Hacker News: couchand

New comment by couchand in "Ideas on modernizing the open-source desktop"

couchand — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:21:34 +0000

Completely fair to complain that the icons do not indicate the purpose of each menu. They do helpfully name each menu in the tooltip: the hamburger on the left is "Main Menu", the three vertical dots in the location bar is the "Current Folder Menu" and the down arrow next to the view switcher is "View Options".

The Main Menu offers global actions, and appears in the left-hand global pane of the window. The Current Folder Menu offers actions specifically related to the location named in the location bar. The View Options menu is part of a split button with the view switcher, and has additional view-related options.

You're right that the icons themselves do not explain their full and complete functionality. Fortunately, we do not need to rely on hoping for the right labels for actions (be they textual or iconographic). For software intended to be used on a regular basis, it's worth spending a bit of time internalizing the model.

New comment by couchand in "We Write Code by Hand"

couchand — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 14:59:55 +0000

Oh, we're back to using lines of code as a productivity measure?

New comment by couchand in "How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?"

couchand — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:34:19 +0000

And they never will, with that attitude.

New comment by couchand in "Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns"

couchand — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:02:43 +0000

Not just you. There's been a huge pushback in the local music community around this. Concerts listings now prominently feature the name of the poster designer! Humans FTW.

New comment by couchand in "It's a shame what's happened to radio"

couchand — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:55:07 +0000

Radio is still cool! But it's just not really on the FCC-licensed bands anymore. Independent Internet radio stations keep the spirit alive. Look around, there very well might be a vibrant local music-and-more community right in your neighborhood! Two stations I listen to regularly here in NYC:

8 Ball Radio - https://8ballradio.nyc

Radio Free Brooklyn - https://www.radiofreebrooklyn.org

Who else has favorites to share?

New comment by couchand in "OverpAId – Fire your CEO. Hire the future"

couchand — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:47:14 +0000

And in truth it's a paradox. The better a company is (generally correlated to an empowered workforce with a sense of agency and purpose), the harder it is to extract profit for the capitalist class.

Which helps explain the "need" for CEOs to meddle.

New comment by couchand in "Claude Is Not a Compiler"

couchand — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:13:13 +0000

The argument being made here is really incredible when you unpack it.

1) The construction of the Empire State Building was particularly effective due to the depth of human-to-human collaboration.

2) Isn't it great that we can burn a bunch of dinosaur blood to convince ourselves that we don't need other humans?

New comment by couchand in "Show HN: Teach your kids perfect pitch"

couchand — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 14:20:35 +0000

> I tried learning to play a recorder (flute) using some internet howtos as a guide, but got stuck at the first lesson, when the sound produced by the flute didn't match what the Fourier analyser in audacity measured.

> That is, I tried to play a C, but the Fourier transform resulted in a bimodal distribution, and none of the bumps was near the expected C frequency.

What a wonderful experiment! You've uncovered "harmonics": your recorder (or any instrument) sounds a complex mixture of frequencies, even when you play just a single note. The different mix of frequencies from one instrument to another is what gives each a unique sound, called the "timbre". The harmonics of wind instruments like your recorder are particularly complex! Try the same experiment with a stringed instrument, which will make something closer to a pure sine wave. Try it with anything that will make noise!

But I'd recommend not using Audacity to learn to play an instrument. You need your ears for this, so it may as much effort developing listening as developing playing technique. But in the end, don't worry too much about that, just have fun making music!

New comment by couchand in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

couchand — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:20:14 +0000

I can tell you as a resident of New York City that the negative effect of the automobile on the built environment is very much present here as well.

New comment by couchand in "How NASA built Artemis II’s fault-tolerant computer"

couchand — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:57:42 +0000

If your implication is that stencil art does not take effort then perhaps you may not fully appreciate Banksy. Works like Gaza Kitty or Flower Thrower don’t just appear haphazardly without effort.

CBP Facility Codes Sure Seem to Have Leaked via Online Flashcards

couchand — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 00:13:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.wired.com/story/cbp-facility-codes-sure-seem-to-have-leaked-via-online-flashcards/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634073

Points: 12

# Comments: 1

New comment by couchand in "Solar Balconies Take Europe by Storm"

couchand — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 03:49:31 +0000

Fortunately they do, and in fact the article makes that clear. +1 for reading to the end of the paragraph that was quoted.

New comment by couchand in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

couchand — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:58:06 +0000

I think camp 1 would rather see ten useless things than one useful thing.

New comment by couchand in "Ghost artists on Spotify"

couchand — Sat, 21 Dec 2024 15:05:57 +0000

Interesting that your first counterexample is Charlie Parker. I've been listening to a lot of Phil Schaap's Bird Flight recently (https://www.philschaapjazz.com/sections/bird-flight). It's funny to see how many of the episodes are Phil describing a recording session more or less like this:

"The Bird showed up two hours late to a three and a half hour recording session. They recorded one take each of six tracks, but the recording engineer was surprised when they started so he missed the first half of the first track. And that's how we got the five tracks on ."

New comment by couchand in "Traits are a local maximum"

couchand — Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:55:18 +0000

FWIW It's not at all clear to me how this requirement would be implemented in practice: "This syntax would explicitly be limited to orphan implementations."

New comment by couchand in "Avremu: An 8-Bit AVR Microcontroller Simulator Written in LaTeX"

couchand — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 20:39:16 +0000

The classic AVR instruction set does not include multiplication, you have to be targeting a device that supports AVRe+, such as an ATmega rather than an ATtiny. Try adding -mmcu=avr5 and it will show up pretty quick. Example: https://godbolt.org/z/x951M8fn8

Edit: nice work author, I love it!

New comment by couchand in "Excerpts from a conversation about personal information management"

couchand — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 12:03:31 +0000

What an incredibly on-the-nose anecdote, I love it!

The term of art for this strategy is "size to the horizon". Imagine you're looking across an open plain. The trees and rocks closer to you are bigger and you can make out more detail. The ones further away are still abstract.

You have to know exactly what to do with the things right in front of you, but you have to keep only a general awareness of that which is distant.

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:18:38 +0000

I apologize if my comment came off as snark. Your comment was nothing but pasted text which ommitted relevant detail, so it was not clear what the intent was. In context, to me, it did not seem to be illuminating. It actually seemed to be introducing confusion where there previously was none.

Data races are not possible in safe Rust. Race conditions are. The distinction is made clear in the Nomicon article, but commenters here are really muddying the waters...

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 15:14:52 +0000

That's decidedly not a data race, however.

New comment by couchand in "Translation of Rust's core and alloc crates to Coq for formal verification"

couchand — Wed, 15 May 2024 13:11:55 +0000

On the one hand, we like to encourage learning here. On the other, we prefer not to copy-paste a bunch of possibly-irrelevant content. Well, forgive me for pasting in a StackOverflow answer that may be relevant here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11276259/are-data-races-...

> Are "data races" and "race condition" actually the same thing in context of concurrent programming

> No, they are not the same thing. They are not a subset of one another. They are also neither the necessary, nor the sufficient condition for one another.

The really curious thing here is that the Nomicon page also describes this distinction in great detail.