Hacker News: cattenwallen

New comment by cattenwallen in "Has early Scratch experience led to fulfilling careers?"

cattenwallen — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:10:33 +0000

Dolly Parton's Imagination Library project had to have had some justification.

I think picture books are not the same as Scratch. Scratch is much farther along that process. An equivalent might be comic books or graphic novels, which people actually do attribute a love of either as an introduction to fulfilling careers.

New comment by cattenwallen in "Rakuten Kobo returns to U.S. retail as sales double"

cattenwallen — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 17:19:39 +0000

I mean they 100% exist. Brandon Sanderson isn't some excessively complicated fantasy world (despite what fans may say, Sanderson is very approachable). Dungeon Crawler Carl is all the rage. Hell, The Locked Tomb trilogy has tons of big swords and stuff. The reason why morning glory milking farm and other smut exists on bookshelves now is that women were finding and buying the small stuff when no one gave them the time of day. If you want your stuff back on shelves, start buying them, for they 100% exists even if it's a self-publishing sword and sorcery guy.

New comment by cattenwallen in "Characterizing Agentic Flooding of Government Services"

cattenwallen — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:52:32 +0000

In my understanding when it comes to doling out benefits, it's not an overhead connected to a jobs program. The less eligible people use benefits, the less the government has to pay out benefits. It's strictly better for the government to make getting benefits as hard as possible.

New comment by cattenwallen in "I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers"

cattenwallen — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 17:48:54 +0000

Feedback is a gnarly problem because a lot of people assume this means "I, the reviewer, will criticize what I think will improve this work" and "I, the receiver, will receive suggestions to improve my work" but the reviewer and the creative will never have the same idea of what the WIP's ideal state looks like. So the feedback can be actively harmful to the creator. For example, if I'm a Mexican author writing about my abuela, and a feedback is "you should replace all these words with English", that's probably actively harmful to the vision of the work. But also sometimes the creator must be actively open to feedback that "hey, your abuela isn't a person in this story, she's just a female cardboard character" because it's probably a disservice to the vision to have a cardboard character clouded by the creator's nostalgia.

New comment by cattenwallen in "Jack Dorsey launches Buzz to combine team chat, AI agents and Git hosting"

cattenwallen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:57:39 +0000

I'm currently new to northern virginia, a software dev. You sound like a great mentor and I would love to meet you for coffee sometime.