Hacker News: DarkIye

New comment by DarkIye in "AI companies are shredding rare books"

DarkIye — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:19:45 +0000

This is the opposite of a book burning. These books which only a few would ever know the names of, let alone find, let alone read, are being digitised so they can be found in electronic searches.

New comment by DarkIye in "Neverclick: Desktop application for performing mouse actions with your keyboard"

DarkIye — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:51:32 +0000

Nice, this is like Vimium link hints but for everything. So long carpal tunnel!

New comment by DarkIye in "I maintain a 17 year old ThinkPad"

DarkIye — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 11:48:48 +0000

Another x220 club member reporting in. My employer was getting rid of old machines a few years back, I got it for £20. The only work it needed was to resolder the left speaker, I think it already had an SSD in it.

It weighs less than 2kg and is perfect for light duties.

New comment by DarkIye in "RSS is undead"

DarkIye — Mon, 09 Apr 2018 16:23:00 +0000

Thanks to Wordpress publishing an RSS feed endpoint by default (/feed) and Feedly's aptitude at finding feeds, RSS is not dead, or undead, or anything of the sort and I have been using it on a daily basis for over a decade now.

New comment by DarkIye in "Grindr Shares Personal Information With Third-Parties"

DarkIye — Tue, 03 Apr 2018 12:53:51 +0000

"At the time of the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, the Greenwich Village bar Stonewall Inn was owned and operated by the New York Mafia."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/stonewal...

New comment by DarkIye in "Facebook’s war on free will"

DarkIye — Tue, 19 Sep 2017 21:53:25 +0000

This article started off well but began to lose me around the time he said:

"Computer scientists have an aphorism that describes how algorithms relentlessly hunt for patterns: they talk about torturing the data until it confesses."

This is the first time I have seen this formulation of the nature of data. Data is almost always regarded as an input, or a resource, or a substrate, not a being of any kind.

The article generally seems to be less about its title and more about Facebook's business on the whole, and it's an interesting read.

New comment by DarkIye in "40% of foreign students in the US have no close American friends on campus"

DarkIye — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:49:19 +0000

As a university student in London, I noticed Chinese students (the main foreign contingent of the student body) overwhelmingly tended to socialise with one another, and groups of Chinese students speaking Mandarin to each other was a common sight on campus. If you weren't a Chinese speaker, it was hard to penetrate these groups (I tried and failed). Is this also the case in American colleges?

New comment by DarkIye in "Samsung 'blocks' exploding Note 7 parody videos"

DarkIye — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 20:35:52 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

New comment by DarkIye in "Why I turned down $500K and shut down my startup"

DarkIye — Thu, 09 Jun 2016 13:32:15 +0000

it was a bad idea #savedyouaclick

New comment by DarkIye in "Show HN: Something pointless I made"

DarkIye — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 14:16:13 +0000

For when your pickle cat needs that special extra something: analogue synths

New comment by DarkIye in "“Stop reverse engineering our code”"

DarkIye — Tue, 11 Aug 2015 14:51:16 +0000

For general sanity: $150,000,000

New comment by DarkIye in "Applying an experimental procedure to fall in love"

DarkIye — Sun, 11 Jan 2015 07:43:08 +0000

I remember reading about positive conceptualisation techniques in Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. This is nothing particularly special. What if you spent 90 minutes detailing one another's flaws? You'd come away with a similarly inaccurate negative impression of your partner.

New comment by DarkIye in "On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs"

DarkIye — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 17:40:23 +0000

Are you sure it was the "height of her ambition"? Sounds like she was primarily focused on practising her English and didn't mind too much about the work.

New comment by DarkIye in "I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)"

DarkIye — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 12:20:27 +0000

In fact, Scott Adams proposed this in The Dilbert Future as a workplace scheme to improve productivity (he called it 'OA5'). He may be accurate in thinking it's up to the employer to destigmatise leaving 'early' (when in fact it's a symptom of an employee having a good work-life balance, providing his performance is sufficient).

However, I've been thinking about this recently - the logical extreme is that you should never expect the employee to turn up at work at all, provided he performs his tasks (say via telecommuting). Perhaps employers mandate 'desk time' because it's important to have regular physical access to the employee, for example in order to talk to him? I can think of HR/legal reasons where a private in-person interview is needed in order to inform the employee of something or to retrieve information from him. Consequently, if an employee only came in to work for these meetings, it would be obvious when the employee was engaged in some sort of 'serious' communication with the company. It would make mass layoffs especially conspicuous and difficult for the company to hide.

New comment by DarkIye in "I Hate Puzzles: Am I Still a Programmer? (2011)"

DarkIye — Fri, 24 Oct 2014 11:55:18 +0000

I think this explains why I hated school.

New comment by DarkIye in "Manipulate audio with a simple Python library"

DarkIye — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:52:42 +0000

I started writing a sample-level audio suite in Java, for musical purposes:

https://github.com/williamberg/audioDCB

which I'll probably discard because Java is not the right tool for the job. Inspecting pydub/pydub/pyaudioop.py , I see there are methods for working on the sample level. I'll make a mental note to come back to this project when I get back on the computer music bandwagon again.

New comment by DarkIye in ""Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this""

DarkIye — Fri, 10 Oct 2014 11:16:14 +0000

If he were emotionally stunted, he would have difficulty expressing his emotions. Evidently, he does not have that problem.

New comment by DarkIye in ""Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this""

DarkIye — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 14:14:28 +0000

You aren't Jewish, are you?

New comment by DarkIye in ""Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this""

DarkIye — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 14:01:50 +0000

Yeah, me too. We're paid for the lip service - that's our incentive.

Linus has no incentive, financial or social, to be nice to Kay. Chewing him out, however, probably lowers his blood pressure and saves him the time of refactoring his immediate emotional reaction into a polite response, both of which are probably critical metrics to him.

New comment by DarkIye in ""Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this""

DarkIye — Tue, 07 Oct 2014 13:49:28 +0000

The Open Source community is young, like the rest of the field of software engineering, and we're still childish and uncivil towards one another, derived from a root of individualism, fed by the promise of a vast and plentiful uncharted territory.

Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one another. I hope it's a good one.

On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart thinks.