Hacker News: giglamesh

New comment by giglamesh in "Tidal AI Policy"

giglamesh — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:09:18 +0000

Tool was a kind of metal/funk band (or something like that) and Oracle is a database (management system) that somehow made a lot of money for a lot of consultants (and the oligarch owners) even though open source alternatives were far superior.

New comment by giglamesh in "Tidal AI Policy"

giglamesh — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:05:25 +0000

I don't follow this rule strictly, but for most of my adult life I've limited most of my book reading to books > 10 years old. If it still seems remotely relevant and worth reading ten years later, it is far less likely to be a waste of my time. Now sure I'm a bit less prepared for water cooler conversations, but overall the policy has served me well.

> having trouble finding anything actually good to read on Kindle

because of AI slop is new benefit of sticking to older texts that I hadn't anticipated.

New comment by giglamesh in "Reducing tick density along recreational trails in Ottawa, Canada"

giglamesh — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:25:56 +0000

I'd love to try it, but I'm having trouble finding sustainable vendors. My use case is mostly gardening, hiking and just being outside as much as possible but still being somewhat protected from the sun (so a super light weave would not be ideal.) I'd be grateful for any suggestions, ideally from a source in the USA.

New comment by giglamesh in "Marfa Public Radio Puts You to Sleep"

giglamesh — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 17:38:08 +0000

Yes. It is pretty wacky. And while it looks like quiet the EV charging desert on paper (the nearest Tesla charger is in Alpine) but by springing for RV sites in Big Bend and Terlingua we made it work just fine. EDIT: My only regret was going during spring break season. It makes for some very nice weather, but during those two weeks or so, the handful of restaurants in Marfa are overwhelmed.

New comment by giglamesh in "Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior"

giglamesh — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 16:32:06 +0000

The houseplants are giving me that look of disapproval.

New comment by giglamesh in "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness"

giglamesh — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 15:51:05 +0000

Funds to buy, space to store and also the means to transport the bulk goods. We do most of our grocery shopping on foot or by bicycle which rules out Costco for us.

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?