Hacker News: namenotrequired

New comment by namenotrequired in "Laws of Software Engineering"

namenotrequired — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:22:06 +0000

The “second system effect” page more or less covers this

New comment by namenotrequired in "White House staff told not to place bets on prediction markets"

namenotrequired — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:05:02 +0000

Like the stock market?

New comment by namenotrequired in "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying"

namenotrequired — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:13:30 +0000

Which part perplexes you?

New comment by namenotrequired in "Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying"

namenotrequired — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 21:13:20 +0000

I may be wrong but I read “moderately successful in academia” as meaning: they have succeeded in gaining some social capital but make little money

New comment by namenotrequired in "Geologists may have solved mystery of Green River's 'uphill' route"

namenotrequired — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 15:28:03 +0000

Can we take a moment to appreciate that Dr. Adam Smith works at the University of Glasgow?

New comment by namenotrequired in "Found: Medieval Cargo Ship – Largest Vessel of Its Kind Ever"

namenotrequired — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 22:13:55 +0000

I’m more surprised we can tell so precisely where wood that spent 600 years under the sea came from

New comment by namenotrequired in "Why do LLMs freak out over the seahorse emoji?"

namenotrequired — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 12:47:46 +0000

Interesting! I get a similar effect asking about a windmill emoji

New comment by namenotrequired in "Oldest recorded transaction"

namenotrequired — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 10:17:19 +0000

It can be the oldest without being the first, if the earlier ones no longer exists

New comment by namenotrequired in "Stone Age settlement found under the sea in Denmark"

namenotrequired — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:47:48 +0000

Quote me the passage where he said they weren’t?

New comment by namenotrequired in "Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation"

namenotrequired — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 07:35:50 +0000

Why Databricks would do this (rather than IPO) is obvious. When you can raise privately, it’s way easier than IPO. The real question to me is why the investors (new and previous) are going along with it?

New comment by namenotrequired in "Scientists discover surprising language 'shortcuts' in birdsong – like humans"

namenotrequired — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:33:16 +0000

That’s why the researchers used

> … a new open-source computational tool called ZLAvian, which compares real-world observed patterns to simulated ones to determine if ZLA is present.

New comment by namenotrequired in "Genetic correlates of social stratification in Great Britain (2019) [pdf]"

namenotrequired — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 13:57:14 +0000

(2019)

New comment by namenotrequired in "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation"

namenotrequired — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:27:59 +0000

I agree with you, but a few slight caveats to your point that I think are worth noting.

> Not just because of the countless counterexamples of anthropology to everything you can think of in human affairs

A lot of anthropological research is done on non-agrarian societies. The author limited himself to peasants here, so that limits some (far from all) of the variation.

> I found far more even-aged or women-older marriages than I'd expected

The author also limits himself to age at _first_ marriage; I’d expect a lot more variation in age at remarriage. And even if divorce was rare compared to today, death of a spouse was much more common. So you’d expect to see quite some remarriages in the family tree

New comment by namenotrequired in "How to make websites that will require lots of your time and energy"

namenotrequired — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 11:24:53 +0000

If I worked on it for 10 minutes 5 years ago then it’s definitely not taking lots of time and energy

New comment by namenotrequired in "Bus Bunching"

namenotrequired — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 08:22:42 +0000

Where I live they say it’s “so everyone can make the bus in time” and it’s always made sense to me. Running to arrive at a bus stop just in time, only to find it passed two minutes ahead of schedule, is way worse

New comment by namenotrequired in "Scientists may have found a way to eliminate chromosome linked to Down syndrome"

namenotrequired — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 07:56:21 +0000

Wait, am I reading this wrong or did they suggest abortion to avoid a mere 1% risk of Down syndrome?

New comment by namenotrequired in "I know genomes and I didn’t delete my data from 23andMe"

namenotrequired — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 05:29:19 +0000

> If you live in Europe, where healthcare is provided to everyone by the government

This partial sentence alone has so much wrong with it that this article is going to PETA me into finally deleting my data

New comment by namenotrequired in "The daily life of a medieval king"

namenotrequired — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:05:48 +0000

It means the variation in monarchy is higher. So the best monarchy is better than the best democracy, but the worst monarchy is worse than the worst democracy

New comment by namenotrequired in "Linda Yaccarino is leaving X"

namenotrequired — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:34:11 +0000

> the historic business turn around we have accomplished together has been nothing short of remarkable.

I mean she’s not wrong!

New comment by namenotrequired in "Linda Yaccarino is leaving X"

namenotrequired — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 15:33:22 +0000

The title does literally say she is leaving the platform