Hacker News: ConceptJunkie

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Universal health coverage could save $1T and 114k lives a year: study"

ConceptJunkie — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 16:15:07 +0000

Since when has a government projection of costs ever been in any way realistic? The estimates for the costs of Medicare when it was established were low by a factor of 10.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:04:27 +0000

There's going to be a huge realignment in white collar work in the next decade or two, and then there's the fact that college degrees themselves (except for maybe STEM), are becoming less and less valuable because higher education is so politicized and taken over by nonsense. My college education (Computer Science, 1987) served me very well over my career, but I don't know what I'd be doing if I were 18 now.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "The Maxwell Conjecture Is False (GPT 5.6 Sol)"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 13:01:54 +0000

I'll look at math papers on Arxiv, etc., and browsing the titles will find maybe one in a hundred where I even know what it's talking about. I've been a math enthusiast since I was a kid, but the field is so immense I can't even wrap my head around how big it is, leave alone the actual concepts.

Out of all the topics mentioned in the recent AI advances at finding counterexamples to conjectures, etc., about the only one I understood was the one where they've made advances in a bounds for kissing numbers in higher dimension, a topic I find fascinating even if I don't really know much about it.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "That time when I failed the Microsoft interview"

ConceptJunkie — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:42:57 +0000

And when you break the rules, you get absolutely no feedback. You don't even know if you break the rules, or you were just beat by a candidate the interviewers preferred. I had to go through the process last year and hated almost every microsecond of it, except my interview with the place that actually hired me.

Back in the 90s, looking for a job wasn't so bad. Now it's a nightmare.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

ConceptJunkie — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:18:26 +0000

I also have really fond memories of Cinemaware's Three Stooges game. That's one I'd love to play again. It even had some digitized voices, sound effects and photos of the Stooges. It consisted of several mini-games you had to play in order to make enough money in 30 days to save the orphanage.

One had you wheeling a patient through a hospital, avoiding obstacles, and included a clip of "Calling Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard". Another had Curly trying to eat oyster soup. Another had one of the stooges dashing through town to get a violin for Larry to play. And the best one was the pie fight stage. There might have been one or two more, but it was a really cool game with excellent graphics for the time.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

ConceptJunkie — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:36:48 +0000

Roger Dean did some great artwork for computer games, etc., in the 1980s. I still have the poster of the cover of the game Barbarian that came with the game. Dean later recycled that painting for the cover of Steve Howe's excellent "Not Necessarily Acoustic" album, and Dean is _still_ producing lovely and amazing artwork for Yes all these years later.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Amiga Graphics Archive"

ConceptJunkie — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 16:34:46 +0000

Seeing the juggler, and lots of other gee-whiz stuff in 1986 inspired me to buy an Amiga 500 as my first computer in 1988. I got a lot of mileage out of that system, with its whopping 1.5MB of RAM, and two floppy drives (after shelling out another ~$150 for the 1MB upgrade and however much for an external floppy).

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "My security camera shipped a GitHub admin token in its login page"

ConceptJunkie — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 16:14:50 +0000

The point of IPv6 was to make the addresses so long that we don't run out of them in 20 years or so.

There fixed that for you.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample"

ConceptJunkie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 18:17:34 +0000

I'm sorry, I can't do that, but here is the design for a stable quantum computing platform that should allow you to generate those keys yourself...

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "Exploring PDP-1 Lisp (1960)"

ConceptJunkie — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 12:06:50 +0000

I feel like it's a rite of passage for a beginner programmer to have a recursive function generate a stack overflow.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:12:02 +0000

DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:59:28 +0000

If you were to quiz people who preferred the Windows 2000 look, you would more likely get detailed answers regarding the design language and functionality. If you were to quiz people who preferred the XP look, you would more likely get answers revolving around colors and shiny.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:57:43 +0000

Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:55:38 +0000

I don't understand why they couldn't have kept that option. The Windows UI is currently the least customizable I've ever seen and I started using Windows with 2.1.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:51:29 +0000

That era ended 20+ years ago. Sorry, pal. Microsoft has been flailing since Windows 2000 to "improve" the UI, often with one bad idea after another: let's make Windows apps look like webpages, let's make Windows apps look like phones, let's remove all the graphics elements that let you distinguish one window or element from another, let's put 5 times more whitespace into every screen than is needed...

Yes, I can see where the Windows 2000 "Classic" UI was considered bland, but it was also the functional and consistent UI Microsoft ever made. Most changes since have been a step backwards.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:05:10 +0000

Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player look like eyeballs.

"Skinning" apps was a good idea in theory, but in practice, it never offered anything better than the default of Windows 2000 and earlier eras. Now you can't change anything in the Windows UI except a few colors.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:01:08 +0000

In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:59:54 +0000

I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI experts.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI. Yeah, it wasn't visually exciting, but it was the peak of functional and discoverable UI. Of course, the Windows 10/11 UI isn't visually exciting either, and in many cases it's more boring looking, and definitely less functional. I would pay money to go back to the Windows 2000 UI, but I guess Microsoft isn't sophisticated enough to do that any more. The current Windows UI is less customizable than Windows 2. Yes, you heard me right. Windows 2.1 was more customizable than Windows 11.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:54:48 +0000

Yeah, but I would still usually see Explorer crash within an hour of a fresh Win2k installation. Windows 2000 was peak UI, but it wasn't peak Windows. That was Windows 7. And Windows 7 was advanced enough that you could still go back to the Windows 2000 UI.

New comment by ConceptJunkie in "What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000"

ConceptJunkie — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:53:22 +0000

> Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.

That never changed.