Hacker News: hahajk

New comment by hahajk in "Books are not too expensive"

hahajk — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 01:20:21 +0000

> (or often more) than the paperback

Not an expert but my guess is that price is supply and demand. And oversupply of physical books will drive the price down since it costs money to warehouse them. There cannot be an oversupply of ebooks.

New comment by hahajk in "Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft"

hahajk — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 21:35:07 +0000

I managed to convince my org to put up a Grist instance. I now use it for everything I would normally use Sheets for, plus a whole lot more. Row/columnwise permissions, file attachments, multiple views over data, python formulas...

It's a db not a spreadsheet but it's basically the tool I actually needed when I would reach for excel.

New comment by hahajk in "The 49MB web page"

hahajk — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:09:39 +0000

> We'll simply cut the headlines from the offending website and past it into a search engine and find another site with the same or similar info but with easier access.

Where do you trust to read the news? Any newsrooms well staffed enough to verify stories (and not just reprint hearsay) seem to have the same issues.

New comment by hahajk in "Claude Code wiped our production database with a Terraform command"

hahajk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 18:59:11 +0000

I'm absolutely loving the genre of "chatbot informing user it messed up real bad":

> CRITICAL: Everything was destroyed. Your production database is GONE. Let me check if there are any backups:

> ...

> No snapshots found. The database is completely lost.

New comment by hahajk in "CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples’ movements"

hahajk — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 02:49:14 +0000

It's unfortunate the Privacy Act included an exception for law enforcement. I imagine at the time it wasn't clear that every action taken by the govt would be called law enforcement.

There is an ethical framework for handling personal data collected and maintained by the US govt called the Fair Information Practice Principles (https://www.fpc.gov/resources/fipps/).

It really is too bad that "any legal purpose" is the stated boundary for our elected govt rather than a more noble appeal to public service.

New comment by hahajk in "Google staff call for firm to cut ties with ICE"

hahajk — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:46:05 +0000

The government is bound by acquisition processes for these large contracts: they put out RFPs and companies compete for the contract. All Google has to do is not bid for the next contract.

New comment by hahajk in "A sane but bull case on Clawdbot / OpenClaw"

hahajk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:34:54 +0000

We have forgotten the simple, reliable solutions of the past - a grocery list on the fridge, a weekly planner, a weekly plan itself rather than constant coordination. Cell phones and easy communication led us here.

New comment by hahajk in "Qwen3-Coder-Next"

hahajk — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 03:49:49 +0000

the companies could merge or buy each other

New comment by hahajk in "Org Mode syntax is one of the most reasonable markup languages for text (2017)"

hahajk — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 15:33:05 +0000

For me the thing keeping me on markdown is Obsidian on mobile - no other note taking app comes close. If they made an actual Emacs for mobile (actual emacs complete with elisp support, not the existing org mode apps) that was a pleasure to use, I would likely switch to that.

As it is, the * vs # for headings makes switching between the two uncomfortable.

New comment by hahajk in "During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website"

hahajk — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 03:45:42 +0000

> I was struck by how something as simple as text content could have such a big impact.

Truly a sign of our times

New comment by hahajk in "The Coffee Warehouse"

hahajk — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:50:26 +0000

Those are Clover machines from a company they acquired like 15 years ago. They're very good and in my opinion a big improvement over their traditional batch brew-and-store coffee. There are more roasts available to order, the coffee is guaranteed to be fresh, and most of the time they still "skip queue" and hand you your coffee at the register.

New comment by hahajk in "The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat"

hahajk — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 03:32:16 +0000

"If a machine can do this assignment perfectly, why are you giving it to this student?"

This is Idiocracy in the making.

New comment by hahajk in "Technical Deflation"

hahajk — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:29:57 +0000

The conclusion that you should wait to build anything is an illustration of the danger of economic inflation that the author started with. I'm not sure why he thinks the economic version is toxic but the technological version is a good idea though.

The answer to should we just sit around and wait for better technology is obviously no. We gain a lot of knowledge by building with what we have; builders now inform where technology improves. (The front page has an article about Voyager being a light day away...)

I think the more interesting question is what would happen if we induced some kind of 2% "technological inflation" - every year it gets harder to make anything. Would that push more orgs to build more things? Everyone pours everything they have into making products now because their resources will go less far next year.

New comment by hahajk in "AI Broke Interviews"

hahajk — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 23:25:14 +0000

If I read your suggestion correctly, you're saying the exam is basically a board explaining their decision making around their code. That sounds great in theory but in practice it would be very hard to grade. Or at least, how could someone fail? If you let them use AI you can't really fault them for not understanding the code, can you? Unless you teach the course to 1. use AI and then 2. verify. And step 2 requires an understanding of coding and experience to recognize bad architecture. Which requires you to think through a problem without the AI telling you the answer.

New comment by hahajk in "OpenAI’s promise to stay in California helped clear the path for its IPO"

hahajk — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:36:40 +0000

The WSJ did describe it as a "subtle threat".

New comment by hahajk in "Tell HN: Azure outage"

hahajk — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:59:13 +0000

I mail in to Florida and I can log in and see that they received it and it was counted. So, close to seeing it enter the box.

New comment by hahajk in "I, Sharpie"

hahajk — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 01:49:52 +0000

and also when 5 of the six parts are oil derivatives.

New comment by hahajk in "Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions"

hahajk — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:25:29 +0000

Very nice :) The ability to add my own mp3 loops would be choice. Is that possible? I’m choosy about the exact cafe-train mix I work to…

New comment by hahajk in "I only use Google Sheets"

hahajk — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 22:46:32 +0000

I agree. However, so many of my use cases include a one-to-many relationship that I was outgrowing excel/sheets too quickly. Once a project added a VLOOKUP, it hit an inflection point in complexity.

I spun up a local Grist instance in my org, using SAML with our org's email authentication. It's intuitive enough that I've replaced a few shared spreadsheets with it (now with rowwise permissions) and powerful enough that I've also replaced a few internal CRUD apps.

https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-core

New comment by hahajk in "Show HN: Autism Simulator"

hahajk — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 17:48:26 +0000

What project estimation/management process would you suggest as an alternative?