Hacker News: JSoet

On Working with Wizards

JSoet — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 04:23:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/on-working-with-wizards

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218625

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by JSoet in "Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic"

JSoet — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 06:06:55 +0000

I've been playing now the last few days (really enjoying it, so thanks a lot!) and have a couple small suggestions that I don't see mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

- it would be nice to have a list of the incorrect guesses that you've made. Sometimes I come back after a while and can't remember if I already guessed something or if I just thought about guessing it but wasn't sure... Of course this also dovetails a bit with what some of the other people mentioned about guesses being counted as incorrect even when they're guessed early because then if you have a list of all earlier incorrect guesses then an earlier incorrect guess might now be correct, so I would also change that, that a guess which is only incorrect because it's not available yet isn't counted as incorrect, and instead it says something like "not yet!". Another related problem for me though was I got stuck once and it turned out I had just made a typo in my earlier guess and hadn't noticed, which is why it would be nice to see your earlier guesses. Oh, and also related, I think it counts multiple incorrect guesses of the same word (again not 100% sure since I couldn't see my earlier guesses)

- it would be nice to improve the stats, maybe give you some kind of distribution to see how you're doing, maybe on the calendar you could colour code to show what days you've done well and what days you did worse or something

New comment by JSoet in "Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Pyramid Temples at Copan"

JSoet — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 20:40:20 +0000

Fantastic work! Just a small suggestion, I didn't realize that you could free explore the entire area until coming back and reading the comments on this site, I realized you could look around and there was one point in the guides tour where it mentioned you can explore but at least for me I didn't realize you could explore everywhere (especially the tunnels afterwards)

Maybe it's just that I'm on mobile, and when I went back I then saw the "free explore" button on the top... But maybe would be nice to add a couple prompts like you have at that one point which say something like "feel free to explore around the tunnels and then click next when you're ready to continue" or something (also for the ball court)...

New comment by JSoet in "Ask HN: Is it possible to make FAANG salaries without working there?"

JSoet — Wed, 24 Jul 2024 05:33:13 +0000

This article may also be of interest to you if you hadn't seen it: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal-nature-o...

A trip to the dried up kakhovka reservoir

JSoet — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 05:31:15 +0000

Article URL: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/russia-s-scorched-earth-policy-in-ukraine-a-trip-to-the-dried-up-kakhovka-reservoir-a-992aef1d-f4a7-4fbf-84a2-74c5d93b6566

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37518852

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by JSoet in "It's time to halt starting any new projects in C/C++"

JSoet — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 18:22:21 +0000

I am also wondering about your confidence given the fact that there are obviously memory bugs during development... what gives you so much confidence that no memory bugs exist in released versions? Do you have an extensive test suite with valgrind /etc to ensure that there aren't any memory bugs before a release but some can slip in in intermediate versions? Or what do you do that gives you the confidence to say that there aren't any memory bugs in the released versions? Or what is involved in all the extra effort it takes to make a memory bug free c program?

New comment by JSoet in "Marc Andreessen says he’s for new housing, but records tell a different story"

JSoet — Fri, 05 Aug 2022 15:56:31 +0000

Can you explain what changed about your opinion after moving into a suburb?

New comment by JSoet in "Kitsault, Canada’s $50M 1980s ghost town"

JSoet — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 05:37:26 +0000

yeah, I recently watched a youtube video about that town, looks pretty interesting. And the guy seems to have a few more videos from other abandoned towns in BC too... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7PVZq-lqCs

New comment by JSoet in "Ask HN: First-time dad-to-be. What do you wish you'd known back then?"

JSoet — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 05:42:21 +0000

Also on the sleep topic, I would recommend discussing with your SO about how you plan to deal with lack of sleep and increased stress _before_ the baby arrives. When the baby arrives you will quickly be thrown into a high stress situation where both people are operating on very short fuses and things can easily be misinterpreted. Take some time to discuss beforehand what is expected of each other, and how you can plan to deal with lack of sleep and increased stress, so that you hopefully have a plan of attack before you're in the thick of things

New comment by JSoet in "Ask HN: Recommend employers with positive social impact"

JSoet — Tue, 31 May 2022 03:39:05 +0000

Why not mention the company you're working for? You're missing an opportunity here for others to see your post and find out about the positions you have open? Although I'm replying late, maybe there are others like me who open tabs and read them a few days later

New comment by JSoet in "Show HN: A game that tests how well you know your local area"

JSoet — Mon, 21 Mar 2022 04:30:20 +0000

Fun game, great job, but sometimes the scoring seems kind of random, I would sometimes get ~80 points when placing it pretty much directly on the street, and then sometimes get 90 points when guessing and being a few blocks away...

Along with what you mentioned about having different difficulties in terms of radius, would also be fun to be able to choose the difficulty in terms of what types of streets (main streets vs side streets - e.g. only one type, or a mix, or turning down the selection of numbered streets somehow)

New comment by JSoet in "Meld is a visual diff and merge tool targeted at developers"

JSoet — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 21:01:52 +0000

I agree 100% on the utility of a 4 panel diff, but I'd be careful using kdiff3... I also used it for quite a while but found that it would "auto resolve" some merge conflicts which git would flag, and I found it would sometimes auto resolve them wrong (maybe about 10-20% of the time?), and I couldn't figure out how to turn this feature off... I'm using tortoise git merge now (which also does do some auto resolve but only simpler resolutions)

New comment by JSoet in "More Americans are saying they’re ‘vaxxed and done’"

JSoet — Tue, 11 Jan 2022 05:17:56 +0000

I mean, I'm not an expert by any means, but the link you shared also says "Myocarditis is seen much more commonly in people who become infected with COVID-19 than in people who are vaccinated. A preliminary study from the United States(link is external) found the rate of myocarditis in young men after COVID-19 is approximately 45 cases per 100,000 infections"... So, a higher incidence among people with infections than vaccinations, so if you're suggesting to just let everyone get infected... Anyway, I think it's really difficult to weigh the risk when we're dealing with such small numbers (0.045% vs 0.01%), and we don't know all the data.

New comment by JSoet in "Why I hate the weekends (2017)"

JSoet — Sat, 16 Feb 2019 23:45:48 +0000

Definitely not impossible, one of my co-workers switched to only working 3 days a week last year. He lives a fairly frugal lifestyle and enjoys more time for other things, so it works well for him... But it wasn't easy for him to get either, they originally told him he'd only be able to continue like that on a temporary 4 month contract... But we work in a larger bureaucractic company, and after a couple months it was clear that we wouldn't get approval to automatically replace him any time soon if he left completely, so it made more sense to keep him permanently even at 3 days a week, rather than have no one new. It helped that he was one of the better performers on the team, so even at 3 days a week he's very productive, he's just taken less of a role on many of the side tasks that he used to do.

New comment by JSoet in "Fridge 0.2"

JSoet — Fri, 28 Dec 2018 17:13:36 +0000

Yeah, here's an example of one in Alberta, Canada: https://www.dlsc.ca/borehole.htm

Some of the things I found crazy when reading about it is that they can get the ground temperature up to 80 degrees celsius by the end of the summer, and then the ground stores enough heat (without just dissipating off to the environment) that it can provide a majority of the heating for 52 houses over the course of a cold Alberta winter.

New comment by JSoet in "The growing body of evidence that digital distraction is damaging our minds"

JSoet — Sat, 13 Jan 2018 14:50:29 +0000

I'm pretty sure it's referred to later in the article:

>All that distraction adds up to a loss of raw brain power. Workers at a British company who multitasked on electronic media – a decent proxy for frequent smartphone use – were found in a 2014 study to lose about the same quantity of IQ as people who had smoked cannabis or lost a night's sleep.

Still not a reference, but you could probably find the study given that information if you wanted to. Or I'm sure the author would respond if you tweeted and asked him or something. If you really want to find out I'm sure it's possible.

New comment by JSoet in "The AI Misinformation Epidemic"

JSoet — Wed, 29 Mar 2017 04:40:24 +0000

Similar, but more similar to lots of the people mentioned in the original post is the german phrase "Gefährliches Halbwissen" or 'dangerous half-knowledge': when you know just enough to seem knowledgable about a subject, but actually have a very basic surface knowledge.

(ps. I'm not a native german speaker, so sorry if I misrepresented the phrase, but this is how it was explained to me)

New comment by JSoet in "I Built a Bot to Apply to Thousands of Jobs at Once"

JSoet — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 04:38:36 +0000

I was disappointed with the direction this article took - when he said he built a robot to send personalized applications I was hoping it would be reading the requirements and then sending personalized resumes and cover letters specifically built to get past the robot stage, but then waste the recruiter's time to show how stupid the automated system is and how easy it is to game... Something like that anti-spam bot that was posted here a few months ago...

Building affordable housing

JSoet — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 21:30:32 +0000

Article URL: http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2016/08/building-affordable-housing-where-has.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13486357

Points: 56

# Comments: 61

New comment by JSoet in "Car allergic to vanilla ice cream (2000)"

JSoet — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 12:42:07 +0000

I had a similar story from just a few weeks ago. One of my colleagues was having trouble logging into his test instance, but he was the only one having this problem. Tried on my machine and it worked fine, made sure we were both using the exact same version of the code, etc. and he continued to have the problem while I didn't... Eventually we realized that he only had this problem on firefox and not chrome, and then we finally realized that the problem was in Firefox he had his credentials saved and was hitting the 'Login' button, whereas on Chrome he was typing them in and hitting enter, which is apparently what I and the rest of my colleagues also do, but luckily he found that bug with a slight difference in the logic between the two paths before it went to production.