Hacker News: carcabob

New comment by carcabob in "Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI"

carcabob — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 02:20:39 +0000

I am not actively changing how I write, but I think it's still affecting me, is what I meant to say.

New comment by carcabob in "We're Training Students to Write Worse to Prove They're Not Robots"

carcabob — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:37:40 +0000

True. Writing structures for arguments and analysis make a huge difference in effective writing.

I wish brevity and linguistic precision were taught more, as well. Miscommunication due to ambiguity is one of the biggest causes I see for confusion or heated arguments.

New comment by carcabob in "Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI"

carcabob — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:29:59 +0000

A few times in some Discord communities, I've been accused of being A.I. because of how I write. Kind of sad and a bit annoying. I also quite like em dashes, but have felt the need to reduce how much I use them.

Glad to see some schools and teachers teach how to use them well, rather than ban them outright.

New comment by carcabob in "Stop using grey text (2025)"

carcabob — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:15:26 +0000

For a while I'd see "Weird Al" in random headlines or something and my brain would read it as "Weird A.I." and I kept getting very confused.

New comment by carcabob in "Stop Using Grey Text (2025)"

carcabob — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:13:14 +0000

Agreed. I'm very glad Hacker News uses a typeface with serifs on 'I's, 'l's, and '1's. "Sans serif" can be descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

New comment by carcabob in "Stop using grey text (2025)"

carcabob — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 06:09:08 +0000

This problem has been haunting me for years, except in Google Docs. At some point, some template my team used had slightly gray text, and I STILL find it cropping up in our most recent documents.

New comment by carcabob in "Windows 11 Notepad to support Markdown"

carcabob — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 18:33:22 +0000

This has been supported for a while now, so I wonder why this is being treated as news. But I guess it’s news to some people, so that’s fair.

I tried to take advantage of it, but the implementation felt really clunky (formatting seemed to be via menus only), so I’ve stuck with .txt files.

New comment by carcabob in "Discord/Twitch/Snapchat age verification bypass"

carcabob — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:56:42 +0000

Those without driver's licenses or passports can get a state ID card instead, if I'm not mistaken. A pain, but an option.

New comment by carcabob in "OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions"

carcabob — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 20:20:39 +0000

If ads are clearly labeled as "ad" or "sponsored", and they only appear for free users, I think seeing ads is a pretty reasonable price to pay for those who want to use the service for free.

If they're not labeled, or are shown even to paying users, I think that's a problem.

New comment by carcabob in "Claude Opus 4.5"

carcabob — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 04:50:57 +0000

I wish the article's graphs weren't distorted by skipping so much of the scale to make it look like a more significant difference than it is. But it does looks impressive.

New comment by carcabob in ""Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces"

carcabob — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 14:22:23 +0000

The article makes some excellent points. I think this part isn't a great example, though:

> Saying something like “Go to my cases” is awkward and unnatural – if I told you to go to my cases, you’d think I was telling you to go to my cases, not yours.

A help article should use proper capitalization. a couple extra words can add clarity too. For example, "Go to the 'My Cases' page."

Many people don't know how to write good help articles, though, so it's probably still best to avoid "my"/"your" in UIs.

New comment by carcabob in "How to gain code execution on hundreds of millions of people and popular apps"

carcabob — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 02:13:37 +0000

Ironically, it actually helped me stay focused on the article. Kind of like a fidget toy. When part of my brain would get bored, I could just move the cat and satisfy that part of my brain while I keep reading.

I know that sounds kind of sad that my brain can't focus that well (and it is), but I appreciated the cat.

New comment by carcabob in "Do you really need foreign keys?"

carcabob — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:46:08 +0000

Novice Question: How can you have a relational database at all without foreign keys?

In other words, if your tables aren't referencing other tables, how do you perform JOINS for your queries? From my limited experience, they seem pretty essential for most databases. Or is the article just talking about foreign key CONSTRAINTS and cascading UPDATES and DELETES, rather than literally talking about the values stored in foreign key columns?

If anyone can explain, I would greatly appreciate it.