Hacker News: FearNotDaniel

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Ancient Rome's version of Google Maps: how long to reach the beach"

FearNotDaniel — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 11:48:46 +0000

I mean, technically it was built for "the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN". The fact that it also supports a whole bunch of peoples' passion projects as well as a multi-trillion dollar commercial marketplace is just a bonus...

https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "I wanted a clock that never needed setting. Things escalated"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:14:47 +0000

Or for Western Europe there is DCF77 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "AI coding is a nightmare. Am I the only one experiencing this?"

FearNotDaniel — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 07:28:59 +0000

Sorry you're struggling. There are tons of resources out there from people who've been through the same pain and built up techniques to mitigate them. Matt Pocock's YouTube channel is one good starting place, there are many others. One key tip though is - you own the architecture of your application. If your files have become bloated over several rounds of LLM-generated code, that is primarily your responsibility to observe and push back on that, to ensure your repo as a brief but firm AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md to describe architectural non-negotiables and some kind of /code-review skill that you give to a second agent to review the first agent's work against those standards. Worried about LLM changes introducing regressions? That's why you have a test suite, and you read what the agent changes to ensure the tests themselves are still checking for correct behaviour.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice"

FearNotDaniel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 21:20:50 +0000

Don’t they have Haftpflichtversicherung in Germany? Set up as a sole trader, get good-enough liability insurance, send invoices on Day 1, earn actual money while you wait for however long it takes to get that elusive company registration set up. In Austria as an IT Consultant you get liability insurance under a very reasonable group deal through the Wirtschaftskammer. Pay a bit more to get a private policy with more coverage of that’s important to you. I’d be really surprised if similar options aren’t available to our friends across the Alps.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Zero-Downtime Deployments with Docker Compose – No Kubernetes Required"

FearNotDaniel — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:53:45 +0000

As soon as you work in a team, it’s irrelevant whether the project actually needs it. There will be someone who convinces stakeholders that it is necessary and then you just have to fall in line and learn the skills knowing that it is most likely one of the 99.9% of projects where it is just overkill.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Show HN: FablePool – pool money behind a prompt, and Fable builds it in public"

FearNotDaniel — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 13:50:34 +0000

I guess if you have a subscription with a token allowance that you are not going to use up this week, it’s better to let someone else use those tokens rather than throwing them away. So using the food analogy it’s more like a store giving away unsold sandwiches to the homeless at the end of the day instead of throwing them away.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Agentic Mfw"

FearNotDaniel — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 04:55:47 +0000

I’m pouring out a shot of Tres Comas for Claude right now

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "AI job grief: A psychological crisis hitting tech workers"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 13:12:20 +0000

Absolutely true - witness the enormous upheaval in the north of England’s coal mining communities when all the pits got closed in the 1980s. It wasn’t just individuals but families across generations and entire villages who had defined themselves by the work they did. It was easy for those in Westminster to say it was a sound decision for the national economy as a whole, but apart from leaving the workers high and dry with no other visible opportunities they absolutely failed to reckon with the cultural impact of taking away the very source of people’s sense of identity.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinated"

FearNotDaniel — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:37:00 +0000

Probably because (a) that’s not their name any more and (b) when it was, that’s not how you spell it

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "EY Canada published a cybersecurity report and most citations were hallucinated"

FearNotDaniel — Sat, 30 May 2026 20:33:34 +0000

Off topic but: the scroll mechanism on mobile is so horribly irritating and unpredictable that I just can’t be bothered fighting against it to read what sounds like at least a mildly interesting article.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "What a 98-Year Old Children's Book Teaches Us About AI"

FearNotDaniel — Sat, 30 May 2026 04:50:51 +0000

> Where so many see it as the key to a bright future, unlocking untold troves of wisdom, it simply regurgitates…

This needs one of those Wikipedia style [Who?] tags in superscript. I don’t think anyone, at least here on HN, sees AI as anything other than statistical regurgitation of knowledge already produced.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "The Vatican's Website in Latin"

FearNotDaniel — Thu, 07 May 2026 13:03:06 +0000

> baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records

Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.

I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Tar Files Created on macOS Display Errors When Extracting on Linux (2024)"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 04 May 2026 06:41:29 +0000

But, ironically enough, MacOS _is_ Unix:

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy"

FearNotDaniel — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 19:28:35 +0000

Yes but Anglo-Catholic doesn’t mean an Anglo who is Catholic. It means an Anglican who is pretending to be Catholic but without acknowledging the pope’s authority.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "How Pope Leo is pushing back on divine justification of war"

FearNotDaniel — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 09:24:51 +0000

Also, Mrs Trump is Catholic and in the past they made a big deal out of being photographed with Pope Francis to appeal to Catholic voters.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "The ANSI art "telecomics" of the 1992 election"

FearNotDaniel — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:24:49 +0000

That was my initial thought too on seeing the title, having never heard the term before. So I decided to look it up and it turns out there is a whole separate genre called “ANSI art” based on a different tech stack and a naming mistake from history:

- ASCII is a real ANSI standard, the 7-bit character set that we all know and love

- Microsoft, IBM and others extended this to many different 8-bit sets, each with its own “extended” characters in the 128-255 range, often including both graphic symbols and control codes

- one of the more popular ones, windows-1252, became informally known as ANSI because Microsoft hoped that this (and others) would become new ANSI standards (they didn’t)

- people on BBSes and then early websites used this encoding standard to create art using graphic symbols and colour codes that are not available in ASCII art

- due to the optimistic, but ultimately incorrect, naming of both charset and the supporting library, this became known as ANSI art

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns"

FearNotDaniel — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 08:11:01 +0000

Who creates value in the art market? Is it the artist who creates the work? Or the dealer who persuades the buyers that the work has value? As a builder I’m attracted to the fantasy that I can create value with my bare hands just by writing code (or telling the AI to write the code), without needing any of those horrible slimy people in suits to build a business around it. Rock n roll man. If you build it, they will come. Is that the reality though? Or just survival bias based on the fact that a few geeks got lucky during the original dotcom boom when they had no competition from actual businessmen?

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "How to record and retrieve anything you've ever had to look up twice"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 07:27:40 +0000

I find one possible answer to the question “How to make yourself actually do it” is to start by getting into the routine of keeping an engineering notebook - if you are already in the habit of jotting down stream-of-consciousness notes on whatever you are working on at a given time, then Obsidian’s feature to “extract highlighted text into a new note” feature makes it blisteringly easy to file away things you are likely to want to repeat in the future.

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Thought-Terminating Cliché"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:24:15 +0000

No it's not. It's because the meaning of the English word "prove" has changed. It used to mean "test", which could of course have a positive or negative outcome. The modern sense of "successfully demonstrating truth" has caused this phrase to have the opposite of its original meaning.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/prove_v?tl=true

New comment by FearNotDaniel in "Show HN: I created a Mars colony RPG based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars books"

FearNotDaniel — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 09:35:33 +0000

While you’re at it call Netflix and tell them that marrying a European prince at Christmas isn’t a viable option for most big city career girls. Fiction must be realistic at all times with no idealism or escapism, got it.