Hacker News: senkora

New comment by senkora in "What Is a Nomogram and Why Would It Interest Me?"

senkora — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:57:59 +0000

That is cool, although it took me awhile to understand it because the posterior probability is on the left and the prior probability is on the right, and because it uses D=Disease and T=Test when I am used to seeing D=Data.

New comment by senkora in "The last Romans are still around"

senkora — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:39:08 +0000

Since PCA maps are fun to look at, here’s one for modern-day populations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n8xjl6/genome_anc...

New comment by senkora in "Dostoyevsky isn't difficult"

senkora — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:14:18 +0000

This made me smile because I did exactly the same thing (i.e. I also read Anna Karenina in 7th grade, and was very pretentious). I mostly read during lunch periods when it probably would have been a better idea to be developing my social skills.

I remember being most interested in Konstantin Levin's efforts to modernize his farm estate.

I think that at the time I thought that I understood the difficult books that I was reading fully, but looking back on it I must have missed so much. I'll need to have a re-read one of these days.

New comment by senkora in "Vitamin D3 During Pregnancy and Cognitive Performance at 10 Years"

senkora — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:26:49 +0000

I just skimmed the summary but in the results section it reports three significant results and two after “multiple-test correction”. I’m not sure how they did that correction; I would expect that measures of cognitive performance are correlated for each child and so the standard Bonferroni correction might be too harsh to apply here.

> Covariate-adjusted analyses of standardized scores (mean [SD], 0 [1]; higher values indicating better performance) showed positive associations of high-dose vitamin D3 with verbal memory (β = 0.17 SD; 95% CI, 0.03-0.32 SD; P = .02), visual memory (β = 0.24 SD; 95% CI, 0.06-0.42 SD; P = .01), and flexibility or set shift (β = 0.19 SD; 95% CI, 0.01-0.37 SD; P = .04); however, high-dose vitamin D3 was no longer associated with flexibility or set shift after multiple test correction.

New comment by senkora in "Bricks and Minifigs Stole a Man's $200k Lego Collection"

senkora — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:05:54 +0000

It seems to be a real definition, see definition 6 under etymology 2:

> (transitive, law, especially New Zealand)[1] To subject [someone] to a trespass notice, formally notifying them that they are prohibited from entry to a property, such that any current or future presence there will constitute trespass, (especially) criminal trespass

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trespass#English

New comment by senkora in "Opaque Types in Python"

senkora — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:17:29 +0000

There’s always the extra idiomatic __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED for coworkers that can’t take a hint.

https://github.com/reactjs/react.dev/issues/3896

New comment by senkora in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

senkora — Mon, 25 May 2026 19:18:25 +0000

I typically do the same algorithm for each solution, but I do try to write it in an idiomatic way to each language.

I usually look at the editorial after the first solve to see if I missed any tricks or other approaches, and sometimes I’ll write the second solution differently if there was something interesting that I missed.

New comment by senkora in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

senkora — Sun, 24 May 2026 20:19:50 +0000

It's a feature of the leetcode.com website. I actually can't find a URL that will directly link to the current day's problem, but you can open https://leetcode.com/problemset/ and select the current date in the calendar widget (at the top right on desktop, or by clicking the green calendar floating action button at the bottom right on mobile).

You can view the daily problem without logging in or creating an account.

Fair warning: today's daily problem is a "hard" difficulty and it is often worth skipping those or peeking at the solution. They can take a while to solve (often at least an hour) and/or rely on unusual tricks or data structures. I haven't solved this one yet so idk exactly what its deal is.

New comment by senkora in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

senkora — Sun, 24 May 2026 18:04:21 +0000

Good question. I chose them because they are the languages that I use professionally and would choose for technical interviews. I expect to be asked to solve problems in either language in any given interview.

Technical interviews are different enough from day-to-day work that I still find it valuable to practice in them.

New comment by senkora in "I keep bouncing off the Scheme language"

senkora — Sun, 24 May 2026 14:58:25 +0000

I think that it helps a lot to have a daily practice of using a language for small things.

In much that same way that many people do the daily wordle or crossword, I do the daily leetcode.

I flip a coin and solve it first in either C++ or Python, then re-write my solution in the other one.

Usually it takes me around 20 minutes to solve it in either language, and 5 minutes to re-solve it in either language.

Recently I decided to start learning emacs lisp. This is an imperative lisp dialect that’s pretty different from scheme, but I think that the particular language doesn’t matter much for this process. I could a bit biased because I do have prior experience with SML and scheme.

I started re-solving the problems a third time in emacs lisp. And I’m still learning but I’ve felt my comfort with the language increase over time, and I expect that if I continue doing this then I will eventually reach parity with C++ and Python.

Currently it takes me about 20 minutes to re-solve a problem in emacs lisp, because I usually have to read documentation and/or look up something new.

New comment by senkora in "God Is Technology (2010)"

senkora — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:33:56 +0000

Some context is probably necessary for this submission. This is a direct link to one chapter of a book-length (1905 pages!) suicide note titled "Suicide Note" by Mitchell Heisman, who committed suicide near Harvard University in 2010, ostensibly because he convinced himself that non-existence is morally equivalent to existence.

This chapter discusses the Singularity and in particular the idea that God is a technology that has evolved under selective pressures alongside human societies, and that we will eventually create an actual AI God as a continuation of this process.

I think that it's interesting as a standalone read and relevant for discussion on HN. I was surprised to find that it had never been discussed here before.

(standard disclaimer: don't kill yourself.)

God Is Technology (2010)

senkora — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:33:56 +0000

Article URL: https://archive.org/download/MitchellHeismanSuicideNote/Mitchell%20Heisman%20-%20Suicide%20Note.pdf#page=32

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48239631

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

New comment by senkora in "The spread of Christianity, from antiquity until today, on an animated map"

senkora — Fri, 22 May 2026 17:20:31 +0000

This is called being a “universalizing” religion.

The big three universalizing religions are Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism.

You can understand a lot of religious history as just those three religions expanding and displacing other belief systems.

Contrast with non-universalizing religions like Judaism, Hinduism, and Shinto.

New comment by senkora in "The IBM-ification of Google?"

senkora — Fri, 22 May 2026 04:30:55 +0000

You honestly just have to treat any Oracle product as malware, and proactively scan for it / block it from being installed on employee laptops in the first place.

New comment by senkora in "The rise and fall of snake oil"

senkora — Tue, 12 May 2026 15:41:44 +0000

gwern once ran a rigorous N=1 self-experiment on magnesium with self-blinding and week-long blocks, and concluded that it was probably helpful to him: https://gwern.net/nootropic/magnesium#conclusion

You are welcome to review his methodology and see if it still seems like the placebo effect.

New comment by senkora in "Apple Is Holding My Pictures Hostage Until I Accept Their New Terms of Service"

senkora — Sat, 09 May 2026 20:36:14 +0000

I have a monthly recurring task in my task manager to open the Dropbox app on my iPhone and leave it in-focus for a couple of minutes while it uploads the previous month’s photos.

If I don’t do that, then it just won’t upload them.

New comment by senkora in "Canvas online again as ShinyHunters threatens to leak schools’ data"

senkora — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:39:59 +0000

Canvas is actually also open source and can be self-hosted: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

(I don't have experience in hosting either software so I can't really comment beyond that)

New comment by senkora in "Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated"

senkora — Fri, 08 May 2026 14:30:23 +0000

I read the first link and was curious what the outcome of the case was, since the article was released in 2021. It seems that Jeanne was declared alive again in 2023, which is the most recent public reporting on the case:

https://www.leprogres.fr/faits-divers-justice/2023/02/28/jea...

New comment by senkora in "I want to live like Costco people"

senkora — Thu, 07 May 2026 19:01:58 +0000

Trader Joe's is probably closest to what you want. It targets single shoppers with small quantities and low prices, and it rotates products frequently to keep things interesting.

Anecdotally I feel like a lot of TJ's shoppers shift into Costco shoppers as they age up.

New comment by senkora in ".de TLD offline due to DNSSEC?"

senkora — Tue, 05 May 2026 21:11:20 +0000

Security = Confidentiality + Integrity + Availability

or alternatively,

Security = (exclude unauth'd reads) + (exclude unauth'd writes) + (include auth'd reads and auth'd writes)

Gotta satisfy all parts in order to have security.