Hacker News Reader

mkmkon Italy's birth rate crisis is 'irreversible', say experts

Not a lot of effective contraception available for serfs, right?

mkmkon Designing a Star Tracker for Astronaut Don Pettit to Use on the ISS

> Don is a bit of a machinist himself, so we decided to have some fun with the device name.

I don’t get it, anyone able to explain?

mkmkon Zuckerberg approved training Llama on LibGen [pdf]

A partial list of ISBNs in the dataset https://github.com/psmedia/Books3Info

mkmkon Brave Care Has Closed

Patient acquisition costs, perhaps?

mkmkon Early Improvements with Atogepant for the Preventive Treatment of Migraine

If you have had migraines most of your life and you haven’t recently visited a neurologist, do it! The treatments and medications that have come to market over the last 10 years are significantly better than what came before.

mkmkon Mysterious New Jersey drone sightings prompt call for 'state of emergency'

A practical question, beyond the questions of whose drones these are: what are they looking for?

mkmkon What we know about CEO shooting suspect

Why would they be pro bono? He comes from a very wealthy family.

mkmkon How to grow professional relationships

On the practical side of things, one important behavior that I see people frequently forget is the importance of following up. This is probably the biggest differentiator between relationships that languish in the early stages, versus those that progress along the author’s continuum.

It’s always a bit strange when you only hear from people once every few years, just as they need an intro or career advice or whatever- the beginning of those conversations is usually a bit of sheepish catch-up on what happened after you last spoke with them. Similarly, there have been times when I have felt like a dope after realizing that I failed to follow up myself after a call, and am again reaching out for another reason.

However, when you follow up with someone as simple as “Thanks for connecting me with so and so, we had a great chat” or “I tried that thing you suggested, here’s how it worked out”, you build mutual trust and enthusiasm for a successful outcome to the conversation you had. It’s a genuine and thoughtful way to grow your relationship.

mkmkon All political ads running on Google in the US

Here's the equivalent from Meta: https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a...

mkmkon Her Majesty’s Rat-Catcher (2013)

If you have the stomach for it, it’s fascinating to watch terriers hunt for rats. What seem to be cute and charming family pets are actually perfectly bred hunters. It changes how you see them shake their toys, and you understand why so many dog toys have a distinctive squeak.

https://youtu.be/GO_xkUcVea8 (NYC)

https://youtu.be/5_qUdwfxBVQ (on a farm)

mkmkon Stark et al. vs. Patreon, Inc. Class Action Settlement

> I guess if there's a general trend of $35 per privacy violation companies might take a bit more serious.

The pricing of settlements is frequently tied to the size of insurance policies. So you’re right, but it may take a few hops for the trend to percolate.

mkmkon The Physics of Magic Windows (2021)

Some nice comments on this previous discussion of the same link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28283411

mkmkon Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts

I don’t remember where I got it, but I have a simple implementation of a command-line spinner that I use keyboard shortcuts to add to most scripts. Has been a huge quality of life improvement but I wish I could just as seamlessly drop in a progress bar (of course, knowing how far along you are is more complex than knowing you’re still chugging along).

mkmkon Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes side-by-side cut of raw footage vs. final film

Sadly my ad blocker hid the video on first load. It's at the very top of the page once you turn your ad blocker off.

mkmkon Urchin Software Corp: The unlikely origin story of Google Analytics (2016)

> The UTM, or Urchin Traffic Monitor, was an early method for augmenting Apache (or IIS, etc.) log files with cookies, such that unique visitors could be established.

Of course, “utm” lives on today as a standard prefix for link tracking parameters, even outside of google analytics

mkmkon Partisan bot-like accounts continue to amplify divisive content on X

Obvious followup: can you share more about your whitelist and how it works?

mkmkon Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

Out of curiosity, why did you name the paid plan Everest?

mkmkon CriticGPT: Finding GPT-4's mistakes with GPT-4

Isn't the very article we're commenting on an indication that you can form a basic opinion on what makes one proprietary model different from another?

mkmkon Moaan InkPalm Plus is weird, cheap, small, and my kind of e-reader

I wonder if you could find an old Kindle DX on ebay or something.

mkmkon CriticGPT: Finding GPT-4's mistakes with GPT-4

It seems more and more that the solution to AI's quality problems is... more AI.

Does Anthropic do something like this as well, or is there another reason Claude Sonnet 3.5 is so much better at coding than GPT-4o?

mkmkon Agricultural drones are transforming rice farming in the Mekong River delta

Out of curiosity how does nitrogen fertilizer offset labor?

mkmkon What happens if you swallow gum?

I'm not sure why, but this makes me think of the time before ubiquitous internet, when the answers to questions like this one were much harder to come by.

mkmkon Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 6 Years

Administered intravenously? Im confused as to how this works. How would this result in the growth of a new tooth in the right spot? Does intravenously sometimes mean injected in a specific spot, rather than in the veins near your inner elbow?

mkmkon Brain biopsies on 'vulnerable' patients at Mt Sinai set off alarm bells at FDA

Since this is so effectively paywalled, it's probably worthwhile to note that much of the story explained here in this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/KatherineEban/status/1785740414420422819

mkmkon Winner of $1.3B Powerball jackpot is a immigrant from Laos who has cancer

What would be a realistic plan for spending the $400m to give yourself the best chance of saving your own life?

mkmkon The question that no LLM can answer and why it is important

Being able to weed out LLM responses is becoming more and more important for me when I hire for data entry and online research tasks from Upwork. Lots of the contractors on the platform now automatically submit a response to anything you post using some sort of LLM that takes your requirements and confidently asserts that it can complete the task. The AIs are pretty good at jumping through the traditional hoops that one used to put up to make sure someone was paying attention to the task!

As a stopgap, I've started requiring that applicants demonstrate proof of life through a simple question like 'what is the headline on the frontpage of the new york times today', since many LLMs can't live search yet.

mkmkon Daniel Dennett has died

Very nice profile of him from 2017: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett... RIP

mkmkon Ollama: Acknowledge the work done by Georgi and team

Can you explain what this is/means?

mkmkon Tips for linking shell companies to their secret owners

I'm not very familiar with shell companies, so I'm curious – why isn't this just a matter of privacy for those involved? I'm generally pretty understanding of pro-privacy-oriented behavior.

mkmkon Starbucks is raising prices almost every month now

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000709112

Price of a gallon of milk over time