Hacker News: WesleyJohnson

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 15:22:29 +0000

I'm really enjoying dusting off old projects that I lost interest in and handing them over to Claude to modernize their code and resurrect the ideas. But I'm also starting to miss the grind and feeling of accomplishment when you build stuff yourself, or finally sort out that nagging bug. I think there is a balance to be found, for me anyway, and I'm not sure I've found it yet.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "DoorDash Spent $1.4M Trying to Stop Mamdani from Becoming Mayor. Now We Know Why"

WesleyJohnson — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 21:40:26 +0000

I've always struggled with this thinking. Yes, you have finite hours in a day and if you spend an hour going to get food then you can't necessarily also be doing freelance work. But if you planned on working 8 hours to earn X dollars, you can still work 8 hours after spending an hour going to get food and still make X dollars. Sure, that hour has to come from somewhere so maybe it's lost leisure time or an hour of sleep. I guess it makes sense if you're trying to work every waking moment; and I can appreciate that some choose to and some have to.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:12:04 +0000

I've been WFH since Covid and, when it first happened, my office was in a finished attic that was not well conditioned. I like it warmer so I didn't mind, and the lack of comfort for others meant I enjoyed more solo time.

These days, I may as well not even have a door. I put auto-shutting hinges on it, but that failed as reminder/deterrent long ago.

We've got a 10x20 out back that was supposed to be my workshop, but it's filled with all the things most Americans put in their garages - because we don't have one. I'm seriously considering a deep purge and converting at least 1/2 of to an office; the distractions and context switching are disastrous.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:37:20 +0000

My take: this was done to pull consumers back into the cycle of upgrading to every new release. iPhones already do so much more than most people need. With the RAM price hikes, even though there was an influx of sales (according to a store rep) initially, I think Apple was expected a significant decline; people just choosing to stick with their current device to avoid paying the premium.

Leasing not only allows Apple to keep "selling" people new devices, it will also mostly like accelerate the second-hand sales and resource recycling arms of the business. Consumers will be more willing to upgrade sooner and stay in perpetual payments vs having to buy out the device at lease end - and Apple gets back newer devices where the recycled tech is arguably more valuable.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

WesleyJohnson — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 15:00:04 +0000

59,400 - It said I'm a person of few words. It also recommended I read a dictionary. I feel some kind of way about that. :D

Fun!

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"

WesleyJohnson — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:25:44 +0000

I knew I shared a name with a former NBA Forward, but I did not know about some of the other well-known figures. Sadly (or thankfully?) I'm not listed anywhere, even in the hallucinations.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Is my blue your blue?"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:50:25 +0000

You certainly stumbled onto it much sooner in life than I did. It wasn't until I had children in my late 30s that this dawned on me - and has perplexed me ever since. Funny indeed.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Is my blue your blue?"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:46:01 +0000

Oh wow, I hadn't thought of taste, but you're exactly right. Fascinating subject.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Is my blue your blue?"

WesleyJohnson — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 03:44:48 +0000

Amazing. I'm so glad to have a name for this.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Is my blue your blue? (2024)"

WesleyJohnson — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 23:09:00 +0000

I'm sure this isn't an original thought, but I wonder how others see colors. Irrespective of color blindness, is what I know as red appear as blue to someone else? How would you even know or describe it? "Red, like a strawberry, tomato, or apple." And they say, "Yes, exactly." But what they're truly seeing is what YOU know as blue. They see something different than you do, but to them that color has always been called red - even though, if you were to see it as them, it's blue.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition"

WesleyJohnson — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 17:31:47 +0000

This discussion has been particularly insightful. I'm 47 and have been drinking 2 to 3 Mtn Dew Kickstarts a day for probably 10 years. I don't feel high, or jittery, or like I'm bouncing off walls. I have no trouble falling asleep, even drinking caffeine right up until bed time. But, I also have trouble focusing, am working with a psychologist on a possible ADHD (primarily inattentive) diagnosis, never dream, and am very forgetful.

Based on everything I'm reading below, and a "discussion" with Gemini, it's highly probable all of this is related. I know AI isn't a doctor, and confirmation bias and all of that, but even if it's all nonsense - backing off on caffeine or quitting entirely can only help.

So I'm going to star to day, by trying to not have any after 2pm. My regular bedtime is around midnight, so that's 10 hours. We'll see how it goes.

Thanks HN!

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Show HN: Plain – The full-stack Python framework designed for humans and agents"

WesleyJohnson — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:24:19 +0000

"X is just old" is a tired criticism of most things in my experience. Bloated would've sufficed, even if it's subjective.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Mistral AI Releases Forge"

WesleyJohnson — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 18:32:51 +0000

The issue I had with RAG when I tried building our own internal chat/knowledge bot was pulling in the relevant knowledge before sending to the LLM. Domain questions like "What is Cat Block B?" are common and, for a human, provide all the context that is needed for someone to answer within our org. But vectorizing that and then finding matching knowledge produced so many false positives. I tried to circumvent that by adding custom weighting based on keywords, source (Confluence, Teams, Email), but it just seemed unreliable. This was probably a year ago and, admittedly, I was diving in head first without truly understanding RAG end to end.

Being able to just train a model on all of our domain knowledge would, I imagine, produce much better results.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:16:00 +0000

And then Trump can sign the checks again....

Sarcasm aside, I agree the refunds should go back to consumers, not the importers. I don't have a source, but I have to imagine the lion's share of companies that were hit with tariffs increased their prices, and the consumer paid the bill.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:13:30 +0000

What businesses were legitimately going to go bankrupt by the increased tariffs? I'm not defending the tariffs, mind you, but I don't buy that every company had to increase prices to offset the additional taxes. Many could've taken the hit and been fine, except profits would be down and shareholders would be angry.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Judge orders government to begin refunding more than $130B in tariffs"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:09:19 +0000

I had the same thought. Even if it wasn't the original intent, it sure is a preferable outcome.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply-chain risk"

WesleyJohnson — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:46:38 +0000

What player is going to step in and do what Anthropic wouldn't? Or, worse, will the DoW try to author its own AI to go where private AI won't?

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "All Look Same?"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:14:35 +0000

Very uncultured and untraveled caucasian here. I got 10/18, surprising myself. Probably plenty of luck, but at least 5 or 6 I was quite confident about. Not sure how.

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Sizing chaos"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 03:04:24 +0000

The article has mounds of data that to speak to exactly how the clothing sizes ARE the issue. Inconsistencies within brands, across brands, shifting vanity sizes, and shapes designed to fit only 12% of women. And yet, the top comment is about obesity...

Yes, obesity is clearly an epidemic. But discounting the entire article's premise to point that out?

New comment by WesleyJohnson in "Sizing chaos"

WesleyJohnson — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 02:59:13 +0000

But they're not lowest-common-denominator products. If they were, clothing designers would be tailoring clothes for a rectangular figure. The article clearly shows that only 12% of women have that "hourglass" figure and yet, by design, almost all the clothing manufacturers are tailoring their clothes for this shape, regardless of size.