Hacker News: Singletoned

New comment by Singletoned in "The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)"

Singletoned — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 20:49:07 +0000

You are assuming that there's something bad about everything you believe being false. There's a fair amount of evidence that it's a good thing. EG religious people being happier and living longer

New comment by Singletoned in "How we hacked McKinsey's AI platform"

Singletoned — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:17:51 +0000

The idea of "sentience" here could be replaced with "a soul" or "magic thinking powers" or almost anything else. It's an undefinable concept.

New comment by Singletoned in "Your app subscription is now my weekend project"

Singletoned — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:47:24 +0000

For the same reason that there are already lots of markdown editors out there. Why didn't the they all use the first one that came out?

New comment by Singletoned in "Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode"

Singletoned — Fri, 16 May 2025 20:00:22 +0000

I think this is different in different countries. I use them a lot in the UK and the customer support has been excellent.

New comment by Singletoned in "Void: Open-source Cursor alternative"

Singletoned — Fri, 09 May 2025 17:52:52 +0000

I think it's really interesting that Void (and Zed) are both much more tastefully designed than Cursor, Windsurf or VSCode (though I wouldn't have expected VSCode to be well designed)

Exploring Generative AI

Singletoned — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 07:57:40 +0000

Article URL: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43554538

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by Singletoned in "AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding"

Singletoned — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 14:17:56 +0000

"The Rule of Three" I have been expressing as "it takes 3 points to make a straight line".

Any two points will look as if they are on a straight line, but you need a third point to confirm the pattern as being a straight line

New comment by Singletoned in "Why you should fail our interview"

Singletoned — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 13:13:16 +0000

There's a double space on this page: https://www.otherbranch.com/for-engineers in "arbitrary black box" and it's really annoying me, but I can't see anyway to tell anyone about it

New comment by Singletoned in "Disney seeks dismissal of wrongful death lawsuit citing waiver in Disney+ terms"

Singletoned — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 07:57:01 +0000

Ratners is the famous example that springs to mind here in the UK.

New comment by Singletoned in "Amber: A code search and replace tool"

Singletoned — Thu, 23 May 2024 18:41:02 +0000

Can it do multiline search and replace?

New comment by Singletoned in "My next Mac might be the last"

Singletoned — Tue, 25 Oct 2022 10:36:32 +0000

> Hello. I am rational developer. I am very clever and very rational. Devoid of emotion. Oh what is this? [Something has changed that I don't like]. What is this bubbling feeling in me? An emotional response? No way. I am rational. Therefore these changes must be objectively stupid and dumb and wrong. Let me explain why.

I certainly do this a lot.

I'm going to put that paragraph on a postcard and put it up in my office to try to remind me about it.

(It would also be helpful to come up with a name for this phenomenon).

New comment by Singletoned in "Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead"

Singletoned — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:54:21 +0000

Creating "a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run" is pointless if it doesn't get you to the point where you can run the marathon on the day that it happens.

How long you have until the marathon would determine what kind of training schedule (system) you create.

New comment by Singletoned in "Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead"

Singletoned — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 08:25:50 +0000

Even his first metaphor falls down:

> You can’t simply start training today and run a half marathon tomorrow, for example. You can, however, create a system in which you consistently increase the number of miles you run.

The marathon will be on a specific day, ie a deadline. If you haven't finished your training before the day of the marathon, you fail.

New comment by Singletoned in "‘Stunning’ Anglo-Saxon burial site found along HS2 route"

Singletoned — Thu, 16 Jun 2022 14:31:53 +0000

> "climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hs2-will-never-be-carbon-...

It doesn't look as if HS2 will help towards climate change, even in the long run...

Dyson announce air purifying headphones

Singletoned — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 15:09:02 +0000

Article URL: https://www.dyson.co.uk/wearables/dyson-zone-air-purifying-headphones/announcement

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30856225

Points: 2

# Comments: 1

New comment by Singletoned in "Write plain text files"

Singletoned — Wed, 02 Mar 2022 08:38:19 +0000

I hate to be pedantic[1], but:

> HTML, Markdown, JSON, LaTeX, and many other standard formats, are just plain text.

On this definition, Word and Excel are just (zipped) plain text files.

> Every device, including ones long gone, and ones not invented yet, can read and edit plain text.

This definitely isn't true, and it kind of misses the point that there's no such thing as "plain text". It's still encoded in ascii, or utf-8, and still potentially has problems being read on other machines.

It's reasonable to say that ascii has become so ubiquitous as to be universal, but it definitely wasn't always so, and won't definitely always be.

[1] Okay, I love to be pedantic

We Quit Slack

Singletoned — Thu, 24 Feb 2022 09:53:44 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/levelshealth/how-to-intentionally-structure-scale-company-communications-2c4774e1f8c8

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30452887

Points: 6

# Comments: 0

New comment by Singletoned in "Why in the world would you own bonds?"

Singletoned — Wed, 17 Mar 2021 05:15:19 +0000

Or in other words, they are sensible

New comment by Singletoned in "Why doesn't capitalism produce good kettles?"

Singletoned — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 09:50:18 +0000

No filter jug removes all the limescale in hard water areas. You still need a filter on the kettle

New comment by Singletoned in "Why doesn't capitalism produce good kettles?"

Singletoned — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 09:48:34 +0000

But that wouldn’t answer the question. Why is it not profitable to make good kettles?

Also, you’re wrong. The people designing these kettles aren’t doing so to make more money for their company. If anything you could say that capitalism optimises for job security. That’s why you don’t see new features on kettles, and why no one will make a left handed microwave. No one wants to take a risk