Hacker News Reader

dr-smoothon Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

Got to be honest with you, bro. This sounds like pro-russia FUD to me.

I mean honestly, wasn't all of the USSR a big agglomeration? The bottom line now is that Ukraine is a sovereign nation recognized by the rest of the world, and they have been invaded.

dr-smoothon Programming languages used for music

you can use Javascript with Max. It's a bit unwielding in its handling of multi-JS-file projects, but it can be done.

Not everything in Max is exposed to your code, but you really can do a lot from the JS side of things.

dr-smoothon FBI Agents Visit Anti-ICE Protester: "Your name was brought up."

A greasy KFC bucket of deplorables

dr-smoothon Who benefits from the MAHA anti-science push?

we didn't have Fox News and its ilk drumming up panic over caravans back then.

dr-smoothon AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

and if they need West Coast, it's us-west-2. I consider us-west-1 to be a failed region. They don't get some of the new instance types, you can't get three AZs for your VPCs, and they're more expensive than the other US regions.

dr-smoothon AWS multiple services outage in us-east-1

Or Bezos selling his soul to the Orange Devil and kicking you off when the Conman-in-chief puts the squeeze on some other aspect of Bezos' business empire

dr-smoothon SEC approves Texas Stock Exchange, first new US integrated exchange in decades

reminds me of "you can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor" from SNL...

dr-smoothon The Poison Pill to End the MMR Is Tylenol

Yeah, Snopes is really missing the point here. When people point to this idiotic drivel that he spoke in a press conference, their point is not that "oh my god, he told everyone to inject bleach, this is going to cause mass injury and is terrifyingly dangerous".

I think most who point to this statement, they see it as evidence of how pitifully stupid this man is.

So for most people who like to talk about this statement, it's still true -- it's like a 3rd grader is spitballing on how to solve a pandemic.

dr-smoothon The death of partying in the USA

Sorry, there's no way a plumber in the 70s made 40K.

dr-smoothon Claude 4

I'm sure it's already happening.

dr-smoothon Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

Amazing that anybody can look at that guy and think he's "strong". It's so obvious that he's a chicken shit at heart. I mean I guess he talks big, although his language and vocabulary is so stunted, I can't even see that. I guess he was really brave after getting "shot" (probably nicked his own ear with a fingernail when he was pulled to the ground by secret service).

dr-smoothon Trump's Trade War Escalates as China Retaliates with 34% Tariffs

I like how you talk about them like there is any "game" involved. Neither individual knows what the hell he's doing. Just greedy self-serving bulls in a china shop.

dr-smoothon Liu Jiakun Receives the 2025 Pritzker Architecture Prize

Today I learned that in British English, "homely" is a positive trait when referring to a place.

dr-smoothon Solitaire

I don't think that was his point. He wasn't asking specifically what Balatro was. He just marvels at the fact that there are so many niche interests out there that their very existence is unknown to him.

Your statement about people having forgotten how to help themselves to information is borderline insulting. A little like sending somebody a "let me google that for you" link.

Or maybe I've misunderstood what you meant.

dr-smoothon Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

> Just like I don't think anybody truly believes that flipping a real coin with non-identical sides (such as every currency coin I've ever used) must have EXACTLY 50% probability of landing on either side.

That's a nice thought, but that's giving the average person too much credit when it comes to probability. In my experience, most people's understanding of probability is very poor. For example, few people truly understand the concept of independent events.

Most people believe that after flipping 10 heads in a row, the probability of tails on the next flip is much higher.

I'm sure you could convince a rational individual that the assymetry of the coin makes 50/50 impossible. But I doubt that the average person has ever really considered it.

dr-smoothon Can digital emulations be as good as analog hardware?

For all platforms, I recommend Vital (https://vital.audio/)

dr-smoothon After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days

on the other hand, gitlab support has impressed me a few times with the speed of the response and the knowledge level of the support techs.

dr-smoothon Gerald Sussman: Programming is (should be) fun (2022) [video]

Yak Shaving: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/yak-shaving-defined-ill-get-t...

dr-smoothon Multiple Displays on a Mac Sucks

I felt the same way back in 2017.

I don't have the same strong opinions of many on this board about having problems now, but it does kind of seem like I have more problems now than I did back then.

I use an external monitor at home, a portable one when traveling, and external monitors at the office.

I have seen things that were pretty annoying, like all my windows getting stuck on the laptop display, even with the external monitor connected. Having to move 15 instances of VS Code to the external monitor is really obnoxious. It happens to me about once every 6-8 weeks. Not quite annoying enough for me to go find and learn some window management application.

Not sure exactly what triggers this. It seems like it's related to powering up and connecting the external displays. Or even the temporary loss of connection (bad USB cable) between them seems like it can make it happen.

I think back in 2017, I was only using external displays at work. So the laptop didn't have 4 different configurations to contend with like it does now (no external display, home external display, travel external display, and work external displays)

dr-smoothon When do we stop finding new music?

I also have that problem with lyrics in music while I'm working. That pushed me toward more electronic music during the workday. Got into various forms of house that way.

dr-smoothon Why you hear voices in your white noise machine

This immediately made me think of this Reply All episode: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/mehrar/147-the-woman...

dr-smoothon Regex character "$" doesn't mean "end-of-string"

    $ ruby -e 'x = "25\n; delete from people" ; if x =~ /^\d+$/ ; puts "yes" ; else ; puts "no" ; end'
    yes

dr-smoothon Why do people feel the need to litter?

Please don't do that -- nobody wants to see you pour your backwash into the soda machine drip tray. That might be ok for overflow while pouring it, but not after you're done. Yuck!

dr-smoothon Stop Reading News (2013)

Tim Ferris' idea about filter of consequences is interesting. Except for the fact that that information has likely passed through filters of propaganda and almost certainly passed through filters of ignorance, stupidity, and bias. No matter how well-informed, intelligent, and unbiased you think the deliverer of said information might be unless he's telling you something he witnessed first hand.

dr-smoothon Beeper Mini is back

Android user here who is a member of a group that is all iphone. Those users don't care about the color of the bubble. What thy care about is that if I am in the group, they lose functionality that they are accustomed to. The big ones that I hear about are adding/removing users and high quality media sharing. Not to mention the janky handling of message reactions that seem to always suck for one side or the other.

The problem is that having just one non-iphone user in the mix causes imessage to drop to SMS, taking them back a decade in functionality.

And yes, some of them do complain about it vocally. Maybe they're immature, I don't know. But it's an annoying bit of social friction, and I'm sure many android users have caved to the pressure to "upgrade" to an iphone.

dr-smoothon Jon Stewart's Show on Apple Is Ending

For All Mankind is superb

dr-smoothon The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman

Thanks for sharing the option-WiFi tip! Looks like the Bluetooth menu bar item does it, too!

dr-smoothon The Terrifying Possibility of Accidental Nuclear War

Sam Harris recently had an excellent podcast episode with Carl Robichaud (of the Longview Nuclear Risk Policy Fund) on this topic:

https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/330...

dr-smoothon The layoffs are here for those who chose to ‘learn to code’

I take huge exception with this remark. I graduated with a BS and MS engineering at a top-20 US engineering school. I also earned an MS at a top-25 computer science program. I found the CS program dramatically more challenging. My CS classmates were some of the brightest problem solvers I've ever worked with in my life.

Then in my career, I have worked alongside some brilliant software developers who had academic backgrounds in non-technical fields like history or English.

I don't know if there's a way to assess someone's problem solving ability based on their field of academic study. It would seem that those from science and engineering fields (CS inclusive) would generally fare better.

Your dismissive comment about "most CS folks" is just offensive.

dr-smoothon Can brown noise turn off your brain?

Agreed on the looping. I had a cheap white noise machine in the 90s, and once my brain identified the loop, I was locked into it and couldn't fall asleep.

But it's not as bad as hearing somebody in your white noise: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/mehrar