Hacker News: ahalbert4

New comment by ahalbert4 in "Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage"

ahalbert4 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 19:28:34 +0000

A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth.

I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.

I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.

New comment by ahalbert4 in "Show HN: Textracto – fzf for your screen (macOS)"

ahalbert4 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:06:10 +0000

Hi HN!

Textracto is a macOS app (14+) that lets you effortlessly copy text, even when it's unselectable.

Option-Space lets you fuzzy-find any text on screen, then select it or copy it to your clipboard, without ever using the mouse.

I'm often asked to get IDs out of screenshots, and I like using extrakto (https://github.com/laktak/extrakto/) for copying text in my terminal, so why not have the same thing for the rest of my screen?

It combines two sources. The Apple AX API is the first pass. At the same time, the Apple Vision API OCRs the screen to capture text from the parts that don't play well with AX, or that are actually images. Both stream into the palette as they get recognized and deduplicated, so even with a slow AX tree, Textracto is still fast.

Permissions: Screen Recording to read the screen, Accessibility to read exact characters and to click.

Privacy: nothing leaves your computer.

I wanted to make it FOSS, but my wife said that if we were paying for an Apple Developer account and a domain, I had to at least try to make the money back. So it's closed source and paid: 250 free uses, then an unobtrusive reminder to buy a license. Make her happy and I'll make it FOSS. It's $2.49 during the beta launch period and $4.99 after.

What's on your screen that you can't select?

Show HN: Textracto – fzf for your screen (macOS)

ahalbert4 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:05:20 +0000

Article URL: https://textracto.app/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181114

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness

ahalbert4 — Mon, 18 May 2026 02:59:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.noemamag.com/there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175140

Points: 316

# Comments: 767

Earth Live Data

ahalbert4 — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:14:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.earthlivedata.com/earth

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546990

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

If You Write a Series of Blog Posts, Please Link Them at the Beginning

ahalbert4 — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 12:01:20 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ahalbert.com/blog/2026/03/19/series.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47453389

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

ahalbert4 — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:03:25 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ahalbert.com/reviews/2026/03/18/the_body_snatchers.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47431418

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Show HN: Vim-gramaculate: Vim grammar checker, powered by AI

ahalbert4 — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 13:36:59 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/ahalbert/vim-gramaculate

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47376541

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting

ahalbert4 — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:19:05 +0000

Article URL: https://www.ahalbert.com/reviews/2026/02/26/cribsheet.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47165069

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by ahalbert4 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2025)"

ahalbert4 — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 16:39:07 +0000

  Location: Chicago, IL
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: SQL, Python, Java, Golang, Kafka, Kubernetes, Apache Spark, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift
  Résumé/CV: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6l07cbd0gfzeefbjhvlbk/armand_halbert_resume.pdf?rlkey=3gqw4uw0krr6wq522h5epk6j9&st=icuaqeic&dl=0
  Email: armand [dot] halbert [at] gmail.com

I am a Software Engineer/Data Engineer with 10 years of experience in industry building APIs and ETL Pipelines in the pharmaceutical, retail and finance industry. I think of myself as some who bridges the gap between data and code, able to build a service that enables you to generate critical insights for your business. If you need a petabyte scale ETL pipeline built (real-time or batch), or debug why a dashboard or critical report is failing under time pressure, I'm your person.

Side projects: I develop small programming languages for text editing in my spare time.

https://www.ahalbert.com/projects/ted/ted.html

https://ahalbert.github.io/strawk/demo/strawk.html

New comment by ahalbert4 in "The Art of the Critic"

ahalbert4 — Fri, 30 May 2025 16:24:47 +0000

Vladimir Nabokov's opinions on various writers, culled from Strong Opinions. (http://wmjas.wikidot.com/nabokov-s-recommendations)

* James, Henry. Dislike him rather intensely, but now and then his wording causes a kind of electric tingle. Certainly not a genius.

New comment by ahalbert4 in "Systems Correctness Practices at Amazon Web Services"

ahalbert4 — Fri, 30 May 2025 14:54:02 +0000

Just curious, has anyone used FIS in their own distributed services? I'm considering using it but don't have any real word experience handling those kind of experiments.