century anachronisms like indication of directionality.

Unfortunately, we're still waiting for Unicode to cover Rongorongo, which has lines of alternating orientation for two readers sitting opposite one another to take turns reading it line by line.

New comment by helterskelter in "Computation as a universal and fundamental concept"

helterskelter — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:39:18 +0000

Just a heads up, "I want to push back on" is an idiom Claude frequently uses.

It is depressing though, writing feels like it's in part becoming a game of outpacing the latest LLM's idiosyncrasies so we can signal authenticity, which perversely, is achieved through using an LLM enough so that you can become familiar with its flavor of communication.

New comment by helterskelter in "A love letter to flashcards"

helterskelter — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:30:10 +0000

Depends on how you use the flashcards. You can use them to memorize definitions and equalities, and you can also use them as quiz questions which excercise your reason and not simply your memory. For example, you make a flashcard for each excercise question in your textbook. Once you identify what you're struggling with, make more flashcards of that same problem type to avoid remembering the solutions. This will take you from a shaky understanding to much firmer ground pretty quickly.

Honestly just making the flashcards and elaborating on/modifying problems you're struggling with will take you a very long way.

New comment by helterskelter in "A love letter to flashcards"

helterskelter — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:19:03 +0000

Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses.

Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.

New comment by helterskelter in "Alternate clock designs and time systems"

helterskelter — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:10:02 +0000

You used to look at the sun or stars to make an estimate, then we had sundials. For larger time scales, there are tons of archaelogical sites around the world which tracked the solstice, equinox, etc and there's evidence that a few cultures even tracked the full period of the moon's orbit (18.6y).

~250BCE, there was a comedy by Plautus which had in it a poem lamenting the proliferation of sundials, which may or may not have been a parody of some of the attitudes at the time:

    The gods confound the man who first found out
    How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
    Who in this place set up a sundial,
    To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
    Into small portions! When I was a boy,
    My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
    Truer, and more exact than any of them.
    This dial told me when 'twas proper time
    To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
    But nowadays, why even when I have,
    I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
    The town's so full of these confounded dials
    The greatest part of the inhabitants,
    Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.

New comment by helterskelter in "GLM 5.2 is nearly as accurate as a human book keeper"

helterskelter — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 19:08:11 +0000

> They've done studies, you know. Sixty percent of the time, it works every time.

New comment by helterskelter in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

helterskelter — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:11:19 +0000

Huh? You talking about Iran?

(.../s)

New comment by helterskelter in "Decoding the obfuscated bash script on a Uniqlo t-shirt"

helterskelter — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 18:55:14 +0000

All I remember is that it had some to do with Bill Clinton sleeping with underage girls and Bill Gates with a nasty case of VD.

Geocentric Orrery

helterskelter — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 21:37:04 +0000

Article URL: https://navlist.net/Geocentric-Orrery-TrammellH-jul-2026-g58762

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810823

Points: 11

# Comments: 1

New comment by helterskelter in "Car touchscreens are cheap, not good"

helterskelter — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:35:57 +0000

There was a study from a few years ago that associated almost all increase in traffic deaths in the past decade or so with in car displays. Almost all deaths were pedestrians being struck at or after twilight. The thinking is that infotainment systems are making drivers take their eyes off the road to adjust anything in their vehicles, and also ruining their nightvision. Not sure how they were able to separate this from smartphones.

New comment by helterskelter in "Delta flight hit by firework while landing at Midway Airport on Fourth of July"

helterskelter — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:18:03 +0000

I'm fine with idiots blowing their own hands off, I just worry about wildfires.

New comment by helterskelter in "US residents angry datacenters 'shoved down our throats' are recalling officials"

helterskelter — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 18:04:11 +0000

Probably the lack of water. I don't know why they need to continually pump it instead of doing a closed loop and cooling it through a few miles of pipe underground which is practically free, after you install the plumbing. Sure evaporative cooling is good, but certainly there are workable alternatives.

New comment by helterskelter in "Great Salt Lake Tracker"

helterskelter — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 05:45:43 +0000

I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about, but I've heard it said more than once that a lot of Utah politicians have conflicts of interest with respect to allowing more water to flow into the lake (ties to agriculture, etc). The situation has probably changed somewhat now that parts of the city have shelter in place orders because of toxic clouds, but people have been talking about it for decades now.

New comment by helterskelter in "Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning"

helterskelter — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:52:08 +0000

Yep, build up your interior knowledge graph, each connection reinforces the nodes it joins.

New comment by helterskelter in "Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning"

helterskelter — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 18:15:17 +0000

Yep, it's mostly used in for navigation, especially as a backup in case GPS fails (in the case of a lightning strike on a sailboat, for instance, probably all your electronics are toast). The military still uses it with slide rules/log tables, in case of jamming, etc. It kind of "disappeared" sometime after WWII, and there aren't many new books on it, but you'll see it come up in computer graphics and animation quite a bit, and I'm pretty sure it's used extensively in surveying still.

Te Lapa

helterskelter — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 16:01:08 +0000

Article URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_lapa

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48749010

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by helterskelter in "County with 37 Data Centers Asks Schools to 'Conserve Electricity'"

helterskelter — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:59:57 +0000

This reminds me of WorldCom. One employee said they knew something was up when the company was posting huge profits but the CEO was sending out emails with progressively more extreme electricity saving measures.

New comment by helterskelter in "Forestiere Underground Gardens"

helterskelter — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:56:18 +0000

It's beautiful, but I wouldn't want to be down there in a major quake.

New comment by helterskelter in "Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning"

helterskelter — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:48:14 +0000

Honestly I've been thinking about putting some standing stones in my yard to act as solar clock and calendar, maybe doing a lunar calendar as well...

I don't that's against code (yet).