Hacker News: thedailymail

New comment by thedailymail in "Where the goblins came from"

thedailymail — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 09:57:38 +0000

I'm curious whether this type of goblin epidemic was seen in other language versions of ChatGPT. Did e.g. Japanese users see more yõkai turning up?

New comment by thedailymail in "Why Not Venus?"

thedailymail — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 09:44:43 +0000

Why not the Sun?

New comment by thedailymail in "Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books"

thedailymail — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 01:55:09 +0000

The supplementary files in that paper—verbatim reproductions of the full texts of Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby—are pretty instructive. The research group highlighted all additions and omissions, but on most pages the differences are difficult to spot because they are only missing spaces, extra hyphens, and other typographical minutiae.

New comment by thedailymail in "You Have Billions Invested in Generative AI"

thedailymail — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 10:17:11 +0000

Nice concept but could use some more procedurally generated LLM content

New comment by thedailymail in "America is going through a big economic experiment"

thedailymail — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 10:08:53 +0000

>Trump's declaring that he'll be involved with deciding who WB-Discovery-HBO can be sold to.

This needs to be developed into a The Apprentice-style show where aspirants truckle before the king as they make their pitches.

New comment by thedailymail in "Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden"

thedailymail — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 04:29:01 +0000

In the same essay ("Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren," 1930) where he predicted the 15-hour workweek, Keynes wrote about how future generations would view the hoarding of money for money's sake as criminally insane.

"There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard."

New comment by thedailymail in "Where did the Smurfs get their hats (2018)"

thedailymail — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 03:28:39 +0000

Or maybe the artist was inspired by the connection of the Phrygian cap with psychedelic "liberty cap" mushrooms (Psilocybe semilanceata), which are distributed widely across Europe and associated with elves, fairies and various other wee folk?

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

New comment by thedailymail in "Claude says “You're absolutely right!” about everything"

thedailymail — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 22:39:47 +0000

Somehow we got an inverted version of the Monty Python "I'd like to buy an argument" skit

Tom Lehrer, song satirist and mathematician, dies at 97

thedailymail — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:55:25 +0000

Article URL: https://apnews.com/article/tom-lehrer-son-satirist-mathematician-dies-9caa7ee01faf4fbfb793d7ba984c179d

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44703613

Points: 22

# Comments: 2

New comment by thedailymail in "I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students"

thedailymail — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 01:18:01 +0000

When kids say (as one does in this essay) that AI will do the writing for them in the future anyway, so there's no point in learning to write, they have a point. But there is a second function of writing, which is to strengthen parts of the mind. Maybe in the future there will be "gyms" for developing these mental muscles in the same way we have fitness centers at a time when physical labor has become much less common in the past?

New comment by thedailymail in ""Not second screen enough" – Netflix dumbing down TV for phone usage"

thedailymail — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 10:38:13 +0000

I just fell out a window and am on my way down! I sure hope I don't straddle that sawhorse when I land... Ow! My balls!!

New comment by thedailymail in "Jane Street barred from Indian markets as regulator freezes $566M"

thedailymail — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 21:36:50 +0000

>While these actions were not a breach of any regulation, SEBI said that the “intensity and sheer scale” of their intervention, and the rapid reversal of their trades “without any plausible economic rationale, other than the concurrent activity in and impact on their positions in the BANKNIFTY index options markets,” was manipulative.

I don't get the basis for regulatory action if they weren't in "breach of any regulation." Not a fan of financial skullduggery, but it does seem important for government agencies to play by explicit, non-arbitrary rules. (Or maybe this article just got it wrong?)

New comment by thedailymail in "America's Coming Smoke Epidemic"

thedailymail — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 07:29:05 +0000

In the early days of the pandemic it was widely reported (erroneously) that tobacco smoking was protective against SARS-CoV-2. I don't know if OP was thinking along such lines, but it would be understandable if they were.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41533-021-00223-1

New comment by thedailymail in "Curtis Yarvin's Plot Against America"

thedailymail — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:33:31 +0000

I don't want to be pedantic or prescriptive, but it's "imminent" not "eminent." (The wrong word got introduced upstream in this thread and was taken up by multiple commenters.)

New comment by thedailymail in "Authors are accidentally leaving AI prompts in their novels"

thedailymail — Sun, 25 May 2025 21:27:41 +0000

[Opt]+[-] is for en-dash (at least on macos). For an em-dash, it's [Shift]+[Opt]+[-].

New comment by thedailymail in "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]"

thedailymail — Sat, 10 May 2025 22:53:42 +0000

I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)

New comment by thedailymail in "My new deadline: 20 years to give away virtually all my wealth"

thedailymail — Fri, 09 May 2025 07:12:04 +0000

Mission drift can sometimes go in a positive direction. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, for example, functioned primarily as a tax evasion vehicle while Hughes was alive. After his death, the HHMI was in deep trouble with the IRS and sitting on an endowment of ~$5 billion. So it appointed former NIH director Donald Fredrickson to turn it into an actual research funding organization and mend relations with the tax authorities and research community.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-11-fi-2620-s...

New comment by thedailymail in "Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data"

thedailymail — Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:56:00 +0000

Oh wow - TIL! I wish I could edit or delete the above. Anyway thanks for correcting me.

New comment by thedailymail in "Whistleblower: DOGE Siphoned NLRB Case Data"

thedailymail — Tue, 22 Apr 2025 13:43:58 +0000

Notably, Krebs just had his security clearance revoked by Trump & Co. 12 days ago for posing "risks".

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr...

New comment by thedailymail in "This is no world for an axolotl"

thedailymail — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 06:27:24 +0000

"It has an impressive resume, being the most studied animal in the world, subject of more investigations than even the Drosophila melanogaster or common fruit fly that resides in thousands of laboratories around the world."

It would be great to have a source for this claim! Recent studies have estimated that between 10 million and 110 million (it's controversial!) lab mice are used per year in the US, representing 93–97% of all experimental animals.

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-many-mice-and-ra...