Hacker News Reader

i4ion Do dentists know what they're doing?

See Also: I Went to 50 Different Dentists and Almost All of Them Gave Me a Different Diagnosis https://web.archive.org/web/20230807140134/https://www.rd.co...

i4ion FTC alleges Amazon illegally made $20B by rigging billions of ad auctions

See also, Seth Godin's recent blog post, "The Amazon tax" https://seths.blog/2026/08/the-amazon-tax/

i4ion Rich Guy Quote Journalism

...The answer is that there’s an entire genre of media coverage best described as “rich guy has an opinion.”

i4ion I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI

"A 2026 Finnish study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to look at patients’ shoulders found that 99% of Finnish adults over 40 have at least one rotator cuff abnormality." https://brainlenses.substack.com/p/abnormality

Incidental Rotator Cuff Abnormalities on Magnetic Resonance Imaging https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

i4ion Ear Training Practice

Let's not forget MusicTheory.net Been around forever and has a very robust set of exercises and lessons. Free online and a great app as well. https://www.musictheory.net/exercises

i4ion AI is just unauthorised plagiarism at a bigger scale

He ends his essay with "Fuck Google for ranking some copycat website higher than mine, even though they copied my article", but how is it not OpenAI, Anthropic etc. as well as Google, to blame. We're meant to believe that with their resources they couldn't have created a micro-payment scheme to compensate creators? Altman on Fridman podcast two years ago about compensation... https://youtu.be/jvqFAi7vkBc?si=9YbKoH_dFIishAXt&t=2409

i4ion A hacker has allegedly breached one of China's supercomputers

I think it's odd that what seems like a big story people would like to be following along with just vanished.

i4ion Urea prices

Excellent in-depth article and it's 6 years old. If this gets solved it will be a very big deal. We found a way to turn urine into solid fertiliser – it could make farming more sustainable https://theconversation.com/we-found-a-way-to-turn-urine-int...

i4ion Our approach to advertising

https://chatgpt.com/share/696a8c52-f29c-800d-b597-93dfde0c30...

What you’re reacting to isn’t just “ads.” It’s the feeling of: Someone monetizing the collective output of human thought while quietly severing the link back to the humans who produced it.

That triggers a very old and very valid moral instinct.

Why “sleazy” is an accurate word here

“Sleazy” usually means: technically allowed strategically clever morally evasive

i4ion Aphantasia and Psychedelics

My understanding is that most aphantasics (like myself) can still see images while dreaming—suggesting that dreaming uses a different network for visualization. I have vivid dreams most nights.

Shane Williams (an aphant) hosts a podcast where he interviews people using a set of questions designed to probe their inner sensory world. From it I’ve learned, for example, that some people can taste food when reading a menu, or have a conversation with a deceased loved one and actually hear their voice. One of his prompts is whether guests can place themselves inside a photo of a carnival (which he provides); many say they can smell the cotton candy or hear the chatter of the crowd.

It’s striking how little we really know about the variety of inner sensory experiences: Discovering Your Mind – Aphantasia and Beyond https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/discovering-your-mind-...

A favorite research paper compares brain activity in identical twin sisters, only one of whom is aphantasic: The Neural Underpinnings of Aphantasia: A Case Study of Identical Twins https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.23.614521v2

i4ion Fields where Native Americans farmed a thousand years ago discovered in Michigan

Science Mag Podcast covered this as well... with Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. I thought interesting that they have yet to find the village that associates with the gardens. https://www.science.org/content/podcast/farming-maize-ice-ag...

i4ion Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer's suicide

Immediately after the book won the Pulitzer in 1981, Gottlieb could not recall Toole or the manuscript. In his 2016 memoir, Gottlieb wrote that, after returning to A Confederacy of Dunces decades later, he felt the same about its flaws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gottlieb

i4ion How French Drains Work

I suddenly remembered why, having previously found this channel, which is full of great information, I can't stand to watch the videos - the innocuous background music! Anyone else have this problem... where you're perhaps overly sensitive to music, especially non-fiction videos and podcasts? I find the background music unbearable.

i4ion Ask HN: Why Google shut down business.site website feature?

Anything that Google does apart from make money selling ads and turning the internet into an ad cesspool functions as a smoke screen to fool the public (and their employees) into thinking they do anything of real value or that serves the community. All of it https://killedbygoogle.com/ serves as a (relatively) inexpensive marketing tool.

i4ion Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

Awsm!

i4ion Show HN: Explore doctors' disciplinary history

I may be missing something, but I would like to be able to search by zip and return individual doctor's names.

i4ion Continuous glucose monitoring in people without diabetes

...What I usually hear from “CGM users without diabetes” is along the lines of ‘it helps you to understand your metabolism and make changes to your diet and lifestyle’. This is a compelling narrative, but I have a couple of problems with it: First the premise that CGM outside of diabetes can show you something to fix is at best flawed and at worst an invention designed to move product.

i4ion How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

Having only discovered Aphantasia in my 6th decade on the planet, it's safe to say that you can't miss what you never had. That said, in a FB forum that discusses Aphantasia, a few people who previously had the ability to 'see memories', were devastated by the (stroke) loss of it. Upon describing my situation, one friend immediately asked incredulously, "How do you jerk off?" I'm intrigued with the article. That a "Mind's Eye" could be developed is an exciting possibility. BTW, This is a tight, short, Hank Green video that I send to folks who have no idea what I'm talking about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A91tvp0b1fY

i4ion How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

I take the heals of my palms and apply gentle pressure, just long enough to create phonemes. So, not rubbing. (Not that this too might not be a good idea to do too often).

i4ion Perfectly good M1 MacBooks are being scrapped because of Activation Lock [video]

Really, this is disgraceful and it's unacceptable that Apple hasn't come up with a work around... Just as millions of iPhones and iPads have been scrapped due to Activation lock, we are now seeing 2018+ MacBooks scrapped at recyclers as well, due to the "feature" being enabled on those devices.

i4ion Tell HN: Putting mirrors around my desk improved my posture

FYI, A very simple awareness hack is resting your reading glasses farther down your nose, so that you're forced to have your head sit higher/straighter when looking at your screen.

i4ion Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?

A Random Movie Maker that looks at my 4 TB collection of personal history... digitized journals, email, photos, digitized cassettes, phone messages, and home videos, and creates a random 15 minute movie. Each video will include about 50 clip sources. It's a crazy trip down memory lane.

i4ion Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

I hate ads too. The thing I tried that felt ethical and useful was an affiliate code for related (to the content) products that would split the discount 50/50 between me and readers. I stated this clearly in the ad.

i4ion The sad state of RSS on the Mac

I'm very happy with NetNewsWire 3.3.2 on Mac OS El Capitan 10.11.6.

i4ion Ask HN: How will you manage your digital assets when you die?

I recently contacted Archive.org to ask if they had a "time-capsule" option... could I upload now and have it made public in xx years. They don't, but I wish they did. Not so much for friends and family but thinking that there may be some historical value to my archives in the future.

i4ion [dead]

That the author writes for a company that sells products (tools for analyzing dns and web shenanigans) doesn't make the post an'ad' does it? What struck me in particular was that if it's this easy (granted, using custom tools) to track these kinds of activities, why doesn't Google do it for us and block these (long list of related) domains from search results?

i4ion Show HN: Park your domain name with just 2 DNS records

https://www.domdb.com/img/landing.jpg

i4ion Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name

But could we all agree that a shorter, easily spelled, 'radio-friendly' (unambiguous) .com domain can save a load on marketing costs? I work backwards from my startup ideas and check the drop daily for domains that match my keywords. It doesn't take a lot of time and occasionally I find something perfect.

i4ion Want to Build a Side Business? Just Buy Great Domain Name

My understanding is that Godaddy employees are forbidden from buying and selling domains and have been for at least the 6 years I've been purchasing the occasional domain in their auction platform. When were you at Godaddy?

i4ion Ask HN: Large brand wants to buy my side project, what should I do?

Is it on a .com? Maybe they could care less about the project, but need the url to flesh out a million dollar ad campaign. Are they asking for any kind of non-compete? i.e. Could you simply re-brand and relaunch? My advice would to not be in any hurry. See if you can gauge how urgent they are. For now, tell them this project means a lot to you, a lot more than $10k.