Hacker News: thefringthing

New comment by thefringthing in "A Brief History of Fish Sauce"

thefringthing — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:21:36 +0000

At my local Asian grocery store, Red Boat costs about four times as much as the other brands, so I'll be sticking with my old standby of "random bottle whose ingredients list contains only anchovies and salt".

New comment by thefringthing in "Ars Technica fires reporter after AI controversy involving fabricated quotes"

thefringthing — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 18:02:01 +0000

I bought a handmade arcade-style SNES controller from this guy one time. He should go back to making those, I guess.

New comment by thefringthing in "Hard-braking events as indicators of road segment crash risk"

thefringthing — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 18:42:04 +0000

> The core objective was to determine if a high frequency of HBEs causally links to a high rate of crashes. We employed negative binomial (NB) regression models [...].

A negative binomial regression fit on observational data cannot establish that a statistical relationship is causal.

New comment by thefringthing in "Show HN: Books mentioned on Hacker News in 2025"

thefringthing — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:12:16 +0000

If you had asked me to list ten books that would be mentioned frequently on HackerNews, I think I'd have gotten at least eight of the top ten here.

New comment by thefringthing in "Dollar-stores overcharge customers while promising low prices"

thefringthing — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:25:49 +0000

Selling at a loss can also be a monopolistic practice: a firm with enough capital can sell at a loss to capture the market, and then buy out their now-flailing competition.

New comment by thefringthing in "I wasted years of my life in crypto"

thefringthing — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:10:07 +0000

It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.

New comment by thefringthing in "SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search"

thefringthing — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 15:58:08 +0000

Is there a simple way to turn a set of hcker.news feed settings into an RSS feed?

New comment by thefringthing in "YouTube erased more than 700 videos documenting Israeli human rights violations"

thefringthing — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:12:17 +0000

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not require that perpetrators are successful in reducing the population of the targeted group, only that they "intend to destroy [it], in whole or in part" and take any of five specific categories of action with that intent.

New comment by thefringthing in "My Truck Desk"

thefringthing — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:33:15 +0000

The causes and mechanisms of ADHD are reasonably well understood. Perhaps whatever other traits you have in mind are not.

New comment by thefringthing in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

thefringthing — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:31:41 +0000

The article addresses this.

New comment by thefringthing in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

thefringthing — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:29:27 +0000

French spelling is sometimes described as "one-way": it's almost always possible to pronounce a written word correctly, but very difficult to spell a word you've only heard.

New comment by thefringthing in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

thefringthing — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 16:28:16 +0000

Kingsley Read went with something like an artificially rhotic midcentury RP when designing the Shavian alphabet. It works reasonably well for me, a Standard Canadian English speaker, except that distinguishing all the open vowels (father/bought/bot) can be a struggle,

New comment by thefringthing in "Bayesian Data Analysis, Third edition (2013) [pdf]"

thefringthing — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 15:27:25 +0000

I would include Richard McElreath's _Statistical Rethinking_ here after, or in combination with, _Bayes Rules!_. A translation of the code parts into the tidyverse is available free online, as are lecture videos based on the book.

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

thefringthing — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:29:01 +0000

Grammar problem: "In 3D space, we position objects by setting its coordinates" should read either "their coordinates" or "an object".

New comment by thefringthing in "Why English doesn't use accents"

thefringthing — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 11:57:30 +0000

The article touches on this, but there have been countless attempts to restandardize English spelling or replace the Latin alphabet with one more suited to English. But English is a global language with no central authority responsible for deciding what is correct, making coordinated change nearly impossible.

To my mind, the best such attempt was Kingsley Read's, made at the behest of G. B. Shaw: https://www.shavian.info

New comment by thefringthing in "The Who Cares Era"

thefringthing — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:29:41 +0000

> They put in the time, the effort, the blood, sweat and tears, and what did they get? No thank you, just more work.

Don't be ridiculous. They got a pizza party and $20 gift card to a mall store.

New comment by thefringthing in "Denmark to raise retirement age to 70"

thefringthing — Mon, 26 May 2025 12:45:43 +0000

If Denmark wanted to fund the same number of retired years per person as the US did when Social Security was established, the retirement age would be about 68, based on the 1935 and 2025 actuarial life tables for the USA and Denmark respectively.

New comment by thefringthing in "MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming"

thefringthing — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 16:06:37 +0000

My understanding is that the whole history of basketball is explained by the fact that they won't make the court bigger and the nets higher to account for the fact that the players are seven feet tall now.

New comment by thefringthing in "Buy European Made. Support European Values"

thefringthing — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:09:40 +0000

Title II, Article 11.

New comment by thefringthing in "Phase behavior of Cacio and Pepe sauce"

thefringthing — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 17:33:07 +0000

Boil long pasta in a skillet, not a pot.