Hacker News: markovs_gun

New comment by markovs_gun in "Academics have a duty to defend open knowledge systems like Wikipedia"

markovs_gun — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 02:44:45 +0000

People who say you should be allowed and encouraged to cite Wikipedia in academic contexts have clearly not spent enough time on Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia and I think it's one of humanity's greatest achievements- however, it has a lot of flaws and really shouldn't ever be used as a substitute for real in depth research. There are major trends and biases in the types of articles that are high quality and those that are low quality. For example, obscure Marvel comic book characters often have much longer and more detailed Wikipedia pages than ones for most pre-modern historical figures.

New comment by markovs_gun in "An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling"

markovs_gun — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:55:59 +0000

In my experience a wealthy person with a gambling addiction eventually becomes a poor person with a gambling addiction

New comment by markovs_gun in "An ESPN producer who quit because of sports gambling"

markovs_gun — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 11:54:46 +0000

I feel like this is just straight from the Kalshi marketing department. The wealthy make money from speculation by taking calculated risks and offsetting those risks with other investments. They're not betting everything on black at the roulette table or bettin on the outcome of football games.

New comment by markovs_gun in "Do dentists know what they're doing?"

markovs_gun — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:40:44 +0000

Don't want to victim blame, but this guy could learn to be a little more skeptical of what people are telling him while trying to sell him something. I know you shouldn't have to be on guard like that in a medical setting but I feel like after the third or fourth time this happened he would learn his lesson and either start vetting dentists better beforehand or not just believing everything they say when trying to upsell him on stuff.

New comment by markovs_gun in "Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts"

markovs_gun — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:38:05 +0000

While your assumptions about barter societies are pretty much true, I think you're off on the origins of currency being tied to force. This is overly influenced by modern fiat currencies whose values are derived from government requirements rather than valuable assets. There was a long period of time where precious metals and other valuable items were used as stores of value without a central authority requiring their use. People used official coinage because its weight and purity was standardized and it made things easier, and the value changed alongside debasement, often in spite of official attempts to prevent this. People also used different currencies alongside each other based on their weights and purities. The only times in ancient societies where we have something similar to what you're describing where a specific currency must be used is in taxation, and even then, most taxes were settled in equivalent values of other goods and not specific currencies. The only example I can think of for what you're describing is the Jewish temple offering system in the second temple period, in which certain obligations to the Temple were ruled to have to be paid in Tyrian sheckles specificall

New comment by markovs_gun in "What's Earth's dominant species by mass?"

markovs_gun — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:04:47 +0000

Gravity is a pretty major benefit for the development of complex life, because low gravity cannot form an atmosphere, and without an atmosphere, radiation would cause massive problems for early lifeforms. As bad as radiation is for existing life on Earth's surface today, I imagine it would be far worse for complex macromolecules to form when getting bombarded with radiation constantly. Temperature is also a problem without an atmosphere- you would tend to have extreme temperature cycles. Not insurmountable, but definitely more difficult to make it work. Given the sheer unlikelihood of life developing in the first place even in fairly good conditions like on Earth, I feel like it's a lot less likely on an even harsher environment like an asteroid.

New comment by markovs_gun in "Don't paste the AI, please"

markovs_gun — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 14:57:40 +0000

In my experience it is the semi-literate who are most impressed by AI writing and the ones who use it the most to write for them.

New comment by markovs_gun in "License plate reader searches should require a warrant"

markovs_gun — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:44:51 +0000

> No one expected doorbell cameras to join a mass surveillance network

No one? There's a reason I never bought one of these things. This was a pretty obvious outcome to anyone who even slightly distrusts corporations or the government.

New comment by markovs_gun in "The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (1851)"

markovs_gun — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 01:32:30 +0000

I think you'd really only need pneumatics/hydraulics for the scoring and any special effects. You can accomplish ball launches and paddles completely with basic mechanical parts. For example, you could have the score be represented by a water reservoir filling up and score events could just open the valve to fill. Ball counter could also be completely mechanical.

New comment by markovs_gun in "The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (1851)"

markovs_gun — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 13:12:08 +0000

I'm a chemical engineer and I've worked in some old plants. Before modern electronic control, everything was controlled by pneumatics. A control loop would literally be something like a pressure gauge connected to an air valve, so that when pressure increased the air flow would change and proportionately close off another valve upstream, and when it would decrease, the air would open the valve up. There were also complex logic circuits set up this way entirely with air pressure. Really amazing stuff when you can look at the control panels because operators were opening and closing air valves to control everything and it works just like an analogue circuit, but it's all air pressure instead of voltage and air lines instead of wires.

New comment by markovs_gun in "AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol"

markovs_gun — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:21:25 +0000

Because when you buy a live pig, you don't just slaughter and eat it right away, you have to fatten it up over a period of time and then you slaughter it and have a feast. A typical scam is more like fishing, where you catch a fish and then eat it right away. Pig butchering requires a prolonged relationship with the victim to get a higher payout for more work.

New comment by markovs_gun in "The Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria (1851)"

markovs_gun — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:14:49 +0000

This is an awesome resource. I have always wanted to try building every one of Hero's known inventions because with modern technology most are quite simply constructed (compared to extremely precise machines brass contraptions such as the Antikythera Mechanism) but incredibly elegant in their operation. I think it would be a very fun project

New comment by markovs_gun in "“Gravity is worth asking about”"

markovs_gun — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:11:15 +0000

This is something that I find extremely annoying about pretty much everything on computers these days. I have noticed recently that play buttons on pretty much every music player do not work consistently and often show the wrong play/pause state (showing a pause button when there is nothing playing, showing play buttons when something is playing) and obviously that doesn't break any real functionality, but it's just annoying and shows a complete disregard for the quality of the user experience across the board. I honestly don't know of a single audio only app that has a play button that works properly.

New comment by markovs_gun in "Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year"

markovs_gun — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 02:00:41 +0000

To me the biggest piece of evidence that these methods don't actually work for age verification and are completely for surveillance and data collection is that you can't use them to buy wine at the self checkout at the grocery store. Like if it's effective, why can't the self checkout camera tell that I'm over 21 and can buy wine? Because it's not and everyone knows it.

New comment by markovs_gun in "What's Under Your Feet in New York City?"

markovs_gun — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:21:22 +0000

Jews have a very different relationship to religious laws than Christians. In his own time, Jesus was combating the predominant interpretation of the Jewish law in favor of his own interpretation, which is based more about the meaning and purpose of the law rather than the precise letter of the law. Sin isn't simply non-adherence to the law, it is an intrinsic part of human nature that needs to be redeemed, and all will fall short of the law. The important thing to remember in this is that in historically Christian cultures, we have inherited Jesus's view of the law that was directly and explicitly opposed to the version of Judaism that eventually became the default.

Jews think of the law differently. The law came directly from God- therefore, it is free from errors. If there are loopholes you can find in the law, God put them there for a reason and won't be mad if you use them. Some people even think that God put the loopholes in there as a reward for careful study of the law. Jews also don't think that there is eternal damnation in Hell facing anyone who defies the law, so I suppose the stakes are lower than for Christians so they can afford to be stricter.

New comment by markovs_gun in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

markovs_gun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:57:24 +0000

I feel like you can say cock, dong, and schlong on here too. It's a website for adults, it's not Tik Tok where you have to censor everything in these asinine ways.

New comment by markovs_gun in "What else do people draw on gradient.horse?"

markovs_gun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:13:29 +0000

I love that dicks are a feature of graffiti even going to ancient times. Pompeii's walls are covered with dicks.

New comment by markovs_gun in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

markovs_gun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:58:04 +0000

Yeah I switched to Linux full time at home last year and never even heard of this distro in doing any research about it.

New comment by markovs_gun in "If coding has been solved, why does software keep getting worse?"

markovs_gun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 10:56:52 +0000

> "The guy has clearly lost it and thus is probably not making sensible decisions"

That isn't the problem though. Fascism isn't mental instability, it's an ideology. Someone going off the deep end and making bad decisions does so essentially at random, while someone driven by ideology messes things up in very specific ways. In the case of Fascist ideology, the specific ways they ruin things are specifically intended to harm specific groups of people, so I think the distinction matters. Writing it off as the guy having "lost it" obscures the specific goal he is working towards.

New comment by markovs_gun in "Back to Kagi"

markovs_gun — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:59:18 +0000

What tier do you use for it? I would like to use Kagi, but it seems really expensive for the lower tiers. I may be overestimating how much I use search but it seems like it is pretty limiting.