Hacker News: dminor

New comment by dminor in "Ban the sale of precise geolocation"

dminor — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 15:56:30 +0000

Senator Wyden has been pretty focused on it. I think it's going to take some changes in Congress before it happens though.

New comment by dminor in "Some things just take time"

dminor — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 03:56:44 +0000

You won't find a 50 year old American Chestnut anywhere lol, they were wiped out almost entirely.

New comment by dminor in "Some things just take time"

dminor — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:03:00 +0000

You're moving the goalposts on his poor analogy :)

Most of the trees do just fine, and these nurseries will typically provide a warranty.

New comment by dminor in "Some things just take time"

dminor — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 16:16:51 +0000

On the contrary, you can solve the tree problem with money. There are nurseries that sell mature trees -- most people though will not choose to spend $20k on a tree.

New comment by dminor in "How to defer US taxes"

dminor — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 19:34:27 +0000

It's a strategy that's only really available to the ultra wealthy, because the banks are willing to give them a bespoke loan with a much lower interest rate that's payable after they die. There's also a complex trust setup to pass the asset to their heirs.

New comment by dminor in "No right to relicense this project"

dminor — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 15:59:26 +0000

Another tangent that I didn't see in the thread is that the Supreme Court just confirmed a ruling that LLM created art isn't copyrightable since the author must be human for copyright to apply.

If the new code was generated entirely by an LLM, can it be licensed at all? Or is it automatically in the public domain?

New comment by dminor in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)"

dminor — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:42:30 +0000

I'm working on a language learning framework based on the ideas of comprehensible input and spaced repetition learning.

The idea is you take a book you want to read, and it gets translated but also rewritten to match your current learning level. And as you read/listen it introduces new words to learn, reinforced by spaced repetition.

We're taking a trip to France this summer and I'm hoping to have something usable for at least a couple months before we go.

Currently working on the mechanics of extracting content from ebooks.

New comment by dminor in "California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years"

dminor — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 03:00:44 +0000

Same in Oregon. Snowpack way below normal.

New comment by dminor in "Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?"

dminor — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:18:24 +0000

Canned beans are already cooked, so add them at the end to heat through. Or, start from dried beans, but it takes experimentation to get them to the desired texture.

New comment by dminor in "Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone"

dminor — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 21:25:41 +0000

If you have GitHub copilot you can create github issues and assign them to copilot. All you need is a browser.

New comment by dminor in "The Fisher-Yates shuffle is backward"

dminor — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 19:35:02 +0000

A lot of backwards looping is a remnant of efficient loops in programming days of yore - you compare your iterator to 0 each time, which is slightly more efficient than comparing to another variable.

New comment by dminor in "10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13"

dminor — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:39:56 +0000

We've been using Dato for 5 years or so - a bit of a weird use case probably, we're driving configuration of our internal EHR with it. But it is very nice for creating a structured set of data models and then you've got a nice UI to input the data and a nice API for grabbing the data, all of which the engineering team didn't need to build.

It's been rock solid for us.

New comment by dminor in "10 years bootstrapped: €6.5M revenue with a team of 13"

dminor — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 16:25:54 +0000

As an actual customer, I have the opposite reaction. They are doing well and that gives me peace of mind.

New comment by dminor in "How to think about durable execution"

dminor — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 16:32:03 +0000

First time hearing of it.

At first glance it looks more complicated than DBOS, not easier. DBOS is just a library and doesn't require a special DSL.

Also we use node which it Little horse doesn't seem to support.

New comment by dminor in "How to think about durable execution"

dminor — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 15:42:08 +0000

We recently started using DBOS for durable execution - it's much easier to integrate than Temporal and it Just Uses Postgres(tm), which is nice.

New comment by dminor in "I tried Gleam for Advent of Code"

dminor — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:08:57 +0000

I looked at lustre for a recent project and it seems very nice. But the ecosystem is pretty small yet (I could find no examples of auth, for one), so I ended up going with liveview.

I'm hoping it succeeds and gets bigger because I really like its ergonomics.

New comment by dminor in "Europe converged rapidly on the United States before stagnating"

dminor — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 15:51:39 +0000

You don't have to be rich to move to Europe. The cost of living in most European countries is less than the USA (which you would expect, given their lower salaries).

New comment by dminor in "Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals"

dminor — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 01:01:41 +0000

I don't know about Thailand, but in France you can apply to join their healthcare system after 3 months. In the meantime you must have private insurance but it's a fraction of what it is here.

New comment by dminor in "Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies"

dminor — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:41:55 +0000

How does one practically avoid flu exposure?

New comment by dminor in "Australia starts peanut allergy treatment for babies"

dminor — Sun, 04 Aug 2024 16:37:34 +0000

Swim lessons don't require you to swim every day for the rest of your life