Hacker News: adsteel_

New comment by adsteel_ in "Caveman: Why use many token when few token do trick"

adsteel_ — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 20:46:05 +0000

A pidgin is just a simplified form of language that hasn't evolved into its own new language yet. There are many English pidgins.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Wired headphone sales are exploding"

adsteel_ — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:21:14 +0000

I bought the official ear pad replacements for my PXC450 back when those were available, for 1/4 of what the headset cost. They are so terrible that I stopped using the headphones entirely. I lost faith in Sennheiser after that, now I just use cheaper ear buds.

New comment by adsteel_ in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

adsteel_ — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 13:42:11 +0000

I talk politely to LLMs because I don't want any impoliteness to leak out to my interactions with humans.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down"

adsteel_ — Sun, 01 Feb 2026 23:33:20 +0000

My romantic views of wood smoke hit reality when I first camped in Canada's Banff-Jasper national parks, where you could buy unlimited firewood for the night for $5. Everyone bought it, it seemed. Trying to breathe downwind of a campground was a rude wakeup call. It should definitely be restricted in denser residential areas. I can't imagine some of the towns in Germany or Poland where residents depend on wood fires for heat.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Ruby website redesigned"

adsteel_ — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:07:31 +0000

It looks great, but it's missing the one thing I want most in the site - the ability to select the version of the language documentation in some way other than editing the URL directly. I use ruby-lang almost exclusively for the documentation.

I also wish the documentation search parameter were saved in the URL. This would allow people to create a custom Chrome search engine like @ruby and dramatically speed up doc searching.

New comment by adsteel_ in "The daily life of a medieval king"

adsteel_ — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 12:49:07 +0000

"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...."

- Winston S. Churchill, 11 November 1947

New comment by adsteel_ in "Congratulations on creating the one billionth repository on GitHub"

adsteel_ — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:10:21 +0000

I only realized last week that Tres Comas tequila is just a bottle of 1800 Reposado with a different label

New comment by adsteel_ in "The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything"

adsteel_ — Tue, 06 May 2025 18:58:05 +0000

In less poetic terms, the progression I talk about is "copy, choose, create". First, we learn to copy a solution. Later, we know enough solutions that we can choose the best for the situation and copy that one. Finally, we know enough to create our own solutions that are well adapted to the problem.

New comment by adsteel_ in "A Letter to the American People"

adsteel_ — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 22:46:14 +0000

I love your optimism about steps 4 and 5.

New comment by adsteel_ in "A Letter to the American People"

adsteel_ — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 22:40:24 +0000

Privatizing is a key step on the path to full oligarchy. So I would guess that yes.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Why Ruby on Rails still matters"

adsteel_ — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 19:28:56 +0000

Rails is set up for that, but it doesn't force you to build like that. You're free to build in other patterns that you design yourself. It's nice to have simple defaults with the freedom to opt into more complexity only if and when you need it.

New comment by adsteel_ in "The largest sofa you can move around a corner"

adsteel_ — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 01:12:08 +0000

There was even a computer program in that book that was constantly rotating the sofa, trying to find a way for it to come out. If Adams didn't know about this, he certainly had a sixth sense.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Children's arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math"

adsteel_ — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 23:24:32 +0000

I only learned this in adulthood, too. I had to discover and memorize those shortcuts. Now I know that some of the "brilliant" math students I went to high school with had simply learned these skills the rest of us didn't.

New comment by adsteel_ in "GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search"

adsteel_ — Mon, 20 Jan 2025 02:52:12 +0000

Have you been able to try trailer.app?

New comment by adsteel_ in "A visual demo of Ruby's lazy enumerator"

adsteel_ — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 20:07:55 +0000

Hm, the CSS and JS don't appear to load for me. Not even a set of tags in the HTML response.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep"

adsteel_ — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 01:58:30 +0000

It makes me think of long COVID and CFS, where patients complain of a lack of "unrefreshing sleep" and "brain fog". A lack of perfusion resulting in waste not being sufficiently flushed out could possibly result in those symptoms.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep"

adsteel_ — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 20:45:24 +0000

I'd like to learn more about the washing. Do you have a link or word/phrase to Google?

New comment by adsteel_ in "Stripe V2"

adsteel_ — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 02:46:12 +0000

My experience with JSON API is that it doesn't come with the out-of-box tooling that GraphQL comes with. GraphQL is declarative enough that just writing the queries, mutations, and types gives you UI documentation and a GraphiQL playground. I still prefer the simplicity of a REST API, but GraphQL is clearly winning on the tooling front.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Enslaved on OnlyFans: Women describe lives of torment and sexual servitude"

adsteel_ — Sun, 29 Dec 2024 18:54:32 +0000

That was my thought. They might even need to periodically re-verify in person. And ideally they should verify in person with a witness, like getting a driver's license or passport.

New comment by adsteel_ in "Spotify is full of AI music"

adsteel_ — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 23:16:30 +0000

Not just AI music, but "ghost artists", which are real people paid bottom dollar to create generic playlist music in a theme, under a different name. https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/music-streaming/spot...