Hacker News: p00dles

New comment by p00dles in "HelloAssembly The smallest possible complete Windows application"

p00dles — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:35:29 +0000

I hope that expression makes a comeback.

New comment by p00dles in "Company Offering '100% Human-Written, Never AI' Medical Research Is 100% AI"

p00dles — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 05:20:20 +0000

Not long ago companies claiming “100% AI-powered” services were secretly relying on humans because the tech wasn’t good enough.

Now, the opposite is true - AI has gotten so good, people are trying to pass AI work off as “100% human-powered.”

To me this remarkable inversion in a short period of time demonstrates how powerful these models can be; even if AI is overhyped and the financing/economics seem like a stack of cards, this example is driving home the point to me of just how far these models have come.

New comment by p00dles in "Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again"

p00dles — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 22:32:28 +0000

I don’t think that she means it as literally as you are interpreting her. It’s a _feeling_ of not belonging to or probably feeling welcomed to join the culture that surrounds her daily life, I don’t think she cares whether she belongs to the history-based definition that you outlined of modern “synthetic” unified Germany.

This experience is usually invisible to the people who are part of the in-group, in this case Germans, but if someone lives in a foreign country for an extended period of time and tries to make it their home, I think they understand what that woman was saying.

New comment by p00dles in "I was recently diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis"

p00dles — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:34:51 +0000

A big reason is clinical trials. They take time, they are expensive, and there isn’t another good way to determine an intervention’s safety and effectiveness.

New comment by p00dles in "Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism"

p00dles — Wed, 20 May 2026 00:20:18 +0000

There is also a category of people who are “mixed-handed”, who have a strong handedness preference for a given task, but which hand one prefers varies based on the task. I didn’t know about this category until recently, but it describes my personal experience.

Mildly informative Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-dominance

New comment by p00dles in "Missile defense is NP-complete"

p00dles — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:14:09 +0000

who is our/us?

New comment by p00dles in "99% of adults over 40 have shoulder "abnormalities" on an MRI, study finds"

p00dles — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 20:00:28 +0000

From walking around holding them with your left arm when they were babies, or from something else?

New comment by p00dles in "There's only one Woz, but we can all learn from him"

p00dles — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 10:03:39 +0000

They were both brilliant, but from everything that I've read, Jobs was an ass****, and Woz was the opposite, and that is a huge, huge difference.

The mythologizing of Jobs is the canonical example of people condoning terrible behavior because they think that a person is smart/valuable/talented/etc.

To me this is completely backwards and sets a terrible precedent - that you can act however you want if you get results - especially given how many people idolize and look up to Jobs.

New comment by p00dles in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

p00dles — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 08:00:35 +0000

Today I took the subway at a different time than I normally do, and I saw a very different mix of people. Fascinating.

New comment by p00dles in "Why some clothes shrink in the wash and how to unshrink them"

p00dles — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:38:04 +0000

It probably means to air-dry (to not use a dryer)

New comment by p00dles in "Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn"

p00dles — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 14:22:56 +0000

you summarized my 5+ year experience living in Germany with one sentence in a way that I have never found the words for - thank you, really, thank you

I feel that in Germany, the original intent of the many rules, processes, and procedures has been lost. Employees are trained to operate such that every situation is governed by a rule/process/procedure, and their job is to look up the situation in a massive leather-bound book of branching rules, see which rule applies in the given situation, and then… apply the rule. But, they will do this only if they assess that helping you falls under their job’s responsibilities. Sometimes your situation is neat and clean, and was what the rule-writers thought about when they wrote the rules. Sometimes, not.

TLDR: if you have an edge case in the German bureaucratic system (forms at the doctor’s office, Deutsche Bahn travel troubles, closing a bank account), you are f***

New comment by p00dles in "Scientists edited genes in a living person and saved his life"

p00dles — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:03:34 +0000

Firefox on iOS, I see strikethrough but the strikes are at varying heights.

New comment by p00dles in "GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients"

p00dles — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 10:19:02 +0000

Interesting that GLP-1s might have different effects on cancer _incidence_ vs. cancer _survival_.

A different study "GLP-1 Receptor Agonists and the Risk of Thyroid Cancer" was published in the Diabates Care journal in February 2023*

The conclusion of the 2023 study: "we found increased risk of all thyroid cancer and medullary thyroid cancer with use of GLP-1 RA, in particular after 1–3 years of treatment."

I wonder what the mechanistic hypothesis could be for GLP-1s increasing thyroid cancer _incidence_ (the probability of thyroid cancer occurring in patients taking GLP-1s) but increasing colon cancer _survival_ (the probability of surviving in patients taking GLP-1s who have colon cancer).

Of course there are numerous important differences across the studies (cancer type, France vs. USA data, etc.), I'm just curious about a why this might be the case.

*https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article-abstract/46/2/384/...

New comment by p00dles in "I analyzed the lineups at the most popular nightclubs"

p00dles — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:14:54 +0000

I think this analysis is cool, and the comments are too critical. The author put something out there, documented it, and I learned something by reading it. Thank you.

Maybe the title needs reframing to soften the reader’s expectations, and I definitely agree that RA as a data source has important limitations that should be mentioned.

New comment by p00dles in "Analysis indicates that the universe’s expansion is not accelerating"

p00dles — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 12:10:28 +0000

That guy should start a PR firm

New comment by p00dles in "NY school phone ban has made lunch loud again"

p00dles — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 03:46:04 +0000

Ugh this is so tragic but I think correct

New comment by p00dles in "Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste"

p00dles — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 11:02:19 +0000

novice -> informed -> asshole

I strive to be at the informed part of the spectrum.

Wine example:

- Novice: "I'd like any red wine" -> waiter brings you something you don't like

- Informed: "I'd like a red wine that is dry, not st" -> waiter brings you something you are quite likely to like

- Asshole: "Do you have an Argentinian malbec from 1998-2000, from the so and so valley?" -> you spend a lot of money and like the wine, or you are unhappy because they don't meet your asshole preferences

*edit formatting

New comment by p00dles in "Inflammation now predicts heart disease more strongly than cholesterol"

p00dles — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 22:01:42 +0000

https://www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/j.jacc.2025.08.047

New comment by p00dles in "iPhone Air"

p00dles — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 05:39:58 +0000

I had the 13 mini and now the 12 mini and the 13 mini was noticeably better - battery life, camera, screen brightness (big difference when using phone on a bike for navigation)

New comment by p00dles in "Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization"

p00dles — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:13:02 +0000

I applaud anybody who makes visualizations of difficult to grasp concepts - so, thank you very much.

As a visual (spatial) learner, I often wonder how my math/science education could have been improved with learning tools such as these.