Hacker News: RegBarclay

New comment by RegBarclay in "Claude Skills"

RegBarclay — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:36:50 +0000

I've had this experience too. I like doing the work. Claude is good and I do find it useful for brainstorming and some other things, but... I still like doing the work.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Florida's DeSantis signs law restricting social media for people under 16"

RegBarclay — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 20:44:16 +0000

I'll add my own anecdata here. My older kids are in their late 20s and one has bought a home and the other is buying a new build home this year.

My youngest is 18, the greatest consumer of social media of my 4 children, and she's convinced she won't be able to buy a home like her under-30 siblings are doing right now.

Sounds very much like a YMMV situation, but it feels like social media has influenced my youngest to believe otherwise.

New comment by RegBarclay in "An Air Force officer who spent $11M searching Earhart's plane may have found it"

RegBarclay — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 19:59:54 +0000

Then Arthur Clarke wrote "The Ghost from the Grand Banks" in 1990 (after Ballard discovered it was in pieces) with a slightly more plausible approach to raising the bow. The wreck has deteriorated now to the point where raising it would probably destroy more than what would be recovered.

New comment by RegBarclay in "We're moving to a four-day work week at Beacon"

RegBarclay — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:53:07 +0000

I had a 4 tens option at a previous job. We could have Monday or Friday off. I especially liked it late in the day when the 5 eights people left and it was quiet and there weren't any meetings.

New comment by RegBarclay in "My Favorite Liar (2008)"

RegBarclay — Fri, 20 May 2022 14:55:15 +0000

One of my kids' high school teachers does something similar - not limited to a single falsehood per class period and bonus points given on the spot for students piping up and correcting. High schoolers aren't always very forthcoming with details about their classroom experiences, so this one teacher does stand out simply because they get talked about positively at home, so I'd say mission accomplished on student engagement.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Cooking for Engineers"

RegBarclay — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 12:45:36 +0000

https://based.cooking/chocolate-chip-cookies.html

Servings: 4

That's about my level of self-control with chocolate chip cookies.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole"

RegBarclay — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 12:47:12 +0000

>Investing once into something that feels good to use every day is worth it totally.

My mechanical keyboard makes me happy. Does it matter if that's some kind of placebo effect or confirmation bias? Nope.

New comment by RegBarclay in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

RegBarclay — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 12:35:16 +0000

Agreed. On daylight time or off - just stop changing the clocks twice a year please.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Wordle is pretty damn smart in many subtle ways"

RegBarclay — Wed, 23 Feb 2022 14:44:10 +0000

I try to use words that hit the Wheel of Fortune RSTLNE letters - BEAST, RUSTY, ROAST. It's served me pretty well. I haven't had to go beyond the 5th guess yet and commonly solve it in 4.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Father who used a signal jammer to keep his kids offline at night faces jail"

RegBarclay — Tue, 22 Feb 2022 16:12:10 +0000

I bought a Gryphon router to deal with this. It conditionally blocks VPN access by device/user. It's generally been really good, but I've had to back down some of the settings occasionally because school assignments/sites were blocked.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Starship is threatening NASA’s moon contractors"

RegBarclay — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 13:28:06 +0000

That was my first thought. I haven't seen The Expanse, but in any case, Heinlein preceded The Expanse by decades.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?"

RegBarclay — Tue, 15 Feb 2022 13:21:16 +0000

I've had that happen. I have my own domain, but some of my family just have it set to forward to gmail and they've had mail service disabled intermittently because of spam coming from the domain account.

New comment by RegBarclay in "I relearned typing to save my wrists"

RegBarclay — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 13:49:50 +0000

I've had to change things up a few times over the years mostly related to the mouse. Dude, are you left-handed? No, switched hands with the mouse because my right elbow hurts. Listen to your body. Adapt.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Ask HN: I suck at math, where to start?"

RegBarclay — Wed, 12 Jan 2022 16:18:36 +0000

I hadn't thought about it that way. I was good at algebra, but can't get through calculus to save my life. I've mostly found that coding is more about logic than math. When math has come up in my work, it's generally a formula or calculation that's already defined and I just have to code it into a system, which has never been a problem for me.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer"

RegBarclay — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:50:45 +0000

FizzBuzz != leetcode. You are correct - easy problems are a good filter. After starting with one company I started sitting in on phone screens and candidate interviews and I was shocked at what a lot of applicants didn't know. Actually helped me with my imposter syndrome. I walked away from several interviews feeling like maybe I did know a thing or two!

New comment by RegBarclay in "Leetcode has taught me that I'm a bad engineer"

RegBarclay — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 13:47:09 +0000

I'm also self taught with over 20 YOE and pretty lost with leetcode problems. But I get the job done and have a really good eye for user and business domain concerns. My last two jobs haven't required any kind of test. I actually had to do a couple of short narrative essays for one to prove I could write - which was a hoot because I majored in English.

The only job I've ever had to do any kind of test for wasn't leetcode - just a practical demonstation that I could write a basic CRUD app. Was actually a pretty good test to weed out people who were just completely useless.

I'm also finding that experience matters. It's just tough to get that across up front.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?"

RegBarclay — Wed, 22 Dec 2021 13:23:40 +0000

After the usual government ID requests were satisfied and the automated e-mails started saying "we're done here," I just googled it and found a few anecdotal cases where someone had gone the Oculus route. It worked for my daughter. She had a really tough time returning the Oculus. She's a slightly more than casual gamer, but she's also a poor grad student.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?"

RegBarclay — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 14:13:20 +0000

I'm no genius. Just good search engine skills. Geek dad jumped in an started looking for answers and found reports where others had done this.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Ask HN: How can a non-techie mom regain access to her FB account?"

RegBarclay — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 13:43:45 +0000

This happened to my daughter. I got a notification that she'd changed her profile picture and it was changed to text that looked Arabic to me. Between the time I said something to my wife about it and my wife pulling up Facebook on her phone, the account was locked and disappeared.

HERE'S THE SOLUTION:

Purchase an Oculus device. Do not open it. It's a Facebook product and requires a Facebook account to use it. Oculus tech support has humans and inside channels to resurrect Facebook accounts that have been left in limbo by the dumb Facebook automated support.

Once you get your account back, return the Oculus device for a refund.

You have to act fairly quickly because the suspended Facebook accounts are permanently deleted and become completely unrecoverable after around 30 days.

New comment by RegBarclay in "Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars"

RegBarclay — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:37:41 +0000

> But also in retrospect, stretching the budget to afford the computer was well worth it since it gave you and your brother valuable skills worth more than money.

I bought my Atari 800 and a disk drive using newspaper route money. Probably the best investment I ever made.