Hacker News: cafebeen

New comment by cafebeen in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

cafebeen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:58:10 +0000

True, but not universally, depending on whether they are involved day-to-day management or just acting as a public face to the org. Of course there's always just being in the right place at the right time. So I think it's worth looking at the specific decisions, policies, culture, etc.

New comment by cafebeen in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

cafebeen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 23:53:09 +0000

I guess the author doesn't cleanly define "elite", but it does lean heavy on the upper-class, and the depiction of social life seems to suggest that as well. But I guess during that period the makeup of upper-class shifted a bit from entirely aristocrats / nobility to include others too

New comment by cafebeen in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

cafebeen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:03:28 +0000

One way of thinking about it, the success of the elite (meaning the aristocracy) may be separate from the success of the empire. Most of the work behind the latter was done by the industrial bourgeoisie, engineers, workers, colonized people, etc., so the question is, how big a direct impact did the elite have on the empire? How successful they were individually is a different question.

New comment by cafebeen in "Why were Victorian elites so effective?"

cafebeen — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 15:41:14 +0000

Seems like an accurate picture of the Victorian elite, but it sounds like they were optimized for rent-seeking from an economy and an empire that others built and worked. That was success "on their own terms," as the article puts it, but not something to emulate.

GameToMac

cafebeen — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 19:58:54 +0000

Article URL: https://www.gametomac.com

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947238

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by cafebeen in "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"

cafebeen — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 13:56:41 +0000

I wonder if those are more engaging or more effective, they could look similar if untested.

New comment by cafebeen in "Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes"

cafebeen — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 14:01:25 +0000

I personally find it slower to read text without capitalization. It helps me visually chunk information from different sentences, in the same way that line breaks separate ideas into different paragraphs. Without it, it’s sort of like a wall of text that I have to read more carefully to parse (although a closer reading perhaps isn’t bad).

New comment by cafebeen in "The Real Luxuries In Life"

cafebeen — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 20:17:42 +0000

I agree, for at least some listed, though many people blow past the amount of money actually needed. Money starts as a proxy measure for attaining these things, but it eventually replaces them as the goal, per Goodhart's law.

New comment by cafebeen in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

cafebeen — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 04:17:14 +0000

For sure, I find many of the LLM-isms to be useful writing techniques and terms (although there's something uncanny-valley about the repetition and density of them).

But what I was more thinking about are truly unique jargon terms / phrases that get generated when deep in a problem. As an example of both of such a term and the phenomenon itself, Claude calls this "fluent compound coinage." They usually make sense in the original context, but get confusing when thrown around otherwise.

New comment by cafebeen in "Vomit: Clean up Claude 5's token output with a separate LLM"

cafebeen — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 18:45:16 +0000

One danger in acclimating to this style of communication style is that we may accidentally use it in your own communication with other people. If the other person hasn't grokked the dialect, it can make things quite confusing (to say the least). For example, there is common jargon used by people and there is chat-session-specific jargon created by LLM agents, and I've seen the latter popping up in various meetings, unbeknownst to the speaker. Some people call it out, but others may simply disconnect from the discussion.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Saggar, a Mac terminal that keeps sessions and your attention organized"

cafebeen — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 18:08:11 +0000

Yes, and also possible they've gone too heavy on verifiable rewards (RLVR) for agentic coding work, and too light on human feedback (RLHF)

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

cafebeen — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:00:29 +0000

Thank you, just what I was imagining! I would prefer a bigger wireless box as well.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: I spent 2 years designing a mechanical Magic Keyboard"

cafebeen — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 15:47:50 +0000

Yes, agreed. Beautiful keyboard, but when I heard "magic" I hoped to find a touch ID. That sensor so useful that even though I use a mechanical keyboard, I keep an apple magic keyboard off to the side of my desk just for the touch ID sensor.

What I'd love to have is a standalone touch ID sensor that I could attach anywhere -- mechanical keyboard, side of the monitor, under my desk, etc. I guess this is bottlenecked by Apple's IP on the device, so I've considered just hacking one together by deconstructing and extracting an Apple keyboard...

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 02:10:07 +0000

It's a known issue now! I have have all notifications silenced, so I haven't seen this behavior. Will reproduce and try look into a fix, thanks

New comment by cafebeen in "How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing"

cafebeen — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:10:33 +0000

Yes, I had a related experience of reading a book and observing what I thought were claude-isms, only to realize it was written in 2019. Some of the common tells are actually good writing practices, but I guess they are best in smaller doses.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 03:53:35 +0000

Indeed, if only Apple still made an 11-inch macbook air...

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 23:19:41 +0000

I agree this should be built-in. Many apps have their own "focus mode", but I wanted something that works uniformly across all apps. There is a full-screen mode in macOS, but it stretches the widow and context to full width, which doesn't pan out too well in some apps (lots of empty space or lines that are too long to read comfortably). So this preserves the window width but extends the height when focused, which works well for my daily drivers. The "fade" is somewhat unusual too, which means everything else is darkened close to black, which I find visually suppressing things and reduces distraction.

By the way, repo has an animated demo in case you want to see how it works.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:38:17 +0000

Would be great, and it's technically possible to spotlight multiple windows in this setup. But I wonder about the mechanics of picking the right apps. One way is to use named sets, e.g. dev=(iTerm2, Safari), each with their own shortcut. Another is to to focus one window and then use Cmd+Tab as an picker to choose which app to add next. I guess it depends on whether the arrangement is changing or relatively stable.

New comment by cafebeen in "Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS"

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:53:23 +0000

Author here, I made this macOS tool "Zen Mode" to provide a global focus mode that works across apps. There are plenty of things approaching this (HazeOver, Stage Manager, built-in full-screen mode, etc.) but nothing quite like I imagined. The basic idea is to have a shortcut to bring the current window front and center and fade everything else to black like a spotlight, and when you're done, the window returns home, and the lights come back up. A simple solution with about 250 lines of Hammerspoon Lua, built with Fable, though with many iterations to get the UX right. Happy to answer any questions or hear any feedback.

Show HN: Zen Mode – a global focus mode for macOS

cafebeen — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:52:04 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/cabeen/zen-mode

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48884663

Points: 30

# Comments: 12