Hacker News: SketchySeaBeast

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

SketchySeaBeast — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 16:09:45 +0000

Good luck to future models figuring out which weird section of code are bugs and which are features.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:32:41 +0000

Isn't it also not the direct customer purchasing the insurance, but their employer, who also has to pay into the pot and so is incentivized to find cheap options? (I'm not 100% on this - I'm not American.)

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:22:10 +0000

> Do you think that there is some health care system in which all requests for care can be approved without limit?

I'm not going to wade into the murder tag, but is this the actual incentive? The health care execs don't have enough money to save everyone so they pick who they can help strategically, making sure to help as many as possible, or is the system incentivized to instead maximize finding who can be denied so that the company makes the most money?

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 18:48:38 +0000

There's nothing stopping the use of decimal points for Celsius. Though there's also nothing stopping decimal points in Fahrenheit, the rare instance where an imperial sub-unit doesn't make things go fucky.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:59:14 +0000

I understand that entirely. I'm saying that the way that GP is presenting their information it sounds like a "one neat trick", which of course it isn't because nothing ever is, which you and I are in agreement upon.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:41:43 +0000

Wireless would be ideal, assuming there's still some way to connect to my PC.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 15:35:55 +0000

That would imply that red meat eaters would be less likely to get cancer which doesn't seem to be the case. I'm not saying that zinc isn't a factor, but I think that saying a blanket "Zinc is needed to prevent cancer" is irresponsible. We should be so lucky that we can narrow it down to a single dietary element or be able to blame it simply upon nutrition.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly"

SketchySeaBeast — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:52:10 +0000

Is it hard to get waterpoof, considering that every modern smart phone is both usb-c and waterproof? Important to note that this watch doesn't claim to be waterproof.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Una Watch: Garmin watch competitor but repairable, open ecosystem and USB-C"

SketchySeaBeast — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:10:26 +0000

I do like the idea of USB-C, the garmin's power plug is nothing but annoying. It's really just a matter of battery life and what sort of software integration it has. Although, it's hard to beat the Garmin ecosystem.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Claude Opus 5"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 18:06:55 +0000

I don't know about Claude, but I know that $20 of Copilot doesn't get you very far these days even when you know enough to tell it what to do.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Claude Opus 5"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:30:06 +0000

There should be a sign somewhere:

934 days since people first started threatening that devs would be replaced by AI in 365 days. 0 day(s) since Anthropic posted a developer job posting.

Only one of those numbers would need to be dynamic.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "Claude Opus 5"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 17:10:36 +0000

Let's be honest - they're also still hiring software devs. AI still requires skilled humans in the loop and that's not going away.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "My dad helped build North America's oat supply chain: Can it be remade?"

SketchySeaBeast — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:07:01 +0000

Yup. I don't normally eat vegan but, if I'm drinking a latte, it's gonna be oatmilk.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:57:23 +0000

Great programmers write code that makes you wonder why everyone doesn't do it like that.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 18:30:03 +0000

I feel like you keep missing the point and are more interested in gotcha's.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:15:32 +0000

Triffid music.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:11:04 +0000

I don't know enough to speak about that particular domain, but if the junior is writing something the senior can't understand, that's always going to be a problem. That code becomes the team's responsibility, and that code needs to be able to be maintained by the entire team, not only by the junior with something to prove.

Who is getting called at 2 AM when something breaks? Not the junior.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "The primary purpose of code review is to find code that will be hard to maintain"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 13:40:20 +0000

If the code is so smart that it's not easily understandable, it's not easily fixable. My transition from junior to senior was accompanied by the realization that simpler is nearly always better.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "It's Only When You Look Back"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 12:01:52 +0000

I'm a simple man. Promises of utopia are well and good, but it would appear the way we get there is by corporations hoovering up all the new means of production, at which point they somehow decide to share it all with the rest of us for some inexplicable reason - turning their trillions in investment into charity.

I don't believe any of it, I just want hardware to be cheap and accessible again because that means all the compute won't solely be in the hands of the few.

New comment by SketchySeaBeast in "It's Only When You Look Back"

SketchySeaBeast — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:35:54 +0000

In your future, when does it stop costing $500 to buy 32GB of DDR5? Or are the companies still leasing us the compute?