Hacker News: a_shoeboy

New comment by a_shoeboy in "I Spent My Sabbatical Building a Power Meter for Sledgehammers"

a_shoeboy — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:30:19 +0000

Me too, but it's "Shock the Monkey" which doesn't make sense in this context.

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

a_shoeboy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:35:15 +0000

I have had similar conversations with my wife a few times, but I'm the one with working color vision.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal"

a_shoeboy — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 18:13:16 +0000

It is a simple mathematical fact that if you get married one year and have twins the next, your household will contain over a million people within 20 years.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Impact of the "when the fun stops, stop" gambling message on online gambling"

a_shoeboy — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:02:35 +0000

Not exactly a surprising result. How exactly is "gambling is fun" supposed to reduce gambling?

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Parental controls aren't for parents"

a_shoeboy — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 21:24:04 +0000

You obviously don't have kids. You can't trust a child's judgement because they don't have the experience to exercise good judgement. Your job as a parent is to look out for them while helping them develop.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Show HN: I Made Loom for Mobile"

a_shoeboy — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 23:39:46 +0000

Glad it's not just me.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Sugars, Gum, Stardust Found in NASA's Asteroid Bennu Samples"

a_shoeboy — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 18:06:32 +0000

With the battle-axe, sir, with the battle-axe!

New comment by a_shoeboy in "The impossible predicament of the death newts"

a_shoeboy — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:09:53 +0000

A high percentage of fatal poisonings in the US have been Southeast Asian immigrants because, in the button stage, the North American death cap looks nearly identical to the paddy straw mushroom they know from home.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "New study casts doubt on the likelihood of Milky Way collision with Andromeda"

a_shoeboy — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 17:55:30 +0000

It's 0.00019884 furlongs, if that helps.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "The last RadioShack in Maryland is closing"

a_shoeboy — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:44:15 +0000

I have plenty of unpleasant memories of being young. They don't involve RadioShack though.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "The last RadioShack in Maryland is closing"

a_shoeboy — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 18:27:56 +0000

They were always terrible, but I have fond pre-teen memories of saving up my allowance to buy components off the pegboard in the back and then failing to make anything that worked with them.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "How to Make a Longbow"

a_shoeboy — Fri, 11 Apr 2025 15:27:29 +0000

25 years ago, I had a Honduran roommate who barely spoke English. One day he came home with a thrift store VHS on how to make longbows and he watched that thing over and over like it would tell him the meaning of life. I hope he finally got ahold of some yew wood and made one.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Drag racers are ditching superchargers for scuba-style tanks and compressed air"

a_shoeboy — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:44:04 +0000

If you're going to cheat, way cheaper to put nitrous oxide in the tank and claim it's compressed air. 50% boost in oxygen content without having to engineer your engine to not burn when pure O2 hits it.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Electron band structure in germanium, my ass (2001)"

a_shoeboy — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 17:48:13 +0000

I used to write my undergrad history essays in rhymed couplets because I figured the grad assistant doing the grading would be grateful for a break in the monotony and it was faster and easier than writing an actual good essay. Probably wouldn't work in the LLM era, but it was very effective in the 90's.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "The Death of a Mnemonist"

a_shoeboy — Mon, 13 May 2024 19:02:05 +0000

This is how it usually goes--it's vanishingly rare to retain a photographic memory into adulthood, but it's not that rare in kids. I had it too, but then I started sprouting hair in places that never ever got cold and the rest is history (that I can barely remember).

New comment by a_shoeboy in "The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid"

a_shoeboy — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 16:27:18 +0000

$6K on mine, 17 years and counting. How many more of these anecdotes do we need before can call it data?

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes used in Swiss DDoS attacks"

a_shoeboy — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 21:29:15 +0000

I wish my lone internet-of-shit device worked well enough to participate in a botnet. My house came with an internet connected sprinkler system--if the power blips, the sprinkler system boots up before the WIFI router, can't connect and then refuses to work until rebooted. I realized this when my lawn started dying.

New comment by a_shoeboy in "Customer ratings have become meaningless. ‘people give 5 stars like it’s candy.’"

a_shoeboy — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 15:56:22 +0000

Worst case of this is online reviews at Home Depot. Every review is five stars even when the text is something like "it spontaneously combusted as soon as we brought it in the house and killed one of my children."

New comment by a_shoeboy in "A medieval comedy act has been discovered in first-ever find, researcher says"

a_shoeboy — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 20:28:03 +0000

Here's the Hunting of the Hare (starts on the page marked 113 and it's in Middle English, but there's a glossary after): https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236869902_'The_Hunt...