hoosieree

I only saw one mention of HN's stereotypical in-group (the gray tribe) in this already massive thread, so I suspect the author's conclusion (that it's painful to be honestly critical of your own in-group) is spot-on.

Here's an attempt at criticism of the gray tribe. Writing it felt a little uncomfortable, maybe I have one foot in the gray tribe and the other foot somewhere else. If this post doesn't get downvoted to 5% opacity then I wasn't honest enough:

1. We rail about over-complicated systems yet we inevitably make them more complex.

2. We claim to love precision but one of our most important values is "progress".

3. We're just as nepotistic as everyone else but we claim to be a meritocracy.

4. We think we're good problem solvers but we just might be better at making them.

5. We think growth is sustainable.

I like tldr for quick examples. If it doesn't have what I need, then I fall back to phind or some other llm. Nice thing about tldr is there's an offline version.

https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/common/curl

https://tldr.inbrowser.app/pages/common/wget

A man walks into a shop and asks, "You wouldn't happen to have any fish, would you?" The shop assistant replies, "You've got it wrong – ours is a butcher's shop. We don't have any meat. You're looking for the fish shop across the road. There they don't have any fish!"

Maybe from here: https://www.equifax.com/business/data-network/nctue/

Seems to be an Equifax product.

Some lenders still do "manual underwriting" for mortgages.

So instead of blindly trusting your credit score as the measure of your ability to repay a loan, a human looks at your situation - income, other debts, etc, and makes a judgement call. It's more paperwork and slower, but it definitely exists.

What a waste of talent... why accomplish things in real life when you can grind leetcode to give the appearance of being able to accomplish things? /s

> What’s the point of an array-based language if it’s slower and harder to write than the equivalent in mainstream languages!?

How many times would you throw away a 1000 line program and start over with completely different data structures and algorithms, just to try a different approach? What about a 10 line program? Or a 1-line program?

When it's basically free to rewrite your entire program, you tend to explore more. That's one benefit terseness affords you.

Instructions unclear; created billionaire mice.

It's strange to read editorials from the early days of automation - we expected to be Jetsons; instead most of us got 1984 so that a few of us could be Jetsons.

Coolest of all time is probably the touchscreen that you can use in an MRI[1]. But my current favorite is a low-impedance guitar pickup[2].

[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10820839B2/en

[2]: https://alexshroyer.com/posts/2023-01-01-Low-Impedance-Picku...

There are easier sources for iron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_iron

One day far from now, in our hour of need, the hero will return and I'm pretty sure they're gonna need that arrowhead.

The first comment reacting to a post on HN sets the tone for the entire discussion.

The key difference is that HN is essentially plain text.

Half is wildly optimistic.

Text-to-keystroke-audio where the text comes from the LLM Prompt "fanfiction based on HGTV's Love It or List It starring an Ewok realtor and Klingon interior designer in iambic pentameter".

The goal is to cause the eavesdropper to totally reevaluate their life choices, and maybe even get caught up in the story.

Even using Vim or Emacs would add some obufsCTRL[dbiobfuscation from all the spurious keystrokes.

Using an image classifier on spectrograms is pretty funny. Not a bad idea, given image classifiers are dime a dozen, but still.

Expired patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5220807A/en

The way it works now with run-time codegen it should be Fast Fourier Transform Fixed That For You (FFTFTFY) which also somewhat evokes a butterfly diagram.

Or the rare LRCF.

There's a lot going on in that story.

Once I got stranded and the only rental vehicle option for me was a U-Haul because I was too young to rent a car. Let that sink in.

These are valid points, yet anecdotally it seems like modern fridges are less reliable and require more frequent replacement. Old fridges were "inefficient" because they didn't have an integrated variable speed motor and control board. But modern fridges seem to suffer a critical failure of some mysterious component 2 months after their warranty expires. This component can only be fixed by replacing the entire control board, and that's half the cost of a new one. Wouldn't you rather just buy a new one?

But if you zoom out, is it globally more efficient to trash the whole fridge every 5 years, or use an "inefficient" fridge with replaceable parts for 40 years?

Modern appliances are all slowly heading in the same direction.

It starts with DRM on replaceable items like water filters. Then un-mutable advertisements playing on the screen. Then subscription fees for "options". Then subscription fees for things like being able to open the doors. Then fridge-as-a-service where you rent the entire fridge and the fridge vendor resells your personal information to anyone and everyone.

There will be a "vintage replica" premium market for rich hipsters to enjoy the luxury of a fridge without any of these features. But this market will be short-lived. The vintage fridges are just modern fridges dressed up in vintage sheet metal. They buy their critical components from the same wholesalers as the DRM vendors, so eventually they'll be compelled to put in the same features. Maybe they'll be permitted to use an old-timey font on a round touchscreen with a chrome bezel, to maintain the vintage vibe.

I picture the execs of these companies studying Black Mirror episodes in darkened boardrooms... "Are you writing this down, Dave? This show is a gold mine!"

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to water-cool the refrigerator's condenser coils, and use the heated water as input for a dishwasher or kitchen sink.

When your pupils are smaller, the image that hits your retina is sharper, just like with a pinhole camera.

Sharper images lead to less eyestrain because you don't need to keep your eye still for as long.

I use light color themes for this reason. Although I always add the caveat to "do what works for you", because everyone's body is different.

I don't know about Obsidian, but delay before search prevents a bunch of useless queries to the prefixes of your search terms. If search is slow, adding a delay to prevent extra searches might make searching feel faster.

Alternatively, you could get near-zero delay and no spurious queries by requiring the user type Enter or click a button... but that design is much less common these days.

The techies are well-fed gladiators, not knights.

Hah, I haven't tried that, but I bet it's possible to do it all within org-mode...

Nothing can top the 2008 Pepsi brand philosophy:

https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...