Hacker News: adamdonahue

New comment by adamdonahue in "What's the difference between a "disc" and a "disk"? (2023)"

adamdonahue — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:26:37 +0000

So a floppy disk has a disc inside?

New comment by adamdonahue in "An AI agent published a hit piece on me"

adamdonahue — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:23:32 +0000

This post is pure AI alarmism.

New comment by adamdonahue in "'Dogequest' Site Claims to Dox Tesla Owners Across the U.S."

adamdonahue — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 17:39:03 +0000

This.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Who profits most from America's baffling health-care system?"

adamdonahue — Sun, 22 Oct 2023 17:05:37 +0000

Hammer meet nail.

The same issue plagues the American higher education system, which is wildly overpriced.

New comment by adamdonahue in "YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video"

adamdonahue — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 17:14:31 +0000

Right-o.

New comment by adamdonahue in "YouTube suspended my account for posting DeFi hackathon video"

adamdonahue — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 13:13:38 +0000

There's an opportunity here. Put the video on both YouTube and a blockchain, make it easy to find on the latter via the YouTube URI, then when one discovers a non-working link you YouTube you can pivot to the blockchain-based backup. Once enough people know about this hack it then, with a browser plug-in, censorship be gone!

This is obviously off-the-cuff, undetailed thinking here, but an approach like this might make sense in the future.

New comment by adamdonahue in "The most remarkable legacy system I have seen"

adamdonahue — Mon, 13 Jul 2020 15:41:57 +0000

It was indeed "diddle," not "twiddle." At BAML, it's a "tweak." Beacon Platform is another implementation by the same team (but with support for the public cloud, and many more advanced features, I believe, including tighter web integration). I think it uses the terminology "bind."

[Disclosure: I was part of the Quartz Core team in 2011/2012.]

New comment by adamdonahue in "The unreasonable effectiveness of declarative programming"

adamdonahue — Fri, 22 May 2020 19:58:37 +0000

Spot on.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Technical Debt"

adamdonahue — Mon, 27 May 2019 21:23:48 +0000

But it's only debt if business decisions mean you must change it. I've seen far too many programmers crawl through legacy code that need not be replaced (it does its job) merely because it's using an outdated technology. But if there's no business justification for that, I'd argue it's not debt at all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with some ugly COBOL code doing its job with no current need for modification. That's not debt. Debt is something you have to pay back.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Technical Debt"

adamdonahue — Mon, 27 May 2019 21:21:08 +0000

It's only debt if you have to pay it back.

New comment by adamdonahue in "TLDR Stock Options"

adamdonahue — Tue, 06 Jun 2017 16:27:38 +0000

I'm having trouble grokking the results here. If I put in 50 basis points for a seed-funded company it calculates as no return until a $40M exit. I'd like to see the justification for this.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Ask HN: What is so great about Bloomberg Terminal?"

adamdonahue — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:51:06 +0000

Hacker News is the ultimate waste of time. Correction: Hacker News _comments are the ultimate waste of time.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters"

adamdonahue — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:27:20 +0000

It's definitely not "zero cost." It may be a low cost, but as with any choice, there is always an opportunity cost.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Time to Take a Stand"

adamdonahue — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 21:47:40 +0000

Yeah, Altman is a hypocrite. Zero respect for this guy. "Let's ban certain types of speech unless it's from me, of course."

New comment by adamdonahue in "Ask HN: Why does Google put the query in the URL hash instead of query string?"

adamdonahue — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 14:39:37 +0000

Exactly. You are someone who gets it.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Software Developers Should Have Sysadmin Experience"

adamdonahue — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 14:35:09 +0000

The general trend in software development appears to be toward generalization over specialization. I'm not sure this is a good thing.

New comment by adamdonahue in "Recognizing magic as a rare and valuable art form and national treasure"

adamdonahue — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 15:26:19 +0000

Reads like an advertisement for Copperfield. But in terms of advancing the art form and of classic prestidigitation, I can think of no better current practitioner than Ricky Jay.

Recognizing magic as a rare and valuable art form and national treasure

adamdonahue — Mon, 25 Apr 2016 12:55:08 +0000

Article URL: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-resolution/642

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563869

Points: 22

# Comments: 43

New comment by adamdonahue in "This is what happens when FlightFox copies your entire site without attribution"

adamdonahue — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 10:08:49 +0000

To say FlightFox 'copied [the] entire site' is a bit of a reach, to put it mildly. The idea, perhaps, but I wouldn't hold my breath hoping for attribution for that.