Hacker News: emberfiend

New comment by emberfiend in "Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically"

emberfiend — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:59:06 +0000

cool game, maybe consider removing the eternally looping animation in the header, it's pretty visually distracting

New comment by emberfiend in "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act"

emberfiend — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:40:57 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

Long-time WP contributor and apologist here. I still think Wikipedia does more good than bad (for all its sins), is the greatest collaborative human work of our time, and there is some merit to the idea of having a giant pile of money to be able to fight government-scale battles like this one. But the story of the bureaucrats settling in and leeching donations at scale is basically accurate.

New comment by emberfiend in "Why I Use a Dumbphone in 2025 (and Why You Should Too)"

emberfiend — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:12:05 +0000

Yeah, a smartphone with no dopamine feeds installed on it seems like the sane middle path here.

New comment by emberfiend in "Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge"

emberfiend — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:29:58 +0000

To your point, ads are brain malware.

New comment by emberfiend in "Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge"

emberfiend — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 11:26:10 +0000

mad-max-tom-hardy-nuh-uh-thats-bait.webm

New comment by emberfiend in "Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers"

emberfiend — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 15:01:50 +0000

The brand I found when I did the research was LightDims. They seem to come in pretty large sheets. Haven't actually ordered any though.

Yeah, I'm also PWM sensitive. You can buy devices which measure it fortunately but I've been making do with a phone camera on a high/brief shutter speed.

New comment by emberfiend in "Uchū – Color palette for internet lovers"

emberfiend — Mon, 17 Feb 2025 09:09:41 +0000

Yeah, I'm at the point where I'm looking at manually positioning/removing one of those full-screen dimming filters so I can use my monitor past 7pm. And 90% of the time if a screen goes really dim it does so with savage PWM.

New comment by emberfiend in "Stimulation Clicker"

emberfiend — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:24:49 +0000

Yeah. I mean I agree with the rant but the guy seems so unhappy. I hope he finds a way to spend less time using computers.

New comment by emberfiend in "Stimulation Clicker"

emberfiend — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 09:16:30 +0000

Majestic.

New comment by emberfiend in "Ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to Community Notes model"

emberfiend — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 08:32:41 +0000

Reddit already has this feature, although it might be underused. Set up a multireddit. Everything you want and nothing you don't. They are also not bottomless (well, more so if you stick to smaller subs), so if you don't put too many subs in your multi you can also hard-limit your feed time. They're great.

New comment by emberfiend in "How 'Factorio' seduced Silicon Valley and me"

emberfiend — Sun, 27 Oct 2024 15:49:26 +0000

I think a lot about this in the context of video game minmaxers/netdeckers who just copy a researched, optimal behaviour. It's completely alien to me but some people really get a kick out of just being an implementer, following rote instructions exactly to the letter.

New comment by emberfiend in "Squatting in Spain: Understanding Spain's "okupas" problem"

emberfiend — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 14:20:43 +0000

Yes, we are discussing a hypothetical, from a few parents up: "set a property tax that would hurt if the buildings became vacant"

The definition of vacant is something that would have to be figured out, but it's not impossible. For example, you could do a generous 6-12 months of the year occupation without taxation, and then a sliding scale from there. (So you pay 0% of the new tax at 12 months yearly occupation, 0% at 6 months, 50% at 3 months, and 100% at 0 months.)

New comment by emberfiend in "Hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job"

emberfiend — Wed, 08 Nov 2023 14:16:06 +0000

Well said. I think misanthropy and pessimism are endemic with people who spend 14 hours a day talking to computers and don't have healthy social lives or many reasons to touch grass.

New comment by emberfiend in "My rude-ass car"

emberfiend — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 06:39:15 +0000

satisfice isn't a word fyi

I think you might be conflating "satisfy" (as in "that satisfies my needs") with "suffice" (as in "that's good enough, it suffices for my purposes").

A Hyper-Dense City

emberfiend — Sun, 08 Oct 2023 18:17:56 +0000

Article URL: https://judybackhouse.com/fiction/ultra-high-density-city.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37813025

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by emberfiend in "Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page"

emberfiend — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 10:29:48 +0000

Do you blog anywhere? Your perspective feels very lucid

New comment by emberfiend in "Developer tools to create spatial experiences for Apple Vision Pro"

emberfiend — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:07:41 +0000

This misses the "same computer" stipulation, no?

New comment by emberfiend in "Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”"

emberfiend — Sat, 06 May 2023 21:01:43 +0000

Native, high-level speaker here: "comprised of" is not wrong. You're entitled to your tastes of course, but you'll have a richer understanding of the world if you include the shades in your model.

New comment by emberfiend in "Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”"

emberfiend — Sat, 06 May 2023 20:55:23 +0000

Your example doesn't map, though. There is no ambiguity when I say "curry is comprised of beans and carrots". It's just a way of using the word that some native speakers have used their whole lives and other native speakers find jarring.

New comment by emberfiend in "Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself?"

emberfiend — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 19:09:42 +0000

I also made a time-of-day brightness adjuster! I had a much cruder solution, just an autohotkey script that drags sliders around in nvidia control panel, but it's such a relief on the eyes. I hope it gets baked into OSes (or monitor hardware?) at some point, matching monitor luminosity to what the sun is doing seems pretty obvious.