Hacker News: ossicones

New comment by ossicones in "Mercurial Dyson – a plan for the disassembly of planet Mercury"

ossicones — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:20:50 +0000

Stuff like this is why I read HN

New comment by ossicones in "I miss thinking hard"

ossicones — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:18:57 +0000

I sympathize with this. I wonder if the author might find it helpful to reimagine the thinking they do as coming up with good questions, rather than good answers. I was inspired to try to do so myself after reading this essay: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-019-1902-1

"[I]f a scientist proposes an important question and provides an answer to it that is later deemed wrong, the scientist will still be credited with posing the question. This is because the framing of a fundamentally new question lies, by definition, beyond what we can expect within our frame of knowledge: while answering a question relies upon logic, coming up with a new question often rests on an illogical leap into the unknown."

New comment by ossicones in "Qwen3-Coder-Next"

ossicones — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 17:06:36 +0000

What browser use agent are they using here?

New comment by ossicones in "On being sane in insane places (1973) [pdf]"

ossicones — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 17:58:47 +0000

If you've ever taken a depression screener at a wellness visit, that's a consequence of this work. This paper describes how unreliable psychiatric diagnosis used to be. There were standards, but they ultimately came down to physician judgment. This created demand for more objective standards, which resulted in the "checklist" approach that we have now.

New comment by ossicones in "Deathbed Advice/Regret"

ossicones — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 21:33:05 +0000

I shared this with my partner who works in palliative care. He said that it’s rare to hear people expressing deathbed regrets like this. What he hears more of is people saying that their illness is God’s punishment for a behavior pretty universally accepted as bad, especially when there’s substance abuse involved.

Discovering archetypes of French detective novels using NLP

ossicones — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:53:54 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00627

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45895087

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ossicones in "Hokusai Moyo Gafu: an album of dyeing patterns"

ossicones — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 16:26:50 +0000

Does anyone know how are these patterns were intended to be applied? It seems like they might be block printed, but the fact that they're called "dyeing patterns" makes me think of some kind of resist or shibori.

Causal ML in healthcare

ossicones — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 12:46:39 +0000

Article URL: https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2024/0274290.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41390257

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Gates Foundation switches to supporting preprints over fee-based open access

ossicones — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 20:05:11 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/advancing-equity-and-innovation-research-publishing-time-new-era-open-access-movement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39843926

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by ossicones in "America's elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal"

ossicones — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 17:09:44 +0000

International students often end up subsidizing US students. Restricting student visas might end up actually increasing tuition.

Also, I disagree that $1m/year for the president of Harvard is ridiculous. That's less than the CEOs of many regional hospital systems are paid, and I think the impact of Harvard is much greater.

With you on restricting student loans for non-STEM programs, though.

New comment by ossicones in "Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science"

ossicones — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 16:55:45 +0000

Oh man, I’ve been tricked so many times by the names of packages and frameworks… and here I did it to others. Sorry!

Seaborn bug responsible for finding of declining disruptiveness in science

ossicones — Sun, 25 Feb 2024 14:17:09 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14583

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501001

Points: 82

# Comments: 72

What Is Social Status?

ossicones — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 18:53:33 +0000

Article URL: https://nathanielhendrix.substack.com/p/what-is-status

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39243457

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by ossicones in "The Minimal Phone pairs an E Ink screen with a QWERTY keyboard and Android"

ossicones — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 14:24:15 +0000

The interface looks similar to the Windows phone, which isn't a bad thing IMO

New comment by ossicones in "Dana-Farberications at Harvard University"

ossicones — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 13:39:16 +0000

If researchers were unable to trust their collaborators, it would mean that they would have to master and oversee every step of every process. This would stop interdisciplinary research completely and massively reduce output.

In software, this would be the equivalent of not importing a package unless you first checked the code line by line.

The system works okay now, but there's a lot of room for improvement. I generally think the best way to improve it is to require more open data so that consumers of research can validate the findings of papers.

New comment by ossicones in "Dana-Farberications at Harvard University"

ossicones — Tue, 23 Jan 2024 04:18:05 +0000

I would’ve preferred a less editorialized article about this. In particular, this article has left me wondering who’s actually written fraudulent articles and whose biggest mistake was trusting the wrong collaborators.

New comment by ossicones in "Orthic Shorthand – Write as fast as you type"

ossicones — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:04:58 +0000

I tried to learn Shavian and struggled with it because of its phonetic nature. Every time I wanted to spell something, I had to think about how I pronounce the word.

New comment by ossicones in "How much of the world is it possible to model?"

ossicones — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:54:58 +0000

The excellent new book, "Modeling Social Behavior" by Paul Smaldino, starts with a quote from Jakob von Uexküll that I've abbreviated a bit here:

"An unbroken description of reality would be simultaneously the truest and most useless thing in the world, and it would certainly not be science. If we want to make reality and therefore truth useful to science, we must do violence to reality. [...] In nature, everything is equally essential. By seeking out the relationships that seem essential to us, we order the material in a surveyable way at the same time. Then we are doing science."

I appreciated how this quote emphasizes that science and modeling are inextricably connected.

New comment by ossicones in "[dead]"

ossicones — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:42:28 +0000

Pretty sure that's the wrong link.

Diagnostic error contributes to 6.6% of hospital deaths

ossicones — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:40:50 +0000

Article URL: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2813854

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38972904

Points: 4

# Comments: 1