Hacker News: archon

New comment by archon in "Having your insulin pump die while you're on vacation"

archon — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:34:07 +0000

> To tell the truth: I do not even know how to use the pen. I have never needed to do this in my life.

I truly do not understand how one could have T1D for 27 years and still be alive with this attitude. Don't get my wrong, I'm happy she is! And maybe that's just my own limited experience of managing my foster daughter's T1D for the past year talking but... Man, this year has been a rude education in how many ways all of these necessary-for-life pieces of equipment and medications can go wrong and how easy it is to get into a life-threatening situation.

Going more than 30 minutes from home without extras of everything (Dexcom, glucometer, fast-acting, long-acting, glucose tabs, glucagon) is completely unthinkable.

New comment by archon in "Every book recommended on the Odd Lots Discord"

archon — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 11:45:08 +0000

> Find an online community that has self-selected for some kind of criterion

I’ll add onto that: find real-life friends/acquaintances who are both not brain dead and read books. Frequently ask them “what are you reading lately?” Not only does this lead to good conversations and deeper friendships, it results in an endless stream of book leads.

Most of the good books I’ve read for the past several years have been curated for me by two friends who are prolific readers and do all the work for me of finding new books. I occasionally find something they haven’t read, but they certainly do most of the heavy lifting.

New comment by archon in "Car companies are in a billion-dollar software war"

archon — Sun, 11 May 2025 20:54:48 +0000

"Have done this" implies Slate has delivered even one vehicle. They have not. I hope Slate succeeds, but let's not get caught up in the preorder hype.

New comment by archon in ""Awful": Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen"

archon — Tue, 18 Mar 2025 00:13:40 +0000

I switched from the Roku ecosystem to Nvidia Shield about a year ago because of Roku’s increasingly user hostile ad and tracking decisions and have been pretty happy with it. Android TV gives me enough control with a custom launcher that I can prevent ads.

New comment by archon in "Sony ends production of Blu-ray Disc, recordable MiniDisc, and MiniDV media"

archon — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:19:35 +0000

I would guess that the number of people listening to this media on anything higher quality than the built-in speakers on a 65-inch TV is minuscule. They’re optimizing for sound on an iPad, not a full surround sound setup.

New comment by archon in "We are beginning to roll out new voice and image capabilities in ChatGPT"

archon — Mon, 25 Sep 2023 13:46:38 +0000

Agreed. After using ChatGPT at all Siri is absolutely frustrating.

Example from a couple days ago:

Me, in the shower so not able to type: "Hey Siri, add 1.5 inch brad nails to my latest shopping list note."

Siri: "Sorry, I can't help with that."

... Really, Siri? You can't do something as simple as add a line to a note in the first-party Apple Notes app?

New comment by archon in "Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul"

archon — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 20:37:17 +0000

Backend with a lot of existing code that's still in .Net Framework using tech like WCF and Windows Services.

I could get away with doing dev directly on the Mac if I was _only_ working in .Net Core on our newer applications and if I was willing to use Rider. Neither of which are true.

New comment by archon in "Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac after major overhaul"

archon — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 19:17:14 +0000

I'm one of that tiny percentage, but all of my development is done by remoting into a cloud Windows VM.

I tried directly coding on the Mac when I first got it, but quickly gave up on that. (I hate Rider, which seems to put me in minority as far as most .Net devs go.)

New comment by archon in "EVE Online: Add-in for MS Excel"

archon — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:35:50 +0000

I've had the same experience. Played multiple times, once for almost a year. The only thing that kept me playing that long was the good group of people on voice comms. I quit for the last time when I realized that life is too short to waste on a game I wasn't even enjoying (and that, frankly, stressed me out.)

New comment by archon in "Reddit.com appears to be having an outage"

archon — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 14:59:22 +0000

Pure speculation: With so many subs now private, they're hitting a performance wall searching for enough content to fill the front page. If I'm logged in and go to the site root, it throws an error. If logged out, it works. If I go to a specific (not privatized) sub, it works.

New comment by archon in "GPT Best Practices"

archon — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 16:32:44 +0000

I saw a web comic the other day that I think was right on the nose.

Something along the lines of:

"AI will eat all of the developer jobs!!!"

"Nah. AI expects exact, well-reasoned requirements from management? We're safe."

New comment by archon in "The Work of the Audiobook"

archon — Thu, 18 May 2023 10:42:15 +0000

> It's just surprising that audiobook listeners haven't developed a distinct taste apart from book readers.

Sample size of 1, but: my taste in audiobooks does not perfectly overlap with my taste in dead-trees books. My audiobook library skews much more to the fiction end of things, while my dead-trees library contains more nonfiction. I also use audiobooks to re-read books I've already read.

I enjoy the performance aspect of the audiobooks in its own right. The narrator makes or breaks my experience of the book, to such an extent that I have returned Audible books that _I have already read in dead-trees form and knew I liked_ because the narration was bad. I also suspect some of my favorite audiobooks would have ended up in the "donate/throw out" pile if I'd read them first on paper.

New comment by archon in "Balloon framing is worse-is-better (2021)"

archon — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 23:06:43 +0000

I've been thinking of doing this exact thing, although with a smaller 10x12 single-level shed, just because I want to learn timber framing. Would you do it again? Any specific book recommendations?

New comment by archon in "Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?"

archon — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 16:35:32 +0000

At one point you were talking about the possibility of updating Start Small Stay Small. Just curious if that's still on the table?

New comment by archon in "Ask HN: How to be independent as a developer?"

archon — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 15:44:19 +0000

Not sure if you're just joking, but: Rob founded/ran several SaaS products, many of them solo.

https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/about

New comment by archon in "Ask HN: What happened to Twitter poison pill?"

archon — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 21:32:07 +0000

I just wanted to thank you for this. This is the most succinct and easy-to-understand-for-non-investors explanation of the concept I've seen and now I think I finally understand it.

New comment by archon in "U.S. Inflation Accelerates to 40-Year High"

archon — Thu, 10 Feb 2022 22:13:55 +0000

Not advocating for this point of view, but I think the thinking goes that even if wasn't any less concentrated in 2017 vs. now, the pandemic provided a lot of opportunity for price increase that might have otherwise caused regulatory scrutiny.

New comment by archon in "U.S. Consumer Prices Rose Strongly Again in May"

archon — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 14:06:40 +0000

At least half of people are involved in the housing market, not just immediate buyers. Because you’d better believe if residential property prices skyrocket, so will rental rates.

New comment by archon in "TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans from Filing Taxes for Free (2019)"

archon — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 06:18:15 +0000

They benefit by preventing easy access to an export of the user’s data that could then be importied into a competitor’s software, thereby (presumably) locking in a non-trivial number of their own user base who don’t want to deal with the hassle of re-entering all of their financial data in a new product.

New comment by archon in "A half-hour to learn Rust"

archon — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 14:59:54 +0000

Preface: This is an honest question, not an attempt to start a "which language is better" war.

I'm proficient in C#. I haven't yet encountered any problems I can't solve with C# and the .Net open source ecosystem. (Perhaps that says more about the banality of the problems I'm solving than about .Net, but there you are.)

What would Rust give me the tools to do that I can't already accomplish with C# / .Net Core?