Hacker News: giglamesh

New comment by giglamesh in "France to ditch Windows for Linux to reduce reliance on US tech"

giglamesh — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 14:21:27 +0000

The so called free market really did a bang up job didn't it? The proprietary buggy mess of Windows and the walled garden of MacOS which given its *nix underpinnings could have been really fantastically awesome but instead is a proprietary buggy mess.

New comment by giglamesh in "Music for Programming"

giglamesh — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:45:48 +0000

Could not love SomaFM more! The past few xmas holiday seasons I've been streaming "Department Store Christmas" which is hugely wacky retro Christmas music. Somehow I'd never heard "What Ever Happened to Christmas" a Jimmy Webb song made famous by Frank Sinatra. It was kind of life changing.

New comment by giglamesh in "Music for Programming"

giglamesh — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 16:39:03 +0000

I have very similar criteria, but for me at least

> zero vocals

can also be vocals in a language I don't understand. In those cases, the voice is just another instrument and not distracting.

New comment by giglamesh in "What does " 2>&1 " mean?"

giglamesh — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 15:04:42 +0000

Do these days include the nearly seventeen years ago when this question was posted? ;)

New comment by giglamesh in "Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows"

giglamesh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 16:37:12 +0000

I hope this phenomenon is not limited to HN, but this is the only place I'm aware of where the comments are often more interesting and useful than the posts.

New comment by giglamesh in "Exercise has 'similar effect' to therapy, study on depression shows"

giglamesh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:24:14 +0000

What does "lot prescribe" mean?

New comment by giglamesh in "I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs"

giglamesh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 15:03:44 +0000

I change themes just often enough to completely forget how to do it and also forget whatever other adjustments I had to make to it all work. And like... is my config versioned somehow? This is a long way to say, Thank You for inspiring me to look at all that stuff again!

New comment by giglamesh in "I found a useful Git one liner buried in leaked CIA developer docs"

giglamesh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:59:56 +0000

So the acronym is for Terrible User Interface? ;)

New comment by giglamesh in "How to stop being boring"

giglamesh — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 14:55:47 +0000

I've been having this conversation with some of the children in my life. They frequently refer to a subset of their peers as "boring" and I bristle ever time I hear it. I try to suggest that other people are not here for our entertainment and therefore deciding that they are boring is to misunderstand the relationship. As you might imagine, the suggestion is not sinking in.

New comment by giglamesh in "I'm addicted to being useful"

giglamesh — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 23:30:26 +0000

Yeah there are some similar suggestions but all the examples I can think of are at least a bit of a stretch. Matthew 7:3–5 mebbe? Remove the log from your own eye before focusing on smaller chunks of wood in the eyes of others?

New comment by giglamesh in "Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck and was then canceled for poor sales"

giglamesh — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:40:46 +0000

> ... most pickup trucks aren't designed for maximum utility. They're designed to sell a lifestyle.

Yes, but that lifestyle can and sometimes does include actual needs for some of the utility. There is a great observation from Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat from Washington’s 3rd District in an NYT piece a couple of days ago. I included a perhaps too long quote in lieu of apologizing for the paywall.

> “Spreadsheets can contain a part of truth,” Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “But never all of truth.”

> Looking to illustrate this, I bought the recent book “White Rural Rage” and opened it more or less at random to a passage about rural pickup trucks. It cites a rich portfolio of data and even a scholarly expert on the psychology of truck purchasers, to make what might seem like an obvious point — that it’s inefficient and deluded for rural and suburban men to choose trucks as their daily driving vehicles. The passage never does explain, though, how you’re supposed to haul an elk carcass or pull a cargo trailer without one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/opinion/marie-gluesenkamp...

New comment by giglamesh in "The Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian"

giglamesh — Mon, 02 May 2022 17:34:08 +0000

This is my favorite piece of music right now. I love that this exists. But the title is quite misleading. What is amazingly presented is not the Epic of Gilgamesh but rather, "... a few of the opening lines of part of the epic poem". It is a great 3 minutes and 55 seconds, but don't fire up this URL thinking you are going to hear the entire epic.

New comment by giglamesh in "Modeling chopping onions: The importance of mise en place"

giglamesh — Mon, 28 Feb 2022 18:14:51 +0000

Line cooking in a restaurant is very different than cooking at home. Mis-en-place is usually not efficient for the home cook. The example cited by Jeff W is contrived. I've cooked at least hundreds if not thousands of onions at home and in restaurants and in almost every case I was chopping carrots or celery or peppers while those onions were cooking and never once did I have a failure due to timing.

New comment by giglamesh in "Heroku Is Down"

giglamesh — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 20:28:42 +0000

There is no free tier and the free trial is only 14 days?

New comment by giglamesh in "Music subscriber market shares Q2 2021"

giglamesh — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 21:05:24 +0000

netflix: costlier so-so content AND a soul crushingly annoying interface. I am 100% sure that I will never want to watch the vast majority of the items available, and yet I must scroll past them over and over and over in four to ten different rows during the same session even.

New comment by giglamesh in "Peloton to halt production of its Bikes, treadmills as demand wanes"

giglamesh — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 18:43:34 +0000

They are a better content company than a software company. As you note, they currently have the best music, instructors and variety of classes. But the software itself has a LOT of room for improvement. For example, the now playing widget is constrained to a tiny little chunk of the view in which artist names or titles are routinely truncated beyond recognition even though most of the screen is essentially empty (a view of a big black studio with an instructor in the center).

New comment by giglamesh in "OneBag: The Art and Science of Travelling Light"

giglamesh — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:35:21 +0000

I've been a one bag traveller since approximately forever. One hitch I encountered after getting married: the spouse's family has a tradition of bringing back gifts for everyone from any major trip. I understand that back in the olden days, rare and exotic items (an orange? for me? really?) could only be shared via travel. But those days are gone. There are nearly no other remaining friction points left our otherwise awesome marriage.

New comment by giglamesh in "Lazygit: A simple terminal UI for Git commands"

giglamesh — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 15:07:13 +0000

Good call. Thanks!

New comment by giglamesh in "Lazygit: A simple terminal UI for Git commands"

giglamesh — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 15:04:46 +0000

Came here to whine, got a what seems in retrospect to be a perfectly obvious and simple _solution_. Thank you!

New comment by giglamesh in "Lazygit: A simple terminal UI for Git commands"

giglamesh — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 19:33:17 +0000

Looks pretty great, but:

  Error! Your Xcode (13.0) is too outdated

I don't have the luxury of upgrading yet. This requirement seems overly fussy and opinionated.