Hacker News: figital

New comment by figital in "I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA"

figital — Sun, 03 May 2026 00:25:52 +0000

How will the US midterms and Brazil elections in October / November affect current immigration and visa issues between these 2 (large) countries.

New comment by figital in "The Art of Atari (2016)"

figital — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 23:12:07 +0000

I have this book. It’s fantastic.

New comment by figital in "What went wrong for Yahoo"

figital — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 20:05:23 +0000

del.icio.us was my favorite tool on the internet for a few years (perhaps even still in retrospect). And not far off from the same functionality as Facebook (today). Why purchase such a thing to shut it down?

Money which needed to be burned I guess (for accounting tricks).

New comment by figital in "Questions censored by DeepSeek"

figital — Tue, 28 Jan 2025 22:55:10 +0000

Translate your “taboo” question into Chinese first. You will get a completely different answer ;).

New comment by figital in "Tinnitus linked to undetected auditory nerve damage"

figital — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 14:40:21 +0000

Some may be able to calibrate their hearing in this regard with something called Auditory Integration Training. I have done it. It worked. You might also want to read more about CAPD (Central Auditory Processing Disorder).

New comment by figital in "Turbo Pascal Turns 40"

figital — Fri, 01 Dec 2023 03:04:39 +0000

Still have the manuals at home on my bookshelf. Great examples of technical writing and explaining how the world is changing.

New comment by figital in "Why Japan has blue traffic lights instead of green"

figital — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 18:27:07 +0000

I sell traffic lights. What you consider a “green” light in the USA is actually called “blue green”. I believe the reason for this is increased visibility for older drivers.

New comment by figital in "I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser"

figital — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 14:38:19 +0000

Am so tired of Windows 11 I’ve just started writing my own desktop / toolbars / windows / struts using X11. It’s more than good enough and not much more difficult than writing webapps (in fact half of this project is various web apps. Then Python / c / lua / whatever.

It’s still a little buggy and I have to reboot now and again … but not much more than usual.

At least I control much of the experience now and for the rest of my life. And I’m learning a lot of fun stuff. It’s been a huge time waster but in a very good way. And it’s very snappy. And all of the configs/settings/code synchs with git (eventually lol).

New comment by figital in "Young people are flocking to astrology"

figital — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 05:55:08 +0000

I was not being as specific as latitude/longitude, exact time of the day, or “planetary alignments” … only the season or birth month (or perhaps week if you want to get loco). Much of the natural world runs on such a schedule (even considering lunar phases). This would be more scientific than the concept of Groundhog Day, but less “scientific” than a farmer’s almanac.

New comment by figital in "Young people are flocking to astrology"

figital — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 05:18:32 +0000

There are epigenetic markers which can identify the season or perhaps even month you were born. If you might think there is a link between personality and birth order and that perhaps metaphor is useful in storytelling or group dynamics … then one could loosely link these concepts together and consider it more than something like a party trick.

New comment by figital in "How to generate SQL statements with ChatGPT"

figital — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 18:38:44 +0000

Anyone can do something like this now by searching Google or asking Clippy. The act of double-checking what the interface suggests is the same as doing the thinking and work manually. Perhaps more intelligent error messages would be helpful, or performance improvement suggestions.

New comment by figital in "The World Wide Web (1994)"

figital — Fri, 02 Jun 2023 20:19:36 +0000

WinGopher "Complete" ... $129.00 ...

https://librarytechnology.org/document/7548

New comment by figital in "Why did Mozilla remove XUL add-ons? (2020)"

figital — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 01:15:52 +0000

Being able to script buttons in my browser's toolbars is a feature I miss (circa the Jetpack era of Firefox). It greatly increased my productivity.

Doing some of this now on my Linux desktop using jgmenu ... it's not a browser though ... it's a floating data-driven start menu. Very fun.

New comment by figital in "History of Video Games (1940's – 2010's) – list of firsts"

figital — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 16:07:45 +0000

Sinistar had a number of industry firsts … for the stereo/surround sound and the joystick at least … however it was released just before this market tanked in the early 80’s. Chilling and addictive at the time.

(And hungry!)

New comment by figital in "AI will replace middle management before robots replace hourly workers"

figital — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 06:28:46 +0000

chess jokes. grow arugula.

New comment by figital in "Using the Free Pascal IDE for a Week"

figital — Fri, 14 Oct 2022 16:40:43 +0000

First learned programming in Turbo Pascal and have fond memories of that IDE. Thanks for posting this. Would love to learn of a framework for reconfiguring this UX to do whatever I want (menus, scripting, etc).

New comment by figital in "Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago"

figital — Fri, 15 Apr 2022 20:21:34 +0000

here's a little wrapper around i made around "find" which i always have to install on every new box i manage ....

https://github.com/figital/fstring

(just shows you more useful details about what is found)

New comment by figital in "An intro to finding things in Linux"

figital — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:06:48 +0000

here’s a version of ‘find’ I use quite often …… I usually download it to run as “fstring”. it outputs the file name and the string match:

https://github.com/figital/fstring

New comment by figital in "UPS sells trucking unit"

figital — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 15:46:21 +0000

UPS Freight has never really been “UPS” even though they sort of share the same computer systems and branding. Their quality of service has also always been much lower (at least in our region).

New comment by figital in "Show HN: Visual SQL"

figital — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 22:29:11 +0000

I typed in a basic text query to "count reps per account". Then I clicked the visualize button ... no re-visualization. This is an extremely basic feature in every visual query tool the past 20 years (at least the ones worth paying for). You would be limiting yourself to their canned charts and "demo magic".