Hacker News: throwaway173738

New comment by throwaway173738 in "I also filed the corners off my MacBook"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:33:02 +0000

I think you should look at their catalog. Their dishwashers have some wacky innovations like zeolite dryers. Their windshield wipers are very high quality and easy to install. These are just two examples.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "How Doctors die. It’s not like the rest of us (2016)"

throwaway173738 — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 03:18:13 +0000

None of these things guarantee death and if you fail they come with some awful complications. Overdosing on Morphine is probably the easiest, most humane way to die.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Female US rower completes historic solo journey from California to Hawaii"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 22:19:46 +0000

It depends. Hypernatremia refers specifically to sodium but doesn’t speak to potassium or calcium. You need all three in proper balance for your body. So you can sweat a bunch and still need to take in more salts because the balance is off.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "An American Privacy Emergency"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:44:33 +0000

I was parodying someone very famous who said the same thing about dolls last Christmas.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Punk, or why I don't stream anymore"

throwaway173738 — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:37:01 +0000

Or just call the theater. You can still call stores and ask them if they have something, rather than looking it up on Amazon.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Alternate clock designs and time systems"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 23:32:15 +0000

December used to be the tenth month until Augustus and Julian added a couple of months in the middle of the year.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "What Big Food Did to Ice Cream"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:06:20 +0000

Or we could break up Unilever, which only requires anti trust enforcement.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "98% isn't much"

throwaway173738 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:58:10 +0000

He wasn’t actually giving a blanket directive. The article was suggesting that you think about whether 98% is actually good in your use case by doing the math and thinking.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "An American Privacy Emergency"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:17:28 +0000

I guess the rich people will have to cope with one less super-yacht this year.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "An American Privacy Emergency"

throwaway173738 — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:13:58 +0000

Washington’s paid parental leave act has us put money into our Unemployment Insurance program in addition to the UI payments we already make. So the business owners don’t have to pay for it, they just have to allow it to happen.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The first early human eggs from stem cells"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:41:52 +0000

A lot of these issues have more to do with how we’ve constructed our society than with some loss of purity. If you want people to have more sex, make cities and towns more livable, get people out of cars, give them living wages so they have free time, create societal supports for childcare, make giving birth and pediatric care completely free, and support people forming associations outside of work. These are all barriers that have appeared basically my lifetime and it’s way more likely that people are making informed choices than that there’s some horrible transformation we’re all undergoing.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot with Fall 2026 deliveries"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:36:14 +0000

Or unlocking your doors while you’re on vacation. If there’s a way to operate it remotely then it will get operated remotely.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The first early human eggs from stem cells"

throwaway173738 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:37:48 +0000

“survival of the fittest” was actually coined by a political economist, Herbert Spencer, to explain how lassiez-faire economics produces better companies. Darwin didn’t extrapolate to that in his theories and the quote is often applied to explain how evolution works, but that may not be the case. We can say that evolution results in change but that there are no guarantees that those changes result in fitness of the organism. We can only say that sometimes they obviously do and in other cases we can make up “just-so” stories to explain stuff in terms of fitness.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The first early human eggs from stem cells"

throwaway173738 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:16:35 +0000

I don’t think this technology we’ll get people to stop having sex to the degree that IVG is all we’ll ever use. And to the degree that we believe some humans are genetically destined for anything, that’s the line of thinking that leads to dystopia.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The first early human eggs from stem cells"

throwaway173738 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:10:06 +0000

This line of reasoning leads to “some people are weak and unworthy of life because they are impure.” I don’t think rolling back our work to end infant mortality to prevent weak people from living is the right answer.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "One million passports leaked online"

throwaway173738 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:13:34 +0000

They’ll definitely issue loans to a child. You have to actually put a special freeze on your child’s credit account, which is insane but welcome to the US, where any obstruction to the wheels of commerce is an affront to our national dignity.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "One million passports leaked online"

throwaway173738 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:11:13 +0000

And make them call the registrar during regular hours. That’s what I had to do to get a transcript from 15 years ago once. The registrar holds the records and should be able to provide them.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

throwaway173738 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:55:02 +0000

We used to send people who were concerned with building relationships. These days it sounds like we’re sending people to milk relationships dry.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "HackerRank open sourced its ATS. My resume scored 90/100. Oh wait 74. No – 88"

throwaway173738 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 12:40:41 +0000

It is, after all, a fundamentally voltage-based process, and the logical “no-man’s land” is chosen to limit the likelihood of a weak component producing faulty logic, but it’s impractical to run through the set of all possible starting states and to verify that after an unbounded number of clock steps the machine reaches a predictable end state on all of the devices being manufactured.

New comment by throwaway173738 in "The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision"

throwaway173738 — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:07:02 +0000

What’s cool about sharpening knives is it teaches you how to sharpen all kinds of stuff. For example I’m building a fence and I have to cut some roots in the posthole using my San Angelo bar. The chisel is dull because I’ve been using it to break up concreted rock. So I grab a file and put a little edge back on it.