Hacker News: mecsred

New comment by mecsred in "No Skill. No Taste"

mecsred — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 18:18:47 +0000

That would honestly be an incredible performance art piece, like a distilled waste of a human life just to prove a point. Then even after all that you could ask the question "Is the art inferior, did it prove the point effectively.". I think there's a real argument to be made that it didn't, becuase just having the argument surfaces some very interesting points about worth.

New comment by mecsred in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

mecsred — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 18:17:52 +0000

Obviously people know, but theres no impulse to introspect on why or how. Knowing that someone else knows you had a hard braking event taps in to our social brains to provide a much stronger response to the event. When we know people are watching we're more likely to try and justify our behaviour.

New comment by mecsred in "U.S. government has lost more than 10k STEM PhDs since Trump took office"

mecsred — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 19:20:30 +0000

In the current social climate I would absolutely not trust public media to understand general consensus. Ask specific people you trust or seek out their opinions.

New comment by mecsred in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

mecsred — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 04:48:45 +0000

If the 16 performs worse in the power efficiency department, that is not great, but it doesnt make my machine run any worse. Calling it heavy is crazy to me, the thing is tiny. If you think it's heavy you'd have trouble using an iPad. The screen thing was a shitty manufacturing issue, they released a kit to fix it, which I luckily didnt need since mine came after they fixed it in production.

New comment by mecsred in "I replaced Windows with Linux and everything's going great"

mecsred — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 16:50:09 +0000

You mean the framework Ive been running for the past 4 years or so?

New comment by mecsred in "I'm just having fun"

mecsred — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 22:52:41 +0000

why do you have to do what people on this website tell you? Write the fun thing.

New comment by mecsred in "Brain has five 'eras' with adult mode not starting until early 30s"

mecsred — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 15:18:24 +0000

How do you plan on defending those rights if you dont vote.

New comment by mecsred in "The write last, read first rule"

mecsred — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 19:48:27 +0000

If you read first and write last isnt that the opposite of committing and then reading to see what is comitted?

New comment by mecsred in "Fractal Imaginary Cubes"

mecsred — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 19:47:31 +0000

None of the shadows you can physically see in the photos have 0 area because the construction of the fractal isn't perfect. What a perfect construction would look like and if it's ever theoretically possible to make physical are complicated questions. Beyond me for sure, how would an infinitely thin object even interact with light?

I would assume the problem with the idea is in the fractal physics rather than the definition of area, which has been solidly useful for me.

New comment by mecsred in "A New Algorithm Makes It Faster to Find the Shortest Paths"

mecsred — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 14:08:07 +0000

It only worked on undirected graphs in 2023. This article is about the newest breakthrough that works on directed graphs as well.

New comment by mecsred in "The U.S. Government's Extraordinary Pursuit of Kilmar Ábrego García"

mecsred — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 17:58:32 +0000

Belief is not binary and can change with new evidence. You may believe it is likely someone is innocent, but should still witness all the evidence to update your beliefs. In the rare case that there is concrete and infallible evidence that the accused IS innocent, they are typically not prosecuted, or it wraps up very quickly.

New comment by mecsred in "New quantum state of matter found at interface of exotic materials"

mecsred — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 16:27:12 +0000

Considering they provided multiple references to exactly what they were talking about, what gave you issues? They're not talking about what you linked, and they are talking about what they linked.

New comment by mecsred in "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"

mecsred — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 03:09:45 +0000

If you read the whole thread, the first comment I replied to, that user said exactly that thing.

New comment by mecsred in "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"

mecsred — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:55:58 +0000

No, an unnecessary hyperbole would be saying people should be outraged at any app that allows unverified communication.

New comment by mecsred in "Women dating safety app 'Tea' breached, users' IDs posted to 4chan"

mecsred — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 17:52:05 +0000

So all forms of communication then? What is the end goal here, present your driver's licence and submit your comment to a Truth Verification Panel to be approved for distribution?

New comment by mecsred in "Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds"

mecsred — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 14:48:44 +0000

Its all anecdotal all the way down, so here's another grain of salt to add to the pile.

(Calories in - calories out) is correct enough to be the single most reliable metric, and will serve you right 99% of the time. My "one level deeper" understanding is that there are a few transfer functions applied to calories in. So of the technically available calories you eat, how much does your body absorb. Then, when the calories are biologically available, how does your body spend them?

So the idea would be, if you eat the pizza at the right time you reduce calories in. Either you will digest less calories, or your body will allocated them differently at different times of the day.

Unfortunately these things aren't really measurable so it's very hard to separate from hearsay.

New comment by mecsred in "Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling"

mecsred — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:57:13 +0000

Not likely without other contributing technologies. These devices just move heat from one side to the other, at the cost of producing more heat. So you still have to dissipate even more heat on the hot end with a fan/heatsink, in addition to draining the battery running the Peltier.

New comment by mecsred in "My "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test"

mecsred — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 19:33:49 +0000

I like this litmus test generally, but I think it applies mostly to self aggrandizing behaviour. "Most people are dumber than a threshold I consider intelligent" kind of vibe. I do think humans are stupid though, as in all of us, including myself and people I like. We just sometimes make terrible choices despite our best intentions, and by a strict definition that's pretty stupid.

New comment by mecsred in "RFK Jr.: HHS moves to restore public trust in vaccines"

mecsred — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 23:00:46 +0000

Thank you Spock.

New comment by mecsred in "The Shape of the Essay Field"

mecsred — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 18:11:31 +0000

I really don't think learning to rely on these tools for product review is a good idea. The web shows how much gravity the advertising industry has. As soon as the number of people using llms like this become statistically significant, you can bet product placement will find its way into the training data. Betting on enshittification is easy money.