Hacker News: nahkoots

New comment by nahkoots in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

nahkoots — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:16:26 +0000

That's incredibly cool actually, what was the book? Could you share anything he wrote which you found especially interesting?

New comment by nahkoots in "Phone-free bars and restaurants on the rise across the U.S."

nahkoots — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:22:26 +0000

Linus Tech Tips made a Faraday cage out of an employee's house using graphite-based EMF-blocking paint. MMS messages with images couldn't be sent from within the house, although text messages and phone calls went through. They didn't do anything to treat the windows, though, so maybe if you combine the paint with some sort of fine wire mesh over the windows you'd get a more comprehensive blocking effect.

At $200/gallon, the cost of the paint would also be a major consideration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5BOFsiDpYQ

New comment by nahkoots in "Folk are getting dangerously attached to AI that always tells them they're right"

nahkoots — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 17:48:00 +0000

Fat shaming doesn't work. It can maybe work, sometimes, on an individual level, like if you're a big enough dick to your friend or partner maybe you can get them to lose some weight. But the problem we (society) have isn't that your spouse is fat and my friend is fat, it's that everyone's friend and everyone's spouse is fat, and we (as a society) have already tried being mean to all the fat people and it didn't work. Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. You can't set up a society awash with processed foods which are addictive by design, force everyone to use a car to get to the store/work/school, refuse to educate children on how to purchase and cook healthy foods, and expect everyone individually to recognize these flaws in our system and make a conscious effort to counteract them in their own lives. Maybe some people will do it, good for them, but the average person will do what's easy. If you want a healthy society, you need to make being healthy the easiest thing.

If your coworker keeps asking you to review merge requests filled with garbage code they copy/pasted from an LLM, sure, shaming them might be part of the solution. But if people are turning to AI because it's too difficult for them to get certain types of emotional validation in the physical world, making them feel bad about it probably isn't going to help.

New comment by nahkoots in "Your phone is an entire computer"

nahkoots — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 05:18:38 +0000

Then your bank is garbage and you should switch to a better one. My main bank (USAA) lets me use a one time code sent to my email as a second factor (or SMS, or a code from their app). If they started requiring me to use the app I would drop them immediately. Why is "but my banking app" treated like a valid objection every time user freedom comes up?

New comment by nahkoots in "No adblocker detected"

nahkoots — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 05:45:01 +0000

That's pretty unhinged, but I'm glad there's someone out there vandalizing annoying pumps. It's important work, I think.

New comment by nahkoots in "That 'unsubscribe' button may be a scam"

nahkoots — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 14:35:59 +0000

Can't you use youraddress.servicename@gmail.com? I thought gmail strips whatever comes after the dot. (I don't have a google account, so I could be wrong or maybe it was a different character, but I remember reading about it a couple times on here.)

New comment by nahkoots in "Silicon Valley wants to help me make a superbaby"

nahkoots — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 02:53:08 +0000

“This seems like a path toward having no people with Down syndrome, having no people with certain disabilities, even though there are people that have those disabilities that live fulfilling lives,” he said. “You’re talking about culling a tree of human evolution, right?”

I've heard this argument before and I find it insulting, as though it's somehow a moral wrongdoing to prefer children without birth defects. If I could spare my future children from MS, schizophrenia, Downs, Huntington's, Alzheimer's, etc., I'd do it in a heartbeat. Framed differently, who would deliberately inflict a healthy newborn with any of those congenital disorders? That they might live a fulfilling life in spite of their disorder wouldn't make it any less cruel.

New comment by nahkoots in "Pluto Flyover from New Horizons"

nahkoots — Sun, 18 May 2025 17:53:22 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude#List_of_app...

The sun on Pluto is only slightly dimmer than the sun on a very strongly overcast midday on Earth (about half as bright), but still much brighter (almost 200x) than a full moon.

New comment by nahkoots in "Why our waistlines expand in middle age: aging stem cells shift into overdrive"

nahkoots — Fri, 02 May 2025 17:02:01 +0000

Often, the whole kernels you see in the toilet aren't actually filled with corn.

New comment by nahkoots in "Virginia passes law to enforce maximum vehicle speeds for repeat speeders"

nahkoots — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 02:06:27 +0000

Someone who's jailed for driving on a suspended license because it's the only way they can get to their job probably isn't going to discontinue that behavior upon their release. I don't want my tax dollars being spent on a punishment that's just going to exacerbate the problem, especially when the crime isn't particularly odious in the first place (whatever they did to get their license suspended probably was, but once you have a suspended license it's almost impossible to just stop driving).

New comment by nahkoots in "Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway"

nahkoots — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 18:31:29 +0000

"within your natural lifespan" isn't really a qualification of "never, ever". The two are very different time frames. I think it's good that you're willing to adjust your opinions given new information, but it would be nice if you admitted that you changed your mind based on what MatrixMan said instead of acting like "within your natural lifespan" was your original intent.

New comment by nahkoots in "Threads Software Limited gives Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads"

nahkoots — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 18:42:56 +0000

Yes-like Meta, or Threads, or Apple, Glean, Element, X, Zoom, etc.

If you choose a generic word for your brand name, don't be surprised when a bigger company chooses the same generic word and ruins your SEO. This has happened before. Maybe it's not fair, but it's extremely foreseeable. It seems much easier to me to choose a creative name in the first place than to risk a legal battle wherein you have to prove that really you should be able to use that dictionary word because you thought of it first. As other commenters have pointed out, since Threads (Meta) and Threads (software) operate in different spaces, Threads's (software) claim for exclusivity is tenuous anyway.

New comment by nahkoots in "Threads Software Limited gives Meta 30 days to stop using the name Threads"

nahkoots — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:35:42 +0000

I detest Meta as much as the next guy but I can't bring myself to feel bad for Threads Software Limited here. This is what you get when you pick your company name out of a dictionary in an attempt to be trendy/minimalist.

New comment by nahkoots in "DRM-free e-books are a big deal (2019)"

nahkoots — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 17:14:39 +0000

Piracy vs. not buying it vs. not downloading it are morally equivalent. The actual ethical stance here is whether or not you're paying for DRM; once you've committed to not doing that, whether or not you choose to pirate it at that point is morally neutral because the effect on the author (and publisher et al.) is the same.

New comment by nahkoots in "Japan skiers’ smartphones making unnecessary emergency calls"

nahkoots — Sun, 29 Jan 2023 18:06:44 +0000

> The Gujo City Fire Department in Gifu Prefecture, which has many ski resorts within its jurisdiction, received 351 emergency calls between Jan. 1 and Jan. 23. Nearly 40% — 135 calls — were made erroneously.

I wonder how many of the 351 emergency calls and how many of the 135 erroneous calls were made by a phone's automatic crash detection system. It's obviously not great that the automatic system is placing so many erroneous calls, but it may be worth the burden on Japan's (or any other country's) emergency services if such calls aren't an overwhelming majority.

New comment by nahkoots in "Fun, danger, and 70s airplane toys"

nahkoots — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 00:23:26 +0000

Where do you live? If you're in the US, check if you live near an Ace hardware store; mine sells gallon jugs of 90% sulfuric acid for something in the range of $25. Look for Rooto brand drain cleaner, and if it doesn't say on the side of the container, you'll want the one that feels like it's full of heavy viscous liquid.

And Duda Diesel sells a liter of 67.2% nitric acid for $60.43, or $101.69 for 2.5 (plus shipping ofc).

New comment by nahkoots in "Should we care about people who need never exist?"

nahkoots — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 17:49:59 +0000

https://archive.ph/y4vso

New comment by nahkoots in "A Soviet circus clown tried to prove that dogs can be psychic"

nahkoots — Sat, 22 Oct 2022 04:42:01 +0000

Do you have a source for this?

New comment by nahkoots in "Gmail 2FA causes the homeless to permanently lose access 3 times a year"

nahkoots — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 18:10:24 +0000

I just did it from Firefox on Linux in a private tab near Washington, D.C.. Fake name, no phone, no backup email. I was able to log out, sign back in, and send an email without any trouble.

No doubt they're letting me through because some security heuristic says I'm a real human, and I'm sure they'd eventually make me provide a number if I continued using the account (this happened to me with my university G Suite account a couple years ago and I needed to contact my IT department to manually disable the phone challenge), but so far I can't see any evidence that they're doing anything unreasonable.

Perhaps they're requiring you to use a number because you've tested it a lot.

New comment by nahkoots in "Hackers gaining power of subpoena via fake “emergency data requests”"

nahkoots — Tue, 29 Mar 2022 15:27:53 +0000

Don't forget that we very nearly had a successful coup, which would have spelled the end of American democracy. Are we on the verge of becoming a Stalinist state? No, not really. Could it happen? Absolutely, and we need to recognize that possibility to avoid becoming the next one.