Hacker News: etbebl

New comment by etbebl in "Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line"

etbebl — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 04:59:56 +0000

You can be vegan as part of a health conscious diet, but strict veganism is usually motivated by ethics, not health. (That being said obviously there's more market share if you're in the intersection of the venn diagram.)

New comment by etbebl in "Comparing Python Type Checkers: Typing Spec Conformance"

etbebl — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 02:30:25 +0000

Check out optype (specifically the optype.numpy namespace). If you use scipy, scipy-stubs is compatible and the developer of both is very active and responsive. There's also a new standalone stubs library for numpy called numtype, but it's still in alpha.

New comment by etbebl in "The MacBook Neo"

etbebl — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 01:06:45 +0000

Windows Terminal and PowerToys are pretty nice. The Phone Link app is convenient, and screenshots are way better (no need to paste into Paint anymore, just use snip and sketch)

New comment by etbebl in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

etbebl — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 03:04:24 +0000

I mean yeah I kind of get it, sometimes, it depends what mood I'm in. Sometimes I try to resist this feeling though, because I think being connected with people around me is nice and there are general benefits to being in a friendly community. (If I hated where I lived, or was very busy all the time, I probably wouldn't give it a second thought.)

New comment by etbebl in "Rethinking Syntax: Binding by Adjacency"

etbebl — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 01:16:40 +0000

God I can't believe I'm gonna be that guy, but I feel like in some of these situations one should just forward the text to an LLM and call it a day.

New comment by etbebl in "How to talk to anyone and why you should"

etbebl — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 01:13:07 +0000

The example in the article is a waiting room. Or you could be waiting to catch the subway, or in line at the grocery store. In those situations how is somebody trying to talk to you preventing you from completing your task? Otherwise you're probably just scrolling your phone; sometimes I fill these gaps with things like podcasts, but even then it's not like what I'm doing is urgent.

New comment by etbebl in "The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)"

etbebl — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 02:34:46 +0000

You know the ribbon can be collapsed so that it behaves more like a drop-down menu, right?

New comment by etbebl in "The C-Shaped Hole in Package Management"

etbebl — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:12:52 +0000

I get that the scope of the article is a bit larger than this, but it's a pet peeve of mine when authors acknowledge the advantages of conda and then dismiss it for...silly? reasons. It kind of sounds like they just don't know many people using it, so they assume something must be wrong with it.

> If you don’t need compiled extensions, Conda is more than you need.

Am I missing something or isn't that exactly the problem we're talking about here?

> And even when you do need it, conda environments are heavier than virtual environments and the resolver used to be infamously slow. Mamba exists largely because conda’s dependency resolution took forever on nontrivial environments.

Like it says here, speed isn't a problem anymore - mamba is fast. And it's true that the environments get large; maybe there's bloat, but it definitely does share package versions across environments when possible, while keeping updates and such isolated to the current environment. Maybe there's a space for a language package manager that tries to be more like a system package manager by updating multiple envs at once while staying within version constraints to minimize duplication, but idk if many developers would think that is worth the risk.

New comment by etbebl in "The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)"

etbebl — Fri, 23 Jan 2026 06:55:11 +0000

I absolutely can tell the difference between house temperatures of 67, 68, and 69 F. Not so much down in the 30s, but in the typical ambient range of temperature, that level of precision seems to match my body's sensitivity (in fact, I wish my thermostat was just a bit more precise).

New comment by etbebl in "Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title"

etbebl — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:38:25 +0000

I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.

New comment by etbebl in "Prepare for That Stupid World"

etbebl — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 19:29:38 +0000

Well, of course almost all information comes with an agenda, but perhaps the more useful distinction is whether the information is presented in good faith, i.e. is honest about the agenda (which actual advertising can also be).

New comment by etbebl in "The Anatomy of a macOS App"

etbebl — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 02:46:06 +0000

I get that if you're distributing software to the wider public, you have to make sure these scary alerts don't pop up regardless of platform. But as a savvy user, I think the situation is still better on Windows. As far as I've seen there's still always a (small) link in these popups (I think it's SmartScreen?) to run anyway - no need to dig into settings before even trying to run it.

New comment by etbebl in "Why don't you use dependent types?"

etbebl — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 16:53:55 +0000

The latter is what would be most useful imo. Even Matlab can type check matrix sizes with constants these days, but I often wish I could use variables to express relationships between the sizes of different dimensions of inputs to a function.

New comment by etbebl in "How can I influence others without manipulating them?"

etbebl — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 03:19:44 +0000

I can see that some of the categories are a stretch semantically; however, I didn't see the specific categories and their names as central to the point of the article. I think the goal is to demonstrate that 1) everyone engages in persuasion in some form; 2) there are various different styles of persuasion with different strengths and weaknesses, and it's useful to be self-aware about what style(s) you tend to use and whether there are other styles you might want to try out in certain situations. I think breaking it down into 5 somewhat artificial categories is a good framework for making this topic approachable and providing good examples to think about.

I think if you already have well-developed thoughts about persuasion and social interaction, it might not add much, but it was useful for me.

New comment by etbebl in "The "most hated" CSS feature: cos() and sin()"

etbebl — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 05:29:02 +0000

It's crazy to me that a significant number of people know "cos" and "sin" primarily though CSS. Is that really what this is implying? Or maybe people just find them hard in general, but it seems odd to think of them as features you dislike, rather than attributing the dislike to the underlying math, if you've ever taken a trig class before.

New comment by etbebl in "A critique of package managers"

etbebl — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:00:18 +0000

> In real life, when you have a dependency, you are responsible for it. If the thing that is dependent on you does something wrong, like a child or business, you might end up in jail, as you are responsible for that.

Isn't this backwards? In real life, if you have a dependent, you are responsible for it. On the other hand, if you have a dependency on something, you rely on that thing, in other words it should be responsible for you. A package that is widely used in security-critical applications ought to be able to be held accountable if its failure causes harm due to downstream applications. But because that is in general impossible and most library authors would never take on the risk of making such guarantees, the risk of each dependency is taken on by the person who decides it is safe to use it, and I agree package managers sometimes make that too easy.

New comment by etbebl in "Not paying with cash"

etbebl — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 01:39:58 +0000

How milquetoast... "Young people want to pay with cash more, and there might be interesting reasons for that, but ehh cards are convenient and cash is gross so still no cash for me!" What's the point of this?

New comment by etbebl in "The day Return became Enter (2023)"

etbebl — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 01:21:10 +0000

I have a faint memory of Enter creating a page break rather than a newline on a school Mac when I was a kid. Maybe that was in AppleWorks?

New comment by etbebl in "The Synology End Game"

etbebl — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:49:03 +0000

Isn't the conventional wisdom "at least 2 backups, one offsite"? My lab gets by with 2 copies for most of our data: one on our Synology NAS and one mirrored to Box.

With the size of data we're dealing with, loading everything from cloud all the time would slow analyses down to a crawl. The Synology is networked with 10G Ethernet to most of our workstations.

New comment by etbebl in "Data, objects, and how we're railroaded into poor design (2018)"

etbebl — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 18:16:11 +0000

The author dismisses C++ out of hand, but I really think it does a pretty good job of making this a non-issue. Want a structured value type? Sure, that's a struct with public fields by default, passed by value with automatic copy constructor and assignment functions. Want a mutable type that's encapsulated and needs to do something special to be cloned? Sure, that's a class passed by unique_pointer or reference, with non-default (or deleted) copy constructor and assignment functions and private fields by default.

Every language I've used since then feels like it makes this issue needlessly complicated and implicit.