Hacker News: FriedrichN

New comment by FriedrichN in "Show HN: VOOG – Moog-style polyphonic synthesizer in Python with tkinter GUI"

FriedrichN — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:13:13 +0000

Very cool! I will be playing with this.

The only thing that jumped out to me is a lack of a panic button that stops all sound.

New comment by FriedrichN in "StrictYAML"

FriedrichN — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:19:47 +0000

You are right. However, it is my work and I do have an emotional connection to my work and my frustrations with certain technologies are very real.

New comment by FriedrichN in "StrictYAML"

FriedrichN — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:15:45 +0000

They absolutely do. But I usually don't have to explain the config language and it's widely supported, that is an absolute upside of .ini files.

New comment by FriedrichN in "StrictYAML"

FriedrichN — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:08:06 +0000

I'll use what I'll have to use, it's a tool like you said. But I don't have to love it. Configuration is a necessary evil and whatever I end up using, I'm never fully satisfied with the end result.

New comment by FriedrichN in "StrictYAML"

FriedrichN — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 12:48:38 +0000

I'll just come out and say that I hate every single configuration language. All of them suck in their own unique way and every time a new one comes out it fixes some issues of the language it's supposed to supersede but never without introducing new problems. And eventually you're left thinking that you should've just used a .ini file.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Garmin's –$40B Pivot"

FriedrichN — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:56:01 +0000

I actually really like the fact that my Garmin Instinct is not really a smart watch, it makes connecting it to your phone optional. Mine has never connected to a phone because I don't like to run Google's spyware on my phone. Yet, I can use most of it's functions I care about (time & date, GPS, moon & sun, compass, steps, heart rate, temperature, sports-specific stuff) without giving up my soul to Big Tech.

New comment by FriedrichN in "People are bad at reporting what they eat. That's a problem for dietary research"

FriedrichN — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:08:05 +0000

That probably doesn't work either unless they work in an automated fashion. Did the chef put two or three dashes (official SI unit) of this or that on your meal? A a "dash" or "splash" or "spritz" of certain things can easily mean 100-200 kcal. And if you deal with things like meat, maybe the cut you get today is more or less lean than what you got last week.

I think tracking calories for a couple of weeks can be very enlightening for a lot of people, granted you don't have a personality type where this can get you into trouble. But for the long haul it's not really useful or even feasible, you're better off getting to know what sort of way of eating suits you best and how to correct if you're getting off course. Anyone can stick to a very strict regime for three months, but the trick is to stick to a proper diet you can enjoy for three decades and then three decades more.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Ask HN: What books should I read to improve as a software engineer?"

FriedrichN — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 06:48:23 +0000

I'll second the recommendation of fiction (I love the classics) and add a recommendation for reading philosophy and specifically the history of philosophy. Learning how our frame thinking evolved from the time of the Greeks to the middle ages to more modern times has been nothing short of illuminating for me personally. I don't think you need to read the original works or the really academic stuff (you can if you want to) but having a feel of how our thinking got to be is really useful.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Starting today, YouTube is almost unusable on Firefox"

FriedrichN — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 14:38:42 +0000

This is actually what I do most of the time. I feel like that anecdote of RMS where he says he wgets web pages and e-mails them to himself.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Hackers may have leaked the Social Security Numbers of every American"

FriedrichN — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:27:20 +0000

And they were caught and received 30 year prison sentences.

https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/2-sentenced-to-prison-for-...

New comment by FriedrichN in "Cats appear to grieve death of fellow pets – even dogs, study finds"

FriedrichN — Wed, 07 Aug 2024 14:59:14 +0000

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to their cats' behaviour when another pet dies. I remember when one of our four cats didn't come home, there were definitely changes in how the remaining three behaved. Apparently the cat got hit by a car and was found by someone and dumped in one of those bins where they dump dead animals for rendering. We took her home and laid her on the lawn so the other cats could know that she was dead. Each of the cats came one by one, giving it a sniff and concluding that she was dead. One of them however stayed with her until we took her away to bury her, an incredibly endearing display. It took a while before they all started acting like they did before.

And with the subsequent deaths of all the remaining cats, as they are all sadly deceased, I saw similar things happen.

We should not anthropomorphise animals, but that doesn't mean they don't have complex feelings or thoughts. If we find that even bees can "play", it's not that weird if cats can "grieve".

New comment by FriedrichN in "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans"

FriedrichN — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 09:53:34 +0000

I would have done that if the venue were closer to me, but it's just a little too far away for that. There might be tickets available just before the show, but I'm not willing to risk driving all the way there just to be disappointed and drive all the way back.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans"

FriedrichN — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 07:32:59 +0000

Recently I attempted to buy concert tickets from a well known ticket seller. It insisted I was a bot, even after disabling my uMatrix and uBlock Origin. There was no way to prove that I was not, not even a CAPTCHA. So I decided to simply not buy any tickets.

This is just one example. I get increasingly frustrated by how shit everything is and my way of dealing with it is to disengage. It is rather sad, but I was not put on this earth to wrangle apps, QR codes, verification codes, passwords, usernames, e-mails, TOTP codes, updates, activation codes, etc.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds"

FriedrichN — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:56:18 +0000

Not where I live (ace-K and sucralose). Maybe it differs per region.

New comment by FriedrichN in "Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds"

FriedrichN — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 13:34:40 +0000

I have yet to encounter a soda that uses sugar alcohols, most use aspartame, ace-K, sucralose, or stevia. Those don't bother me at all.

But the side-effects of sugar alcohols are pretty well known (especially to anyone who has had the pleasure of eating beyond their threshold). I haven't searched for any papers but I'm sure you'll find plenty that conclude that many people have adverse reactions to sugar alcohols.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_alcohol#Side_effects

New comment by FriedrichN in "Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds"

FriedrichN — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 12:57:21 +0000

Sugar alcohols will never be as popular as more obvious choices like aspartame and sucralose. Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols. Personally, all of them, used in any meaningful quantity, turn me into a bloated farty mess that ends with diarrhoea. Absolutely terrible stuff.

New comment by FriedrichN in "React 19 Breaks Async Composability"

FriedrichN — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 12:17:34 +0000

Well call me a heathen, but I've never even considered React. Instead I always generate HTML server side and spruce it up using a little JavaScript if necessary (I even use jQuery sometimes). It's reliable, works fast, easy to debug, requires little maintenance, doesn't require a build chain of >100K files of several hundreds of megabytes.

Of course I'm open to the possibility that I'm Doing It Wrong™.

New comment by FriedrichN in "React 19 Breaks Async Composability"

FriedrichN — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 07:40:24 +0000

Nothing is the way forward. It's programming, we make stuff that does stuff. Preferably with stuff that makes making stuff that does stuff easier and with stuff that will be supported for a long time.

Maybe I'm too cynical, but whenever something is presented as some messianistic "way forward" I just think "ah yes, another way forward" but feel we're mostly moving laterally.

New comment by FriedrichN in "React 19 Breaks Async Composability"

FriedrichN — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 07:01:00 +0000

Just the fact that Yarn seems to be the dominant package manager now when it seems like last week it was npm. What will it be next week?

I truly wonder, do people use this stuff for software that is expected to be maintained for 5-10 years? I feel that with the speed at which everything changes, gets deprecated, discontinued, succeeded, etc. you'll spend a good chunk of your time staying up to date with the current js ecosystem. That doesn't seem very economic to me.

New comment by FriedrichN in "DuckDuckGo was down"

FriedrichN — Thu, 23 May 2024 06:50:42 +0000

It seems that https://www.startpage.com also uses Bing for its images.