Hacker News: rags2riches

New comment by rags2riches in "Google’s AI is being manipulated. The search giant is quietly fighting back"

rags2riches — Thu, 21 May 2026 04:51:26 +0000

If there were reliable statistics, I'd much rather have the methods used to produce those statistics than the numbers.

New comment by rags2riches in "Sauna effect on heart rate"

rags2riches — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 10:12:07 +0000

Is the stove radiating too much heat? You want it to heat the air, not fry your skin! I once got a stove glowing hot because I had failed to get a high enough temperature going on the day before. It was the first time I tried a wood fired sauna myself. As long as the stove was glowing hot, I just couldn't enjoy the sauna.

New comment by rags2riches in "Musketeer d'Artagnan's remains believed found under Dutch church"

rags2riches — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:26:40 +0000

Some Swedes will be delighted to learn that not only was there a historical d'Artagnan, but also a real life cardinal named Mazarin. But I have yet to find a historical person named Loranga.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loranga,_Masarin_och_Dartanjan...

New comment by rags2riches in "Return of the Obra Dinn: spherical mapped dithering for a 1bpp first-person game"

rags2riches — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:30:41 +0000

Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.

New comment by rags2riches in "Lessons you will learn living in a snowy place"

rags2riches — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 07:19:42 +0000

If you let people walk on snow, it turns to ice. Shovel that snow asap. Also keep a brush on your doorstep and always use it to clear off the small patches of snow that falls off your shoes, lest you soon have patches of ice there.

New comment by rags2riches in "Many people have no mental imagery. What's going on in their brains?"

rags2riches — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 22:07:47 +0000

> “When I close my eyes, there’s absolutely nothing there,” Shine recalls telling his colleagues. They immediately asked him what he was talking about. “Whoa. What’s going on?” Shine thought. Neither he nor his colleagues had realized how much variation there is in the experiences people have when they close their eyes.

I found this bit about closing your eyes curious. It doesn't matter for my mental imagery if my eyes are closed or not. My eyelids are not a movie screen. I can imagine things quite as well with my eyes open. I focus less on what my eyes are seeing when I think hard about mental images, but they aren't really in competition. It's very easy to imagine visual things right there in my actual eye imagery.

New comment by rags2riches in "Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes""

rags2riches — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:48:41 +0000

> "Schultz" is German for "brown".

Beleg fehlt.

New comment by rags2riches in "A4 Paper Stories"

rags2riches — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 15:59:02 +0000

The 5 grams per sheet of common printer paper has certainly proven handy once or twice in some of my interactions in the informal economy.

New comment by rags2riches in "Scientists discover beer bottle in the Mariana Trench (2024)"

rags2riches — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:21:47 +0000

The bottle wouldn't be empty though.

New comment by rags2riches in "The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice"

rags2riches — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 20:18:16 +0000

Try making it through a few northern European winters as a pre-modern farmer. I'm sure you will develop a keener interest in measuring these things.

New comment by rags2riches in "EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages"

rags2riches — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:32:35 +0000

Sweden didn't have an "official" language before the Language Law of 2009. Five minority languages (Finnish, Meänkieli, Romani, Sámi, Yiddish) were officially recognized as such since 1999.

New comment by rags2riches in "EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages"

rags2riches — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:25:31 +0000

Malta has Maltese and English as official languages. I don't know what they bring to the EU list of official languages.

New comment by rags2riches in "10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea"

rags2riches — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 20:50:07 +0000

> I've first hand seen lockers destroyed to remove the lock.

A neighbor secured his expensive bike with a hefty lock and chain around a tree in our courtyard. Bad guys brought a saw. I still miss that tree.

New comment by rags2riches in "Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout"

rags2riches — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:42:51 +0000

> LOT

Just capitalised for emphasis, right?

> COE

Center of Excellence? Council of Europe? Still wondering even after Googling.

> SLA

Service Level Agreement. This I knew beforehand.

> SDM

Service Delivery Manager?

New comment by rags2riches in "DOJ seizes $15B in Bitcoin from 'pig butchering' scam based in Cambodia"

rags2riches — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:29:46 +0000

This makes me think of the Barbary Wars where piracy out of the Barbary states was a huge issue. There's also the connection with the slave trade then and the human trafficking for the scam centers now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_Wars

New comment by rags2riches in "A years-long Turkish alphabet bug in the Kotlin compiler"

rags2riches — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 04:20:15 +0000

Hold on, are those pebbles Imperial or Troy?

New comment by rags2riches in "When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire"

rags2riches — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 04:45:44 +0000

Still it skips over weirdness like the same person being both a sovereign king and vassal of another king. See for example King Henry II of England and Duke of Normandy etc.

New comment by rags2riches in "Search all text in New York City"

rags2riches — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 07:43:55 +0000

There's even "West Indian Grog" to be found! Surely, that must be the rum based drink? https://www.alltext.nyc/panorama/63DKJbMdVQY8ah6jgobU9g?o=85...

New comment by rags2riches in "Search all text in New York City"

rags2riches — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 07:39:02 +0000

At first glance, there's plenty of grog to be had in NYC. But sailors will be disappointed. It all seems to be OCR errors of "Groceries" or the "Google" watermarks.

New comment by rags2riches in "Every part on a bicycle is safety critical"

rags2riches — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 14:43:58 +0000

Turn your handlebar all the way to the right side (assuming the stand is on the left) and it will be much more stable.